Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, the second time we’ve
00:00:04 spoken on this podcast, he’s a mathematician with a bold and piercing
00:00:08 intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and
00:00:13 shine a light on the darkest corners of our society.
00:00:16 He is the host of the portal podcast, a part of which he recently released his
00:00:23 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of geometric unity that is at the center of
00:00:29 his lifelong efforts to arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the
00:00:34 fundamental laws of physics.
00:00:36 This conversation was recorded recently in the time of the coronavirus pandemic
00:00:41 for everyone feeling the medical, psychological and financial burden of
00:00:44 this crisis, I’m sending love your way.
00:00:47 Stay strong.
00:00:47 We’re in this together.
00:00:49 We’ll beat this thing.
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00:02:00 young people around the world.
00:02:03 And now here’s my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
00:02:08 Do you see a connection between world war II and the crisis
00:02:12 we’re living through right now?
00:02:13 Sure.
00:02:14 The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these
00:02:20 abstractions, like everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do
00:02:25 for himself and leave everyone else alone.
00:02:28 None of these abstractions work in a global crisis.
00:02:31 And this is just a reminder that we didn’t somehow put all that behind us.
00:02:36 When I hear stories about my grandfather who was in the army.
00:02:40 And so the Soviet union where most people die, when you’re in the army,
00:02:44 there’s a brotherhood that happens.
00:02:45 There’s a love that happens.
00:02:48 Do you think that’s something we’re going to see here?
00:02:49 Uh, since we’re not there, I mean, what the Soviet union went through, I mean,
00:02:54 the enormity of the war on, uh, the Russian doorstep, this is different.
00:03:02 What we’re going through now is not, we can’t talk about Stalingrad and
00:03:05 COVID in the same breath yet.
00:03:07 We’re not ready.
00:03:08 And the, the sort of, uh, you know, just the sense of like the great patriotic
00:03:14 war and the way in which I was very moved by the Soviet custom of,
00:03:19 of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day.
00:03:23 It’s like the happiest day of your life.
00:03:24 You have to say thank you to the people who made it possible.
00:03:27 We’re not there.
00:03:28 We’re, we’re just restarting history.
00:03:31 We, you know, I’ve called this on the Rogan program.
00:03:35 I called it the great nap, the 75 years with, um, very little by historical
00:03:41 standards in, in terms of really profound disruption.
00:03:45 And so when you call it the great nap, meaning lack of deep global tragedy,
00:03:51 well, lack of realized global tragedy.
00:03:54 So I think that the development, for example, of the hydrogen bomb, you know,
00:03:58 was something that happened during the great nap.
00:04:02 And that doesn’t mean that people who lived during that time didn’t feel
00:04:08 feared and no anxiety, but it was to say that most of the violent potential
00:04:13 of the human species was not realized.
00:04:15 It was in the form of potential energy.
00:04:18 And this is the thing that I’ve sort of taken issue with, with the description
00:04:21 of Steven Pinker’s optimism is that if you look at the realized kinetic
00:04:25 variables, things have been getting much better for a long time, which is the
00:04:28 great nap, but it’s not as if, uh, our fragility has not grown our dependence
00:04:34 on electronic systems, our vulnerability to disruption.
00:04:38 And so all sorts of things have gotten much better. Other things have gotten
00:04:42 much worse and the destructive potential is skyrocketed.
00:04:47 It’s tragedy.
00:04:47 The only way we wake up from the big nap.
00:04:51 Well, no, you could also have a, you know, jubilation about positive things, but
00:04:56 it’s harder to get people’s attention.
00:04:58 Can you give an example of a big global positive thing that could happen?
00:05:02 I think that when, for example, just historically speaking, uh, HIV
00:05:07 went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with
00:05:11 for a very long period of time.
00:05:13 It would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday, right?
00:05:16 Like all at once, like you knew that things had changed.
00:05:19 And so the bleed in somewhat kills the, the sort of the Wednesday effect
00:05:24 where it all happens on a particular day at a particular moment.
00:05:29 I think if you look at the stock market here, you know, there’s a very clear
00:05:32 moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus.
00:05:37 I think that with respect to, um, positives, the moon landing was the best
00:05:43 example of a positive that happened at a particular time or, uh, recapitulating
00:05:49 the Soviet American, uh, link up in terms of, um, Skylab and Soyuz, right?
00:05:57 Like that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting.
00:06:02 Uh, in orbit.
00:06:03 And so, yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful
00:06:07 and amazing happens, you know, but it’s just, there are fewer of, that’s why,
00:06:11 that’s why as much as I can’t imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event,
00:06:17 when you have like 30,000 people waiting and you know, like she says, yes,
00:06:22 it’s pretty exciting.
00:06:23 So I think that we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t discount that.
00:06:27 So how bad do you think it’s going to get in terms of, um,
00:06:33 of the global suffering that we’re going to experience with this, with this crisis?
00:06:38 I can’t figure this one out.
00:06:40 I’m just not smart enough.
00:06:41 Something is going weirdly wrong.
00:06:43 They’re almost like two separate storylines.
00:06:46 We in one storyline, we aren’t taking things nearly seriously enough.
00:06:52 We see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses.
00:06:59 Um, we hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage.
00:07:05 And that’s a very terrifying story.
00:07:09 On the other hand, there’s this other story, which says there are
00:07:12 tons of ventilators someplace.
00:07:15 We’ve got lots of masks, but they haven’t been released.
00:07:18 We’ve got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used.
00:07:22 And it’s very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling
00:07:28 that they both must be true simultaneously, and they can’t both be true in any kind
00:07:33 of standard way, whether I don’t know whether it’s just that I’m dumb, but I
00:07:37 can’t get one or the other story to quiet down.
00:07:40 So I think weirdly, this is much more serious than we had understood it.
00:07:44 And it’s not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the
00:07:49 same time and that we’re not being given the tools to actually understand, Oh,
00:07:54 here’s how to interpret the data, or here’s the issue with the personal protective
00:07:58 equipment is actually a jurisdictional battle or a question of who pays for it
00:08:03 rather than a question of whether it’s present or absent.
00:08:06 I don’t understand the details of it, but something is wildly off in our
00:08:10 ability to understand where we are.
00:08:11 So that’s, that’s policy that’s institutions.
00:08:14 What about, do you think about the quiet suffering of millions of
00:08:18 people that have lost their job?
00:08:21 Is this a temporary thing?
00:08:23 I mean, what I’m my ears, not to the suffering of those people who have
00:08:28 lost their job or the 50% possibly a small businesses that are going to go
00:08:32 bankrupt, do you think about that?
00:08:36 Sure.
00:08:36 It’s suffering.
00:08:37 Well, and how that might arise itself could be not quiet too.
00:08:41 I mean, right.
00:08:42 That’s the, could be a depression.
00:08:44 This could go from recession to depression and depression could go
00:08:47 to armed conflict and then to war.
00:08:49 So it’s not a very, um, abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where
00:08:57 we can begin with quiet suffering and anxiety and all of these sorts of things
00:09:01 and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress and all sorts of things.
00:09:06 But, um, look, anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in a, I mean,
00:09:15 I think about this as an incredible experiment. Imagine that you proposed,
00:09:20 Hey, I want to do a bunch of research.
00:09:22 Let’s figure out what changes in our emissions, emissions profiles for our
00:09:27 carbon footprints when we’re all indoors or what happens to traffic patterns or
00:09:32 what happens to the vulnerability of retail sales, uh, as Amazon gets stronger,
00:09:37 you know, et cetera, et cetera.
00:09:39 I believe that in many of those situations, um, we’re running an incredible
00:09:44 experiment and I, am I worried for us all?
00:09:47 Yes, there are some bright spots.
00:09:49 One of which is that when you’re ordered to stay indoors, people are
00:09:53 going to feel entitled and the usual thing that people are going to hit when
00:09:58 they hear that they’ve lost your job, you know, there’s this kind of tough,
00:10:04 um, tough love attitude that you see, particularly in the United States, like,
00:10:09 Oh, you lost your job, poor baby.
00:10:12 Well, go retrain, get another one.
00:10:15 I think there’s going to be a lot less appetite for that.
00:10:18 Um, because we’ve been asked to sacrifice, to risk, to act collectively.
00:10:23 And that’s the interesting thing.
00:10:25 What does that reawaken in us?
00:10:27 Maybe the idea that we actually are nations and that, you know, you’re
00:10:31 fellow countrymen may, may start to mean something to more people.
00:10:35 It certainly means something to people in the military, but I wonder how many
00:10:39 people who aren’t in the military start to think about this as like, Oh yeah,
00:10:43 we are kind of running separate experiments and we are not China.
00:10:48 So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come.
00:10:52 From my perspective, we are a part of experiment, but I don’t feel like
00:10:57 we have access to the full range of knowledge.
00:10:59 But I don’t feel like we have access to the full data, the full data of the
00:11:04 experiment, we’re just like little mice in a large, does this one make sense to you?
00:11:11 I’m, I’m romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to world war II.
00:11:15 So I keep connecting to historical events and making sense of them through that way
00:11:19 or reading the plague by Camus, like almost kind of telling narratives and
00:11:26 stories, but it might, I’m not hearing the suffering that people are going
00:11:33 through because I think that’s quiet there.
00:11:36 Everybody’s numb currently.
00:11:39 They’re not realizing what it means to have lost your job and
00:11:43 to have lost your business.
00:11:44 There’s kind of a, I don’t, I, um, I’m afraid how that fear will materialize
00:11:52 itself once the numbness wears out.
00:11:54 And especially if this lasts for many months, then if it’s connected to
00:12:01 the incompetence of the CDC and the WHO and our government and perhaps the
00:12:07 election process, you know, my biggest fear is that the elections get delayed
00:12:13 or something like that.
00:12:15 So the, the, the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or
00:12:23 damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have that
00:12:26 turns to panic, that turns to anger, that anger.
00:12:31 Can I just play with that for a little bit?
00:12:32 Sure.
00:12:33 What if in fact, all of that structure that you grew up thinking about, and
00:12:40 again, you grew up in two places, right?
00:12:43 So, uh, when you were inside the U S we tend to look at all of these things as
00:12:49 museum pieces, like how often do we amend the constitution anymore?
00:12:54 And in some sense, if you think about the Jewish tradition of Simha Torah,
00:12:59 you’ve got this beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn and
00:13:04 calligraphy, um, that’s very valuable.
00:13:08 And it’s very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered.
00:13:15 And so we, one day a year, we dance with the Torah and we hold this incredibly
00:13:20 vulnerable document up and we treat it as if, uh, you know, it was Ginger
00:13:25 Rogers being, uh, led by Fred Astaire.
00:13:28 Well, that is how you become part of your country.
00:13:33 In fact, maybe the, maybe the election will be delayed.
00:13:36 Maybe extraordinary powers will be used.
00:13:38 Maybe any one of a number of things will indicate that you’re
00:13:42 actually living through history.
00:13:43 This isn’t a museum piece that you were handed by your great, great grandparents.
00:13:47 But you’re kind of suggesting that there might be a, like a
00:13:51 community thing that pops up like, like, um, as opposed to, uh, an angry revolution.
00:13:59 It might have a positive effect of, well, for example, are you telling me
00:14:04 that if the right person stood up and called for us to sacrifice PPE, uh, for
00:14:11 our nurses and our, our MDs who are on the front lines, that like people wouldn’t
00:14:19 reach down deep in their own supply that they’ve been like stocking and carefully
00:14:23 storing them just say, like, say here, take it.
00:14:26 Like right now, an actual leader would use this time to bring out the heroic
00:14:35 character and I’m going to just go wildly patriotic cause I frigging love this
00:14:39 country, we’ve got this dormant population in the us that loves leadership
00:14:45 and country and pride in our freedom and not being told what to do.
00:14:51 And we still have this thing that binds us together and all of them,
00:14:55 the merchants of division just be gone.
00:14:59 I totally agree with you.
00:15:01 There’s a, I think there is a deep hunger for that leadership.
00:15:04 Why hasn’t that, why, why hasn’t one of us, we don’t have the right search
00:15:09 surgeon general, we have a guy saying, you know, come on guys, don’t buy masks.
00:15:14 They don’t really work for you.
00:15:15 Save them for our healthcare professionals.
00:15:18 No, you can’t do that.
00:15:20 You have to say, you know what, these masks actually do work and they more
00:15:24 work to protect other people from you, but they would work for you.
00:15:28 They’ll keep you somewhat safer if you wear them.
00:15:30 Here’s the deal.
00:15:31 You’ve got somebody who’s taking huge amounts of viral load all the time
00:15:35 because the patients are shedding.
00:15:36 Do you want to protect that person who’s volunteered to be on the front
00:15:38 line, who’s up sleepless nights?
00:15:41 You just changed the message.
00:15:43 You stop lying to people.
00:15:44 You just, you level with them.
00:15:46 It’s like, it’s bad.
00:15:48 Absolutely.
00:15:48 But that’s a, that’s a little bit specific.
00:15:51 So you, you have to be just honest about the facts of the situation.
00:15:54 Yes.
00:15:55 But I think you were referring to something bigger than just that inspiring,
00:16:00 like, you know, rewriting the constitution, sort of rethinking how
00:16:05 we work as a nation.
00:16:06 Yeah.
00:16:07 I think you should probably, you know, amend the constitution once
00:16:09 or twice in a lifetime so that you don’t get this distance from the foundational
00:16:15 documents and, you know, part of the problem is that we’ve got two generations
00:16:20 on top that feel very connected to the U S they feel bought in and we’ve got three
00:16:25 generations below it’s a little bit like watching your parents riding the tricycle
00:16:31 that they were supposed to pass on to you.
00:16:34 And it’s like, you’re now too old to ride a tricycle and they’re still
00:16:37 whooping it up, ringing the bell with the streamers coming off the handlebars.
00:16:41 And you’re just thinking, do you guys never get bored?
00:16:44 Do you never pass a torch?
00:16:45 Do you really want it?
00:16:47 We had five septuagenarians all born in the forties running for president of the
00:16:51 United States when Clovis sure dropped out.
00:16:53 The youngest was Warren.
00:16:55 We had Warren Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Trump from like 1949 to 1941.
00:17:01 All who had been the oldest president at inauguration and nobody’s, nobody says
00:17:07 grandma and grandpa, you’re embarrassing us except Joe Rogan.
00:17:13 Let me put it on you.
00:17:14 You have a big platform.
00:17:16 You’re somewhat of an intelligent, eloquent guy.
00:17:19 What, what role do you somewhat, what role do you play?
00:17:23 Why aren’t you that leader?
00:17:25 Well, you’re, I mean, I would argue that you’re in, in ways becoming a leader.
00:17:30 In ways becoming that leader.
00:17:32 So I haven’t taken enough risk.
00:17:34 Is that your idea?
00:17:35 What should I do or say at the moment?
00:17:38 No, you’re a little bit, no, you have taken quite a big risks
00:17:41 and we’ll, we’ll talk about it.
00:17:43 All right.
00:17:43 But you’re also on the outside shooting in, meaning, um, you’re, uh, dismantling
00:17:55 the institution from the outside as opposed to becoming the institution.
00:18:00 Do you remember that thing you brought up when you were on the view, the view?
00:18:05 I’m sorry.
00:18:05 When you were on Oprah, I didn’t make, I didn’t get the invite.
00:18:09 Sorry.
00:18:09 When you were on Bill Maher’s program, what was that thing you were saying?
00:18:16 They don’t know we’re here.
00:18:18 They may watch us.
00:18:20 Yeah.
00:18:21 They may quietly slip us a direct message, but they pretend that this
00:18:27 internet thing is, uh, some dangerous place where only lunatics play.
00:18:32 Well, who has the bigger platform, the portal or Bill Maher’s program or the
00:18:37 view, Bill Maher and the view in terms of viewership or in terms of what’s
00:18:43 the metric of size?
00:18:44 Well, first of all, the key thing is, um, take, take a newspaper and even
00:18:50 imagine that it’s completely fake.
00:18:52 Okay.
00:18:53 And then there’s very little in the way of circulation.
00:18:55 Yet imagine that it’s an a hundred year old paper and that it’s still part of
00:18:59 this game, this internal game of media.
00:19:03 The key point is, is that those sources that have that kind of, um, mark of
00:19:10 respectability to the institutional structures matter in a way that even if
00:19:16 I say something on a very large platform that makes a lot of sense, if it’s
00:19:20 outside of what I’ve called the gated institutional narrative or gin, I’m
00:19:24 sorry, institutional narrative or gin, it sort of doesn’t matter to the
00:19:29 institutions. So the game is if it happens outside of the club, we can
00:19:34 pretend that it never happened.
00:19:37 How can you get the credibility and the authority from outside the, the
00:19:41 gated institutional narrative?
00:19:43 Well, first of all, you and I both share, um, institutional credibility coming
00:19:52 from organizations. So you, we were both at MIT, were you at Harvard at any
00:19:57 point? Nope. Okay.
00:19:59 Well, I lived in Harvard square.
00:20:02 So did I, but you know, at some level, the issue isn’t whether you have
00:20:07 credentials in that sense.
00:20:09 The key question is, can you be trusted to file a flight plan and not deviate
00:20:14 from that flight plan when you are in an interview situation, will you stick to
00:20:19 the talking points?
00:20:20 Not, and that’s why you’re not going to be allowed in the general
00:20:25 conversation, which amplifies these sentiments, but I’m still trying to, um,
00:20:30 so your, your point, it would be, is that we’re, let’s say both.
00:20:33 So you’ve done how many Joe Rogan for I’ve done for two, right?
00:20:37 So both of us are somewhat frequent guests. The show is huge.
00:20:40 You know, the power as well as I do, and people are going to watch this
00:20:44 conversation. A huge number watched our last one, by the way, I want to thank
00:20:48 you for that one. That was a terrific, terrific conversation.
00:20:51 Really did change my life. Like you’re brilliant interviewer. So thank you.
00:20:56 Thank you. That was that you changed my life too.
00:21:00 That you gave me a chance. So I was so glad I did that one.
00:21:04 What I would say is, is that we keep mistaking how big the audience is for
00:21:08 whether or not you have the kiss and the kiss is a different thing.
00:21:12 Yes. Yeah. Well, it doesn’t, it’s not an acronym yet. Okay. Um,
00:21:16 it’s uh, but thank you for asking. It’s a question of,
00:21:20 are you part of the inter interoperable institution friendly discussion?
00:21:25 And that’s the discussion which we ultimately have to break into.
00:21:29 But that’s what I’m trying to get at is how do we, how do you,
00:21:32 how does Eric Weinstein become the president of the United States?
00:21:36 I shouldn’t become the president of the United States. Not interested.
00:21:39 Thank you very much for asking. Okay.
00:21:40 Get into a leadership position where I guess I don’t know what that means,
00:21:45 but where you can inspire millions of people to, uh,
00:21:50 the inspire the sense of community, inspire the,
00:21:54 the kind of actions required to overcome hardship,
00:21:57 the kind of hardship that we may be experiencing to inspire people,
00:22:01 to work hard and face the difficult,
00:22:05 hard facts of the realities we’re living through all those kinds of things that
00:22:09 you’re talking about. That leader, you know,
00:22:13 can that leader emerge from the current institutions or
00:22:18 alternatively, can it also emerge from the outside?
00:22:21 I guess that’s what I was asking.
00:22:22 So my belief is,
00:22:23 is that this is the last hurrah for the elderly centrist kleptocrats.
00:22:31 Can you define each of those terms? Okay. Elderly.
00:22:36 I mean people who were born at least a year before I was,
00:22:40 that’s a joke. You can laugh. Uh, no,
00:22:43 because I’m born at the cusp of the gen X boomer divide. Um,
00:22:49 centrist they’re pretending, you know,
00:22:51 there are two parties, Democrat and Republican party in the United States.
00:22:54 I think it’s easier to think of the mainstream of both of them as part of a,
00:22:58 an aggregate party that I sometimes call the looting party,
00:23:01 which gets us to kleptocracy, which is ruled by thieves.
00:23:05 And the great temptation has been to treat the U S like a trough.
00:23:09 And you just have to get yours because it’s not like we’re doing anything
00:23:12 productive.
00:23:13 So everybody’s sort of looting the family mansion and somebody stole the silver
00:23:17 and somebody is cutting the pictures out of the frames and you know,
00:23:20 roughly speaking, we’re watching our elders, uh,
00:23:25 we’ll live it up in a way that doesn’t make sense to the rest of us.
00:23:28 Okay. So if it’s the last hurrah,
00:23:32 this is the time for leaders to step up.
00:23:35 We’re not ready yet. We’re not ready.
00:23:36 I just disagree with that. I call, I call out, you know,
00:23:40 the head of the CDC should resign, should resign.
00:23:45 The surgeon general should resign. Trump should resign. Pelosi should resign.
00:23:49 De Blasio should resign. I understand that. So that’s why. So we’ll wait.
00:23:55 No, but that’s not how revolutions work. You don’t wait for people to resign.
00:24:00 You, uh, step up and inspire the alternative.
00:24:03 Do you remember the Russian revolution of 1907? It’s before my time,
00:24:09 but there wasn’t a Russian revolution of 1907.
00:24:12 So you’re thinking we’re in 1907. I’m saying we’re too early.
00:24:16 But we got this, you know, Spanish flu came in 17, 18.
00:24:20 So I would argue that there’s a lot of parallels there or there were one.
00:24:25 I think it’s not time yet. Like John Prine, the, uh,
00:24:29 uh, the songwriter just died of COVID. That was a pretty big,
00:24:34 really? Yeah. By the way, you, yes, of course. I, um,
00:24:40 every time we do this, uh,
00:24:41 we discover our mutual appreciation of obscure brilliant witty
00:24:46 songwriter. He’s really, he’s really quite good, right? He’s, he’s really good.
00:24:50 Yeah. He died.
00:24:52 My understanding is that he passed recently due to complications of Corona.
00:24:56 Yeah. So we haven’t had large enough,
00:25:01 enough large, large enough shocking deaths yet,
00:25:05 picturesque deaths, deaths of a family that couldn’t get treatment.
00:25:10 There are stories that will come and break our hearts and we have not had enough
00:25:14 of those. The visuals haven’t come in, but I think they’re coming. Well,
00:25:18 we’ll find out.
00:25:19 But that you gotta, you have to be there. He has to be there when they come.
00:25:22 I mean,
00:25:23 but we didn’t get the visual for example of falling man from nine 11.
00:25:27 Right. So the outside world did, but Americans were not,
00:25:32 it was thought that we would be too delicate.
00:25:33 So just the way you remember Pulitzer prize winning photographs from the Vietnam
00:25:37 era,
00:25:38 you don’t easily remember the photographs from all sorts of things that have
00:25:43 happened since because something changed in our media.
00:25:46 We are in sense that we cannot feel or experience our own lives and the tragedy
00:25:51 that would animate us to action.
00:25:53 Yeah. But I think there, again,
00:25:56 I think there’s going to be that suffering that’s going to build and build and
00:25:59 build in terms of businesses,
00:26:02 mom and pop shops that close. And I, like,
00:26:05 I think for myself, I think often that,
00:26:09 that I’m being weak and,
00:26:13 and like I feel like I should be doing something.
00:26:17 I should be becoming a leader on a small scale.
00:26:19 You can’t, this is not world war II, and this is not Soviet Russia.
00:26:24 Why not? Why not?
00:26:27 Because our internal programming,
00:26:29 the malware that sits between our ears is much different than the propaganda is
00:26:36 malware of the Soviet era. I mean,
00:26:40 people were both very indoctrinated and also knew that some level it was BS.
00:26:45 They had a double mind. I don’t know.
00:26:48 There must be a great word in Russian for being able to think both of those
00:26:53 things simultaneously.
00:26:54 You don’t think people are actually sick of the partisanship,
00:27:00 sick of incompetence.
00:27:01 Yeah, but I called for revolt the other day on Joe Rogan.
00:27:05 People found it quixotic.
00:27:06 Well, because I think you’re not, I think revolt is different.
00:27:11 I think that’s like, okay, I’m really angry. I’m, I’m furious.
00:27:16 I cannot stand that this is my country at the moment. I’m embarrassed.
00:27:21 So let’s build a better one. Yeah. Right. That’s the, I’m in.
00:27:25 Okay. So, well, okay, so let’s take over a few universities.
00:27:30 Let’s start running a different experiment at some of our better universities.
00:27:34 Like when I did this experiment and I said, what,
00:27:36 at this, if this were 40 years ago, the median age,
00:27:41 I believe of a university president was 51 that would have the person in gen X
00:27:46 and we’d have a bunch of millennial presidents, a bunch of, you know,
00:27:50 more than half gen X it’s almost 100% baby boom at this point.
00:27:56 Um, and how did that happen?
00:27:58 We can get into how they changed retirement,
00:28:00 but this generation of people are not going to be able to do that.
00:28:04 But this generation above us does not feel for even even the older generous
00:28:12 silent generous. I had Roger Penrose on my program.
00:28:16 Excellent. And I thank you. I really appreciate that.
00:28:19 And I asked him a question that was very important to me. I said, look,
00:28:22 you’re in your late eighties.
00:28:24 Is there anyone you could point to as a successor that we should be watching?
00:28:28 We can get excited. You know, I said,
00:28:31 here’s an opportunity to pass the baton and he said, well, let me,
00:28:33 let me hold off on that. It was like, Oh,
00:28:36 is it ever the right moment to point to somebody younger than you to keep your
00:28:40 flame alive after you’re gone? And also like, I don’t know whether,
00:28:44 I’m just going to admit to this.
00:28:45 People treat me like I’m crazy for caring about the world after I’m dead
00:28:51 or wanting to be remembered after you’re gone. Like, well,
00:28:53 what does it matter to you? You’re gone.
00:28:55 It’s this deeply sort of secular somatic perspective on everything where we
00:29:00 don’t, you know, that phrase in a, as time goes by,
00:29:04 it says it’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory,
00:29:10 a case of do or die.
00:29:13 I don’t think people imagined then that there wouldn’t be a story about
00:29:18 fighting for love and glory.
00:29:20 And like we are so out of practice about fighting, you know,
00:29:25 rivals for love and and and and fighting for glory and something bigger than
00:29:31 yourself.
00:29:34 But the hunger is there.
00:29:35 Well, that was the point then, right? The whole idea is that Rick was,
00:29:39 you know, it was like Han Solo of his time. He’s just like,
00:29:42 I stick my neck out for nobody. You know, it’s like, Oh, come on, Rick,
00:29:46 you’re just pretending you actually have a big soul. Right.
00:29:49 And so at some level, that’s the question. Do we have a big soul or is it just
00:29:53 all bullshit?
00:29:53 So yeah, I think, I think there’s huge Manhattan project style projects,
00:29:59 whether you talk about physical infrastructure or going to Mars, you know,
00:30:03 the SpaceX NASA efforts or huge,
00:30:08 huge scientific efforts.
00:30:10 Well,
00:30:10 we need to get back into the institutions and we need to remove the weak
00:30:13 leadership that we have weak leaders and the weak leaders need to be removed and
00:30:17 they need to seat people more dangerous than the people who are currently sitting
00:30:21 in a lot of those chairs.
00:30:21 Yeah. Or build new institutions. Good luck. Well,
00:30:27 so one of the nice things of, uh,
00:30:30 from the internet is for example,
00:30:32 somebody like you can have a bigger voice than almost anybody at the particular
00:30:38 institutions we’re talking about.
00:30:39 That’s true. But the thing is I might say something.
00:30:43 You can count on the fact that the, you know,
00:30:46 provost at Princeton isn’t going to say anything.
00:30:48 Yeah. What do you mean to, to afraid?
00:30:51 Well, if that person were to give an interview,
00:30:55 how are things going in research at Princeton? Well,
00:30:58 I’m hesitant to say it,
00:30:59 but they’re perhaps as good as they’ve ever been and I think they’re going to
00:31:03 get better. Oh, is that right? All fields? Yep. I don’t see a weak one.
00:31:08 It’s just like, okay, great. Who are you and what are you even saying?
00:31:14 We’re just used to total nonsense. 24 seven.
00:31:17 Yeah.
00:31:18 What do you think might be a beautiful thing that comes out of this?
00:31:23 Like what is there a hope that like a little inkling,
00:31:27 a little fire of hope you have about our time right now?
00:31:31 Yeah.
00:31:31 I think one thing is coming to understand that the freaks, weirdos,
00:31:36 mutants, and other, uh,
00:31:39 near do wells, uh, sometimes referred to as grifters. I like that one.
00:31:43 Grifters, uh, and gadflies were very often the earliest people on the coronavirus.
00:31:51 That’s a really interesting question. Why was that?
00:31:54 And it seems to be that they had already paid such a social price that they
00:32:00 weren’t going to be beaten up by being, um,
00:32:05 told that, Oh my God, you’re xenophobic. You just hate China, you know,
00:32:09 or wow, you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Um,
00:32:14 so if you’d already paid those prices, you were free to think about this.
00:32:17 And everyone in an institutional framework was terrified that they didn’t want
00:32:21 to be seen as the alarmist, the, um,
00:32:26 chicken little. And so that’s why you have this confidence where, you know,
00:32:30 the Blasio says, you know, get on with your lives,
00:32:34 get back in there and celebrate Chinese new year in Chinatown.
00:32:37 Uh, despite coronavirus, it’s like, okay, really?
00:32:41 So you just always thought everything would automatically be okay if you,
00:32:44 if you adapted, sorry, if you adopted that posture.
00:32:49 So you think, uh,
00:32:50 this time reveals the weakness of our institutions and reveals the strength of
00:32:55 our gadflies and the weirdos and the.
00:32:58 No, not necessarily the strength, but the, the, the value of freedom,
00:33:02 like a different way of saying it would be, wow,
00:33:04 even your gadflies and your grifters were able to beat your institutional folks
00:33:09 because your institutional folks were playing with a giant mental handicap.
00:33:13 So just imagine like we were in the story of Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut and
00:33:18 our smartest people were all subjected to, uh,
00:33:23 distracting noises every seven seconds. Well,
00:33:27 they would be functionally much dumber because they couldn’t continue a thought
00:33:31 through all the disturbance.
00:33:33 So in some sense, that’s a little bit like what belonging to an institution is,
00:33:37 is that if you have to make a public statement,
00:33:39 of course the surgeon general is going to be the worst because they’re,
00:33:42 they’re just playing with too much of a handicap.
00:33:44 There are too many institutional players are like, don’t screw us up.
00:33:48 And so the person has to say something wrong.
00:33:50 We’re going to back propagate a falsehood. And this is very interesting.
00:33:54 Some of my socially oriented friends say, Eric,
00:33:57 I don’t understand what you’re on about. Of course masks work,
00:34:00 but you know what they’re trying to do.
00:34:01 They’re trying to get us not to buy up the masks for the doctors. And I think,
00:34:05 okay,
00:34:05 so you imagine that we can just create scientific fiction at will so that you can
00:34:10 run whatever social program you want. This is what I, you know,
00:34:13 my point is get out of my lab, get out of the lab.
00:34:16 You don’t belong in the lab. You’re not meant for the lab.
00:34:19 You’re constitutionally incapable of being around the lab.
00:34:21 You need to leave the lab.
00:34:23 You think the CDC and WHO knew that masks work and we’re trying to,
00:34:28 and we’re trying to sort of imagine that people are kind of stupid and they would
00:34:34 buy masks in excess if they were told that masks work.
00:34:39 Is that like, uh,
00:34:42 cause this does seem to be a particularly clear example of mistakes made.
00:34:48 You’re asking me this question. No, you’re not. What do you think, Lex?
00:34:53 Well, I actually probably disagree with you a little bit. Great. Let’s do it.
00:34:58 I think it’s not so easy to be honest with the populace when the danger of
00:35:04 panic is always around the corner.
00:35:08 So I think the kind of honesty you exhibit appeals to a certain class of brave
00:35:18 intellectual minds that, uh, it appeals to me,
00:35:22 but I don’t know from the perspective of WHO,
00:35:26 I don’t know if it’s so obvious that they should,
00:35:32 um, be honest 100% of the time with people.
00:35:37 I’m not saying you should be perfectly transparent and 100% honest.
00:35:41 I’m saying that the quality of your lies has to be very high and it has to be
00:35:44 public spirited. There’s a big difference between, so I’m not,
00:35:49 I’m not a child about this. I’m not saying that when you’re at war,
00:35:52 for example,
00:35:53 you turn over all of your plans to the enemy because it’s important that you’re
00:35:57 transparent with 360 degree visibility. Far from it.
00:36:01 What I’m saying is something has been forgotten and I forgot who it was who
00:36:06 told it to me,
00:36:06 but it was a fellow graduate student in the Harvard math department and he said,
00:36:12 you know,
00:36:13 I learned one thing being out in the workforce because he was one of the few
00:36:16 people who had had a work life in the department as a grad student.
00:36:20 And he said, you can be friends with your boss,
00:36:24 but if you’re going to be friends with your boss,
00:36:26 you have to be doing a good job at work.
00:36:29 And there’s an analog here,
00:36:32 which is if you’re going to be reasonably honest with the population,
00:36:36 you have to be doing a good job at work as the surgeon general or as the head of
00:36:40 the CDC. So if you’re doing a terrible job,
00:36:44 you’re supposed to resign.
00:36:45 And then the next person is supposed to say, look,
00:36:50 I’m not going to lie to you. I inherited the situation.
00:36:53 It was in a bit of disarray.
00:36:55 But I had several requirements before I agreed to step in and take the job
00:36:59 because I needed to know I could turn it around.
00:37:00 I needed to know that I had clear lines of authority.
00:37:03 I needed to know that I had the resources available in order to rectify the
00:37:06 problem.
00:37:06 And I needed to know that I had the ability and the freedom to level with the
00:37:09 American people directly as I saw fit. All of my wishes were granted.
00:37:12 And that’s why I’m happy here on Monday morning. I’ve got my sleeves rolled up.
00:37:17 Boy, do we got a lot to do.
00:37:18 So please come back in two weeks and then ask me how I’m doing then.
00:37:21 And I hope to have something to show you. That’s how you do it.
00:37:24 So why is that excellence and basic competence
00:37:29 missing?
00:37:31 The big net. You see,
00:37:32 you come from multiple traditions where it was very important to remember
00:37:36 things.
00:37:38 The Soviet tradition made sure that you remembered the sacrifices that came in
00:37:42 that war and the Jewish tradition we’re doing this on Passover,
00:37:47 right? Okay. Well, every year we tell one simple story.
00:37:52 Well, why can’t it be different every year?
00:37:54 Maybe we could have a rotating series of seven stories because it’s the one
00:37:58 story that you need. It’s like, you know, you work with the men in black group,
00:38:02 right? And it’s the last suit that you’ll ever need.
00:38:04 This is the last story that you ever need.
00:38:06 Don’t think I fell for your neuralyzer last time.
00:38:10 In any event, we tell one story because it’s the,
00:38:14 get out of Dodge story.
00:38:16 There’s a time when you need to not wait for the bread to rise.
00:38:19 And that’s the thing, which is even if you live through a great nap,
00:38:24 you deserve to know what it feels like to have to leave everything that has
00:38:29 become comfortable and, and unworkable.
00:38:33 It’s sad that you need, you need that tragedy.
00:38:37 I imagine to have the tradition of remembering
00:38:42 it’s, it’s sad to to think that because things have been
00:38:47 nice and comfortable means that we can’t have great competent leaders,
00:38:54 which is kind of the implied statement.
00:38:55 Like, can we have great leaders who take big risks,
00:39:00 who are, who inspire hard work,
00:39:03 who deal with difficult truth, even though things have been comfortable?
00:39:08 Well, we know what those people sound like. I mean, you know, if,
00:39:12 for example, Jaco Willink suddenly threw his hat into the ring,
00:39:17 everyone would say, okay, right.
00:39:21 Party’s over. It’s time to get up at four 30 and really work hard.
00:39:26 And we’ve got to get back into fighting shape. And yeah,
00:39:30 but Jaco is a very special, I think,
00:39:34 that whole group of people by profession,
00:39:39 put themselves in the way of, and into hardship on a daily basis.
00:39:44 And he’s not, I don’t, well, I don’t know,
00:39:47 but he’s probably not going to be, well, could Jaco be president?
00:39:52 Okay. But it doesn’t have to be Jaco, right? Like in other words,
00:39:55 if it was Kai Lenny or if it was Alex
00:39:59 Honnold from rock climbing, right. But they’re just serious people.
00:40:04 They’re serious people who can’t afford your BS.
00:40:10 Yeah.
00:40:10 But why do we have serious people that do rock climbing and uh,
00:40:16 don’t have serious people who lead the nation? That seems to.
00:40:20 Because that was a,
00:40:22 those skills needed in rock climbing are not good during the big nap.
00:40:27 And at the tail end of the big nap, they would get you fired.
00:40:29 But I don’t,
00:40:30 don’t you think there’s a fundamental part of human nature that desires to,
00:40:35 to excel, to be exceptionally good at your job?
00:40:38 Yeah. But what is your job? I mean, in other words, my, my,
00:40:42 my point to you is if you,
00:40:44 if you’re a general in a peacetime army and your major activity is playing war
00:40:48 games,
00:40:50 what if the skills needed to win war games are very different than the skills
00:40:54 needed to win wars? Because you know how the war games are scored and you’ve,
00:40:57 you’ve done money ball, for example, with war games,
00:41:01 you figured out how to win games on paper.
00:41:03 So then the advancement skill becomes divergent from the, uh,
00:41:08 ultimate skill that it was proxying for.
00:41:12 Yeah. But you create this, we’re good as human beings to, I mean,
00:41:16 I, at least me, I can’t do a big nap.
00:41:20 So at any one moment when I finish something,
00:41:22 a new dream pops up. So going to Mars,
00:41:25 what do you like to do? You like to do Brazilian jujitsu?
00:41:28 Well, first of all, I like to do every, you like to play guitar,
00:41:31 guitar, you do this podcast, you do theory. You’re always,
00:41:35 you’re constantly taking risks and exposing yourself. Right? Why?
00:41:40 Because you’ve got one of those crazy, I’m sorry to say it.
00:41:43 You’ve got an Eastern European Jewish personality, which I’m still tied to,
00:41:47 and I’m a couple of generations more distant than you are.
00:41:51 And I’ve held on to that thing because it’s valuable to me.
00:41:54 You don’t think there’s a huge percent of the populace,
00:41:58 even in the United States. That’s that’s that might be a little bit dormant,
00:42:01 but do you know Anna Hatchian from the red scare podcast?
00:42:06 Did you interview her? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I listened. Yeah, yeah, she was great.
00:42:09 She was great, right? Yeah. She’s fun. She’s, she’s terrific.
00:42:12 But she also has the same thing going on.
00:42:14 And I made a joke in the liner notes for that episode,
00:42:17 which is somewhere on the road from Stalingrad to forever 21,
00:42:22 something was lost. Like how can Stalingrad and forever 21 be in the same
00:42:26 sentence? And, you know, in part it’s that weird thing.
00:42:30 It’s like trying to remember even words like I’m in Russian and Hebrew things,
00:42:35 like it’s like what pom yet then the score, you know,
00:42:38 these words have much more potency about memory and I don’t know.
00:42:43 I do, I think, I think there’s still a dormant populace that craves leaders on a
00:42:53 small scale and large scale.
00:42:55 And I hope to be that leader on a small scale.
00:42:58 And I think you sir have a role to be a leader.
00:43:04 You kids go ahead without me. I’m just gonna,
00:43:07 I’m going to do a little bit of weird podcast.
00:43:08 I see now you’re, you’re putting on your, uh, Joe Rogan hat.
00:43:14 Uh, he says, I’m just a comedian. Oh no, I’m not saying I’m just a,
00:43:17 it’s not that if I say I want to lead too much because of the big nap,
00:43:21 there’s like a group, a chorus of automated idiots and their first thought is
00:43:26 like, ah, I knew it. So it’s a power grab all along. Why should you lead?
00:43:30 You know, it’s just like,
00:43:31 and so the idea is you’re just trying to skirt around,
00:43:34 not stepping on all of the idiot landmines. It’s like, okay,
00:43:38 so now I’m going to hear that in my inbox for the next three days.
00:43:41 Okay. So lead by example, just live. No, I mean, the issue platform, look,
00:43:45 we should take over the institutions. There are institutions.
00:43:47 We’ve got bad leadership.
00:43:49 We should mutiny and we should inject a, I don’t know,
00:43:53 15% 20% uh, disagreeable, dissident,
00:43:57 very aggressive loner, individual mutant freaks,
00:44:00 all the people that you go to see Avengers movies about or the X men or whatever
00:44:04 it is and stop pretending that everything good comes out of some great giant
00:44:09 inclusive, communal, uh, 12 hour meeting.
00:44:14 It’s like, stop it. That’s not how shit happens.
00:44:19 You recently published the video of a lecture you gave at Oxford presenting
00:44:24 some aspects of a theory, uh,
00:44:27 theory of everything called geometric unity.
00:44:29 So this was a work of 30, 30 plus years.
00:44:34 This is life’s work.
00:44:37 Let me ask her the, the silly old question.
00:44:40 How do you feel as a human? Excited, scared,
00:44:44 the experience of posting it.
00:44:47 You know, it’s funny. One of the, one of the things that you,
00:44:49 you learn to feel as an academic is, um,
00:44:53 the great sins you can commit in academics, uh,
00:44:57 is to show yourself to be a non serious person to show yourself to have
00:45:01 delusions,
00:45:03 to avoid the standard practices,
00:45:07 which everyone has signed up for.
00:45:12 And you know,
00:45:14 it’s weird because like, you know that those people are going to be angry.
00:45:19 He did what, you know, why would he do that? And,
00:45:23 and what we’re referring to, for example,
00:45:25 there’s traditions of sort of publishing incrementally,
00:45:29 certainly not trying to have a theory of everything,
00:45:32 perhaps working within the academic departments, all those things.
00:45:37 So that’s true. And so you’re going outside of all of that.
00:45:41 Well, I mean, I was going inside of all of that and we did not come to terms
00:45:47 when I was inside and what they did was so outside to me was so weird,
00:45:52 so freakish, like the most senior, respectable people at the most senior,
00:45:57 respectable places were functionally insane as far as I could tell.
00:46:01 And again, it’s like being functionally stupid.
00:46:03 If you’re the head of the CDC or something where, you know,
00:46:07 you’re giving recommendations out that aren’t based on what you actually
00:46:10 believe. They’re based on what you think you have to be doing. Well,
00:46:13 in some sense,
00:46:14 I think that that’s a lot of how I saw the math and physics world as
00:46:18 the physics world was really crazy and the math world was considerably less
00:46:22 crazy, just very strict and kind of dogmatic.
00:46:25 Well, we’ll psychoanalyze those folks,
00:46:27 but I really want to maybe linger on it a little bit longer of how you feel
00:46:33 because yeah, so this is such a, such a special moment in your life.
00:46:36 I really appreciate it. It’s a great question.
00:46:38 So that if we can pair off some of that other, those other issues. Um,
00:46:43 it’s new being able to say what the observers is,
00:46:49 which was my attempt to replace space time with something that is both closely
00:46:53 related to space, time and not space time. Um,
00:46:57 so I used to carry the number 14 as a closely guarded secret in my life and uh,
00:47:03 we’re 14 is really four dimensions of space and time plus 10.
00:47:08 Extra dimensions of rulers and protractors or for the cool kids out there,
00:47:13 uh, symmetric two tensors.
00:47:16 She had a geometric,
00:47:18 a complicated, beautiful geometric view of the world that you cared with you
00:47:22 for a long time. Yeah. Did you,
00:47:24 did you have friends that you, um, colleagues, essentially? No.
00:47:28 Talked. No. In fact, part of these, part of some of these stories are me,
00:47:33 coming out of the world,
00:47:34 to my friends, um, and I use the phrase coming out because I think that gays
00:47:39 have monopolized the concept of the closet.
00:47:41 Many of us are in closets having nothing to do with our sexual orientation.
00:47:46 Um, yeah, I didn’t really feel comfortable talking to almost anyone.
00:47:50 So this was a closely guarded, uh, secret.
00:47:54 And I think that I let on in some ways that I was up to something and probably
00:47:58 I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was,
00:48:02 I was up to something and probably, but it was a very weird life. So I had to,
00:48:07 I had to have a series of things that I pretended to care about so that I could
00:48:11 use that as the stalking horse for what I really cared about. And to your point,
00:48:15 um, I never understood this whole thing about theories of everything.
00:48:19 Like if you were going to go into something like theoretical physics,
00:48:22 isn’t that what you would normally pursue?
00:48:25 Like wouldn’t it be crazy to do something that difficult and that poorly paid if
00:48:29 you were going to try to do something other than figure out what this is all
00:48:33 about?
00:48:34 Now I have to reveal my cards,
00:48:36 my sort of weaknesses and lack and understanding of the music of physics and
00:48:41 math departments.
00:48:42 But there’s an analogy here to artificial intelligence and often folks come in
00:48:49 and say, okay,
00:48:50 so there’s a giant department working on quote unquote artificial intelligence,
00:48:55 right? But why is nobody actually working on intelligence?
00:49:00 Like you’re all just building little toys, right?
00:49:04 You’re not actually trying to understand. And that breaks a lot of people. Uh,
00:49:08 they, it confuses them because like, okay, so I’m at MIT,
00:49:13 I’m at Stanford, I’m at Harvard, I’m here.
00:49:16 I dreamed of being working on artificial intelligence.
00:49:20 Why is everybody not actually working on intelligence?
00:49:23 And I have the same kind of sense that that’s what working on the theory of
00:49:27 everything is that strangely you somehow become an outcast for even,
00:49:33 but we know why this is right. Why? Well, it’s because let’s take the artificial,
00:49:38 let’s, let’s play with AGI for example.
00:49:41 I think that the idea starts off with nobody really knows how to work on that.
00:49:45 And so if we don’t know how to work on it,
00:49:48 we choose instead to work on a program that is tangentially related to it.
00:49:52 So we do a component of a program that is related to that big question because
00:49:58 it’s felt like at least I can make progress there.
00:50:02 And that wasn’t where I was, where I was in,
00:50:06 it’s funny there was this book of a called Frieden Uhlenbeck and it had this
00:50:10 weird mysterious line in the beginning of it.
00:50:13 And I tried to get clarification of this weird mysterious line and everyone said
00:50:17 wrong things. And then I said, okay, well,
00:50:20 so I can tell that nobody’s thinking properly because I just asked the entire
00:50:24 department and nobody has a correct interpretation of this.
00:50:29 And so, you know, it’s a little bit like you see a crime scene photo
00:50:33 and you have a different idea.
00:50:36 Like there’s a smoking gun and you figure that’s actually a cigarette lighter.
00:50:39 I don’t really believe that. And then there’s like a pack of cards and you think,
00:50:43 Oh,
00:50:43 that looks like the blunt instrument that the person was beaten with. You know,
00:50:47 so you have a very different idea about how things go.
00:50:50 And very quickly you realize that there’s no one thinking about that.
00:50:55 There’s a few human sides to this and technical sides,
00:50:58 both of which I’d love to try to get down to. So the human side,
00:51:03 I can tell from my perspective, I think it was before April 1st, April Fools,
00:51:08 maybe the day before, I forget,
00:51:10 but I was laying in bed in the middle of the night and somehow it popped up,
00:51:15 you know on my feed somewhere that your beautiful face is speaking live and I
00:51:23 clicked. And you know,
00:51:26 it’s kind of weird how the universe just brings things together in this kind of
00:51:29 way.
00:51:30 And all of a sudden I realized that there’s something big happening at this
00:51:34 particular moment. It’s strange. On a day,
00:51:38 like any day and all of a sudden you were thinking of,
00:51:42 you had this somber tone, like you were serious,
00:51:46 like you were going through some difficult decision and it seems strange.
00:51:54 I almost thought you were maybe joking,
00:51:56 but there was a serious decision being made and it was a wonderful experience
00:51:59 to go through with you.
00:52:00 I really appreciate it. I mean it was April 1st.
00:52:03 Yeah, it was, it’s kind of fascinating. I mean it’s just the whole experience.
00:52:05 And so I want to ask,
00:52:10 I mean thank you for letting me be part of that kind of journey of decision
00:52:14 making that took 30 years, but why now?
00:52:19 Why did you think,
00:52:21 why did you struggle so long not to release it and decide to release it now?
00:52:28 While the whole world is on lockdown on April Fools,
00:52:32 is it just because you like the comedy of absurd ways that the universe comes
00:52:38 together?
00:52:38 I don’t think so.
00:52:40 I think that the COVID epidemic is the end of the big nap.
00:52:46 And I think that I actually tried this seven years earlier in Oxford.
00:52:53 So I, uh, and it was too early.
00:52:56 Which part was too, is it the platform?
00:52:59 Cause your platform is quite different now actually the internet. I remember you,
00:53:02 uh, I read several of your brilliant answers that people should read for the
00:53:06 edge questions. One of them was related to the internet.
00:53:10 And it was the first one. Was it the first one? Yeah.
00:53:12 An essay called go virtual young man. Yeah. Yeah. That seemed,
00:53:16 that’s like forever ago now. Well that was 10 years ago.
00:53:19 And that’s exactly what I did is I decamped to the internet,
00:53:22 which is where the portal lives, the portal, the portal, the portal.
00:53:27 Well, so the whole, the theme, that’s the ominous theme music,
00:53:30 which you just listened to forever.
00:53:32 I actually started recording a tiny guitar licks, uh,
00:53:36 for the audio portion, not for the video portion. Um,
00:53:40 you’ve kind of inspired me with bringing your guitar into the story,
00:53:43 but keep going.
00:53:45 So you thought, so the Oxford was like step one and you kind of,
00:53:48 you put your foot into the, in the water to sample it,
00:53:52 but it was too cold at the time. So you didn’t want to step in.
00:53:55 I was just really disappointed.
00:53:57 What was disappointing about that experience?
00:53:59 It’s very, it’s a hard thing to talk about.
00:54:01 It has to do with the fact that, and I can see this,
00:54:05 this, you know, this mirrors a disappointment within myself.
00:54:09 There are two separate issues.
00:54:10 One is the issue of making sure that the idea is actually heard and explored.
00:54:16 And the other is the,
00:54:18 I is the question about will I become disconnected from my work because it will
00:54:24 be ridiculed. It will, it will be immediately improved.
00:54:27 It will be found to be derivative of something that occurred in some paper in
00:54:31 1957. When the community does not want you to gain a voice,
00:54:37 it’s a little bit like a policeman deciding to weirdly enforce all of these
00:54:42 little known regulations against you. And you know,
00:54:47 sometimes nobody else. And I think that’s kind of, you know,
00:54:50 this weird thing where I just don’t believe that we can reach the final theory
00:54:59 necessarily within the political economy of academics.
00:55:03 So if you think about how academics are tortured by each other and how they’re
00:55:08 paid and where they have freedom and where they don’t,
00:55:11 I actually weirdly think that that system of selective pressures is going to
00:55:15 eliminate anybody who’s going to make real progress.
00:55:18 So that’s interesting.
00:55:19 So if you look at the story of Andrew Wiles, for example,
00:55:22 with from our last term, I mean, he,
00:55:26 as far as I understand,
00:55:28 he pretty much isolated himself from the world of academics in terms of the big,
00:55:33 the bulk of the work he did.
00:55:35 And it from my perspective is dramatic and fun to read about,
00:55:39 but it seemed exceptionally stressful. The first step he took,
00:55:43 the first steps he took when actually making the work public that seemed to me
00:55:47 it would be hell, but it’s like so artificially dramatic, you know,
00:55:51 he leads up to it at a series of lectures.
00:55:55 He doesn’t want to say it. And then he finally says it at the end,
00:55:59 because obviously this comes out of a body of work where, I mean,
00:56:02 the funny part about from us last theorem is that wasn’t originally thought to
00:56:06 be a deep and meaningful problem.
00:56:09 It was just an easy to state one that had gone unsolved.
00:56:12 But if you think about it,
00:56:13 it became attached to the body of regular theory.
00:56:17 So he built up this body of regular theory gets all the way up to the end
00:56:21 announces. And then like, there’s this whole drama about, okay,
00:56:25 somebody’s checking the proof. I don’t understand what’s going on in line 37,
00:56:30 you know, and like, Oh, is this serious?
00:56:31 It seems a little bit more serious than we knew.
00:56:33 I mean, do you see parallels?
00:56:35 Do you share the concern that your experience might be something similar?
00:56:38 Well, in his case, I think that if I recall correctly,
00:56:41 his original proof was unsalvageable.
00:56:42 He actually came up with a second proof with a
00:56:47 colleague, Richard Taylor.
00:56:50 And it was that second proof which carried the day.
00:56:53 So it was a little bit that he got put under incredible pressure and then had
00:56:58 to succeed in a new way, having failed the first time,
00:57:00 which is like even a weirder and stranger story.
00:57:03 That’s an incredible story in some sense. But I mean, are you,
00:57:06 I’m trying to get a sense of the kind of stress.
00:57:09 I think that this is okay, but I’m rejecting what I don’t think people
00:57:14 understand with me is the scale of the critique.
00:57:18 It’s like, I don’t, you, people say, well,
00:57:21 you must implicitly agree with this and implicitly agree. It’s like, no,
00:57:24 try me ask before you,
00:57:27 you decide that I am mostly in agreement with the community about how these
00:57:30 things should be handled or what these things mean.
00:57:33 Can you, can you elaborate? And also just why, um,
00:57:37 does criticism matter so much here?
00:57:41 So you seem to dislike the burden of criticism that it will choke away all
00:57:49 different kinds of criticism.
00:57:51 There’s constructive criticism and there’s destructive criticism.
00:57:54 And what I don’t like is I don’t like a community that can’t,
00:58:01 first of all, like if you take the physics community,
00:58:03 like just the way we screwed up on masks and PPE, uh,
00:58:08 just the way we screwed up in the financial crisis and mortgage backed
00:58:11 securities, we screwed up on string theory.
00:58:13 Can we just forget the string theory happened or sure,
00:58:17 but somebody should say that, right? Somebody should say, you know,
00:58:20 it didn’t work out. Yeah. But okay.
00:58:24 But you’re asking this,
00:58:25 like why do you guys get to keep the prestige after failing for 35 years?
00:58:30 Yeah. That’s an interesting question. You guys, because to me,
00:58:34 look these things, if there is a theory of everything to be had, right?
00:58:39 It’s going to be a relatively small group of people where this will be sorted
00:58:43 out. Absolutely. It’s, it’s, it’s not tens of thousands.
00:58:46 It’s probably hundreds at the top.
00:58:50 But within that, within that community,
00:58:53 there is the assholes.
00:58:57 There’s the, I mean, they, you have,
00:59:00 you always in this world have people who are kind, open minded.
00:59:05 It’s a question about, okay,
00:59:08 let’s imagine for example,
00:59:10 that you have a story where you believe that ulcers are definitely
00:59:14 caused by stress and you’ve never questioned it.
00:59:18 Or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of the blue and attacked us at
00:59:21 Pearl Harbor, right?
00:59:23 And now somebody introduces a new idea to you, which is like,
00:59:27 what if it isn’t stress at all?
00:59:29 Or what if we actually tried to make resource star of Japan attack us somewhere
00:59:33 in the Pacific so we could have cast this belly to enter the Asian theater
00:59:38 person’s original idea is like, what, what are you even saying? You know,
00:59:42 it’s like too crazy. Well,
00:59:45 when Dirac in 1963
00:59:47 talked about the importance of beauty as a guiding principle in physics and he
00:59:52 wasn’t talking about the scientific method, that was crazy talk,
00:59:57 but he was actually making a great point and he was using Schrodinger.
01:00:00 And I think it was Schrodinger was standing in for him and he said that if your
01:00:04 equations don’t agree with experiment, that’s kind of a minor detail.
01:00:08 If they have true beauty in them,
01:00:10 you should explore them because very often the agreement with experiment is
01:00:15 that it is an issue of fine tuning of your model of the instantiation.
01:00:22 And so it doesn’t really tell you that your model is wrong.
01:00:25 And of course Heisenberg told Dirac that his model was wrong because that the
01:00:30 proton and the electron should be the same mass if they are each other’s
01:00:33 anti particles.
01:00:35 And that was an irrelevant kind of silliness rather than a real threat to the
01:00:40 Dirac theory. But okay. So amidst all this silliness,
01:00:46 I’m hoping that we could talk about the journey that geometric unity has taken
01:00:51 and will take as an idea and an idea that we’ll see the light.
01:00:56 Yeah. That. So first of all, let’s,
01:00:59 I’m thinking of writing a book called geometric unity for idiots. Okay.
01:01:03 And I need you as a consultant. So can we, first of all,
01:01:07 I hope I have the trademark on geometric unit. You do. Good.
01:01:10 Can you give a basic introduction of the goals of geometric unity?
01:01:17 The basic tools of mathematics use the viewpoints in general for idiots.
01:01:23 Sure. Like me. Okay. Great. Fun.
01:01:26 So what’s the goal of geometric unity?
01:01:28 The goal of geometric unity is to start with something so completely bland that
01:01:36 you can simply say, well,
01:01:37 that’s a something that begins the game is as close to a mathematical.
01:01:41 Nothing is possible. In other words, I can’t answer the question.
01:01:44 Why is there something rather than nothing?
01:01:46 But if there has to be a something that we begin from,
01:01:49 let it begin from something that’s like a blank canvas.
01:01:53 Let’s even more basic. So what is something, what are we trying to describe here?
01:01:59 Right now we have a model of our world and it’s got two sectors.
01:02:04 Two sectors. One of the sectors is called general relativity.
01:02:07 The other is called the standard model.
01:02:09 So we’ll call it GR for general relativity and SM for standard model.
01:02:15 What’s the difference between the two? What are the two described?
01:02:19 So general relativity gives pride of place to gravity and everything else is
01:02:26 acting as a sort of a back, a backup singer.
01:02:30 Gravity is the star of the show. Gravity is the star of general relativity.
01:02:34 And in the standard model,
01:02:38 the other three non gravitational forces.
01:02:41 So if there are four forces that we know about three of the four non
01:02:44 gravitational, that’s where they get to shine. Great.
01:02:48 So tiny little particles and how they interact with each other.
01:02:52 So photons, gluons and so called intermediate vector bosons.
01:02:57 Those are the things that the standard model showcases and general relativity
01:03:02 showcases gravity. And then you have matter,
01:03:05 which is accommodated in both theories,
01:03:08 but much more beautifully inside of the standard model.
01:03:11 So what, what is a theory of everything do?
01:03:14 So, so first of all, I think that that’s,
01:03:17 that’s the first place where we haven’t talked enough.
01:03:19 We assume that we know what it means,
01:03:22 but we don’t actually have any idea what it means.
01:03:25 And what I claim it is, is that it’s a theory where the questions beyond that
01:03:30 theory are no longer of a mathematical nature.
01:03:36 In other words, if I say, let us take, um,
01:03:40 X to be a four dimensional manifold
01:03:45 to a mathematician or a physicist. I’ve said very little.
01:03:49 I’ve simply said there’s some place for calculus and linear algebra to,
01:03:54 to, uh, to dance together and to play.
01:03:58 And that’s what manifolds are. They’re the most natural place where,
01:04:00 where our two greatest math theories can really, uh,
01:04:06 intertwine.
01:04:07 Which are the two? Oh, you mean calculus and linear algebra. Right. Okay.
01:04:12 Now the question is beyond that. So it’s sort of like saying,
01:04:16 I’m an artist and I want to order a canvas.
01:04:18 Okay. Now the question is, does the canvas paint itself?
01:04:26 Does the can, does the canvas come up with an artist
01:04:31 and paint an ink, which then paint the canvas? Like that’s the,
01:04:36 that’s the hard part about theories of everything,
01:04:39 which I don’t think people talk enough about.
01:04:41 Can we just, you bring up Escher and the hand that draws itself.
01:04:45 Is it the fire that lights itself or drawing hands, the drawing hands. Yeah.
01:04:50 And, uh, every time I start to think about that, my mind like, uh,
01:04:54 shuts down. Well, don’t do that. There’s a spark and this is the most beautiful
01:05:00 part. We should do this together. No, it’s beautiful, but, uh,
01:05:04 this robot’s brain, uh, sparks fly.
01:05:08 So can we try to say the same thing over and over in different ways about what,
01:05:12 what, what you mean by that having to be a thing we have to contend with?
01:05:17 Sure. Like why,
01:05:19 why do you think that creating a theory of everything,
01:05:23 as you call the source code are understanding our source code require a view
01:05:29 like the hand that draws itself. Okay.
01:05:31 Well here’s what goes on in the regular physics picture.
01:05:35 We’ve got these two main theories, general relativity and the standard model.
01:05:38 Right?
01:05:39 Okay. Think of general relativity as more or less,
01:05:44 the theory of the canvas. Okay.
01:05:48 Maybe you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape.
01:05:52 Maybe you’ve measured it. So it’s got length and it’s got angle,
01:05:55 but more or less it’s just canvas and length and angle.
01:05:58 And that’s all that really general relativity is,
01:06:02 but it allows the canvas to warp a bit.
01:06:04 Okay. Then we have the second thing,
01:06:08 which is this import of foreign libraries where,
01:06:13 which aren’t tied to space and time.
01:06:18 So we’ve got this crazy set of symmetries called SU three cross SU two cross U
01:06:23 one.
01:06:24 We’ve got this collection of 16 particles in a generation,
01:06:27 which are these sort of twisted spinners.
01:06:30 And we’ve got three copies of them.
01:06:32 Then we’ve got this weird Higgs field that comes in and like Deus ex machina
01:06:37 solves all the problems that have been created in the play that can’t be
01:06:40 resolved otherwise.
01:06:42 So that’s the standard model of quantum field theory just plopped on top.
01:06:45 It’s a problem of the double origin story.
01:06:48 One origin story is about space and time.
01:06:51 The other origin story is about what we would call internal quantum numbers and
01:06:56 internal symmetries.
01:06:58 And then there was an attempt to get one to follow from the other called
01:07:02 Kaluza Klein theory, which didn’t work out.
01:07:06 And this is sort of in that vein.
01:07:10 So you said origin story. So in the hand that draws itself,
01:07:15 what is it?
01:07:16 So it’s, it’s as if you had the canvas and then you ordered
01:07:21 up also give me paint brushes, paints, pigments, pencils, and artists.
01:07:26 But you’re saying that’s like, if you want to create a universe from scratch,
01:07:29 the canvas should be generating the paintbrushes and the paintbrushes and the
01:07:33 artists, right? Like you should, who’s the artist in this analogy?
01:07:38 Well, this is sorry.
01:07:40 Then we’re going to get into a religious thing and I don’t want to do that.
01:07:42 Okay. Well, you know my shtick, which is that we are the AI.
01:07:47 We have two great stories about the simulation and artificial general
01:07:51 intelligence. In one story,
01:07:54 man fears that some program we’ve given birth to will become self aware,
01:07:59 smarter than us and we’ll take over in another story.
01:08:04 There are genius simulators and we live in their simulation and we haven’t
01:08:10 realized that those two stories are the same story. In one case,
01:08:14 we are the simulator. In another case,
01:08:18 we are the simulated and if you buy those and you put them together,
01:08:23 we are the AGI and whether or not we have simulators,
01:08:27 we may be trying to wake up by learning our own source code.
01:08:30 So this could be our Skynet moment,
01:08:31 which is one of the reasons I have some issues around it.
01:08:35 I think we’ll talk about that cause I,
01:08:37 well that’s the issue of the emergent artist within the story just to get back
01:08:40 to the point. Okay. So,
01:08:42 so now the key point is the standard way we tell the story is that Einstein sets
01:08:47 the canvas and then we order all the stuff that we want and then that paints the
01:08:52 picture that is our universe.
01:08:54 So you order the, the, the paint,
01:08:57 you order the artist,
01:09:00 you order the brushes and that then when you collide the two gives you two
01:09:06 separate origin stories.
01:09:08 The canvas came from one place and everything else came from somewhere else.
01:09:12 So what are the mathematical tools required to,
01:09:18 to construct consistent geometric theory?
01:09:21 Yeah.
01:09:23 You know, make this concrete.
01:09:25 Well, somehow you need to get three copies,
01:09:30 for example,
01:09:31 of generations with 16 particles each,
01:09:36 right? And so the question would be like, well, there’s a lot,
01:09:40 there’s a lot of special personality in those symmetries.
01:09:44 Where would they come from? So for example,
01:09:47 you’ve got what would be called grand unified theories that sound like,
01:09:52 um, SU five, uh, the George I.
01:09:55 Glashow theory. There’s something that should be called spin 10,
01:09:58 but physicists insist on calling it SO 10.
01:10:01 There’s something called the petit salon theory that tends to be called SU four
01:10:06 cross SU two cross SU two, which should be called spin six cross spin four.
01:10:10 I can get into all of these.
01:10:11 What are they all accomplishing?
01:10:13 They’re all taking the known forces that we see and packaging them up
01:10:18 to say, we can’t get rid of the second origin story,
01:10:22 but we can at least make that origin story more unified.
01:10:26 So they’re trying grand unification is the attempt to.
01:10:29 And that’s a mistake in your, in your.
01:10:30 It’s not a mistake that the problem is, is it was born lifeless. When,
01:10:35 when George I.
01:10:35 And Glashow first came out with the SU five theory, um,
01:10:40 it was very exciting because it could be tested in a South Dakota, um,
01:10:45 mine filled up with like, I dunno, cleaning fluid or something like that.
01:10:49 And they looked for proton decay and didn’t see it.
01:10:51 And then they gave up because in that day,
01:10:54 when your experiment didn’t work, you gave up on the theory.
01:10:57 It didn’t come to us born of a fusion between Einstein and,
01:11:02 and, and bore, you know,
01:11:05 and that was kind of the problem is that it had this weird parenting where it
01:11:09 was just on the bore side. There was no Einsteinian contribution.
01:11:15 Lex, how can I help you most? I’m trying to figure,
01:11:19 what questions do you want to ask so that you get the most satisfying answers?
01:11:24 Uh, there’s, there’s a, there’s a bunch,
01:11:26 there’s a bunch of questions I want to ask. I mean, one,
01:11:28 and I’m trying to sneak up on you somehow to reveal
01:11:33 in a accessible way, then the nature of our universe.
01:11:40 So I can just give you a guess, right?
01:11:42 We have to be very careful that we’re not claiming that this has been accepted.
01:11:47 This is a speculation, but I will, I will make the speculation that what,
01:11:51 I think what you would want to ask me is how can the canvas generate all the
01:11:55 stuff that usually has to be ordered separately? All right. Should we do that?
01:11:59 Let’s go there. Okay.
01:12:00 Okay. So the first thing is,
01:12:03 is that you have a concept in computers called technical debt.
01:12:08 You’re coding and you cut corners and you know,
01:12:10 you’re going to have to do it right before the thing is safe for the world,
01:12:15 but you’re piling up some series of IO use to yourself and your project as
01:12:21 you’re going along.
01:12:23 So the first thing is we can’t figure out if you have only four degrees of
01:12:28 freedom. And that’s what your canvas is.
01:12:30 How do you get at least Einstein’s world? Einstein says, look,
01:12:35 it’s not just four degrees of freedom,
01:12:36 but there need to be rulers and protractors to measure length and angle in the
01:12:40 world. You can’t just have a flabby four degrees of freedom.
01:12:46 So the first thing you do is you create 10 extra variables,
01:12:49 which is like if we can’t choose any particular set of rulers and protractors to
01:12:53 measure length and angle, let’s take the,
01:12:55 take the set of all possible rulers and protractors.
01:13:00 And that would be called symmetric non degenerate two tensors on the tangent
01:13:04 space of the four manifold X four.
01:13:08 Now because there are four degrees of freedom,
01:13:11 you start off with four dimensions.
01:13:12 Then you need four rulers for each of those different directions.
01:13:17 So that’s four that gets us up to eight variables.
01:13:20 And then between four original variables, there are six possible angles.
01:13:24 So four plus four plus six is equal to 14.
01:13:29 So now you’ve replaced X four with another space, which in the lecture,
01:13:33 I think I called you 14, but I’m now calling Y 14.
01:13:36 This is one of the big problems of working on something in private is every time
01:13:39 you pull it out, you sort of can’t remember it. You name something, something new.
01:13:43 Okay. So you’ve got a 14 dimensional world,
01:13:45 which is the original four dimensional world plus a lot of extra gadgetry for
01:13:51 measurement.
01:13:52 Yeah. And because you’re not in the four dimensional world,
01:13:55 you don’t have the technical debt.
01:13:56 No, now you’ve got a lot of technical debt because now you have to explain away
01:13:59 a 14 dimensional world, which is a big,
01:14:02 you’re taking a huge advance on your payday check, right?
01:14:05 But aren’t more dimensions allow you more freedom to, I mean,
01:14:10 maybe, but you have to get rid of them somehow because we don’t perceive them.
01:14:14 So eventually you have to collapse it down to the thing that we perceive or you
01:14:16 have to sample a four dimensional filament within that 14 dimensional world known
01:14:23 as a section of a bundle.
01:14:26 Okay. So how do we get from the four 14 dimensional world where I imagine a lot
01:14:31 of, oh, wait, wait, wait. Yep. You’re cheating.
01:14:33 The first question was how do we get something from almost nothing?
01:14:38 Like how do we get the,
01:14:40 if I’ve said that the who and the what in the newspaper story that is a theory
01:14:45 theory of everything are bosons and Fermions. So let’s make the who,
01:14:50 the Fermions and the what the bosons think of it as the players and the
01:14:54 equipment for a game.
01:14:56 Are we supposed to be thinking of actual physical things with mass or energy?
01:15:00 Okay. So think about everything you see in this room.
01:15:05 So from chemistry, you know, it’s all protons, neutrons and electrons,
01:15:08 but from a little bit of late 1960s physics,
01:15:12 we know that the protons and neutrons are all made of up quarks and down quarks.
01:15:16 So everything in this room is basically up quarks, down quarks,
01:15:19 and electrons stuck together with, with the, the, what the equipment.
01:15:25 Okay.
01:15:26 Now the way we see it currently is we see that there are space time indices,
01:15:32 which we would call spinners that correspond to the who that is the Fermions,
01:15:38 the matter, the stuff, the up quarks, the down quarks, the electrons.
01:15:41 And there are also
01:15:46 16 degrees of freedom that come from this in this space of internal quantum
01:15:51 numbers. So in my theory,
01:15:55 in 14 dimensions,
01:15:58 there’s no internal quantum number space that figures in.
01:16:03 It’s all just spin oriel.
01:16:05 So spinners in 14 dimensions without any festooning with extra linear algebraic
01:16:14 information.
01:16:17 There’s a concept of a, of, of, of spinners,
01:16:20 which is natural if you have a manifold with length and angle and Y 14 is almost
01:16:27 a manifold with length and angle. It’s,
01:16:32 it’s so close. It’s in other words,
01:16:35 because you’re looking at the space of all rulers and protractors,
01:16:39 maybe it’s not that surprising that a space of rulers and protractors might come
01:16:43 very close to having rulers and protractors on it itself.
01:16:47 Like can you measure the space of measurements and you almost can’t in a space
01:16:52 that has length and angle.
01:16:54 If it doesn’t have a topological obstruction comes with these objects called
01:16:58 spinners.
01:16:59 Now spinners are the stuff of of our world.
01:17:05 We are made of spinners. They are the most important,
01:17:08 really deep object that I can tell you about. They were very surprising.
01:17:11 What is a spinner? So famously,
01:17:14 there are these weird things that require 720 degrees of rotation in order to
01:17:23 come back to normal. And that doesn’t make sense.
01:17:26 And the reason for this is that there’s a knottedness in our three dimensional
01:17:31 world that people don’t observe. And you know,
01:17:34 you can famously see it by this Dirac string trick.
01:17:39 So if you take a glass of water,
01:17:40 imagine that this was a tumbler and I didn’t want to spill any of it.
01:17:43 And the question is if I rotate the cup without losing my grip on the base,
01:17:49 360 degrees and I can’t go backwards,
01:17:53 is there any way I can take a sip? And the answer is this weird motion,
01:17:58 which is
01:18:01 go over first and under second.
01:18:04 And that that’s 720 degrees of rotation to come back to normal so that I can
01:18:08 take a sip. Well, that weird principle,
01:18:10 which sometimes is known as the Philippine wine glass dance because waitresses
01:18:14 in the Philippines apparently learned how to do this.
01:18:18 Um,
01:18:19 so that that move defines if you will,
01:18:24 this hidden space that nobody knew was there of spinners,
01:18:28 which Dirac figured out when he took the square root of something called the
01:18:32 Klein Gordon equation, uh, which I think had earlier,
01:18:37 um, work incorporated from Cartan and killing and company in mathematics.
01:18:43 So spinners are one of the most profound aspects of human existence.
01:18:46 I mean, forgive me for the perhaps dumb questions, but, uh,
01:18:49 would a spinner be the mathematical objects that’s the basic unit of our
01:18:54 universe?
01:18:55 When you, when you start with a manifold,
01:19:01 um, which is just like something like a donut or a sphere circle or a Mobius
01:19:06 band,
01:19:07 a spinner is usually the first wildly surprising thing that you found was
01:19:12 hidden in your original purchase.
01:19:14 So you,
01:19:15 you order a manifold and you didn’t even realize it’s like buying a house and
01:19:20 finding a panic room inside that you hadn’t counted on.
01:19:23 It’s very surprising when you understand that spinners are running around on
01:19:27 your spaces.
01:19:29 Again, perhaps a dumb question,
01:19:31 but we’re talking about 14 dimensions and four dimensions.
01:19:34 What is the manifold we’re operating under?
01:19:38 So in my case, it’s proto space time. It’s before,
01:19:41 it’s before Einstein can slap rulers and protractors on space time.
01:19:47 What do you mean by that? Sorry to interrupt is space.
01:19:49 Time is the four D manifold.
01:19:52 Space time is a four dimensional manifold with extra structure.
01:19:57 What’s the extra structure?
01:19:58 It’s called a semi Ramanian or pseudo Ramanian metric.
01:20:04 In essence,
01:20:05 there is something akin to a four by four symmetric manifold.
01:20:10 Four symmetric matrix from which is equivalent to length and angle.
01:20:15 So when I talk about rulers and protractors,
01:20:17 or I talk about length and angle,
01:20:19 or I talk about Ramanian or pseudo Ramanian or semi Ramanian met manifolds,
01:20:24 I’m usually talking about the same thing.
01:20:26 Can you measure how long something is and what the angle is between two
01:20:30 different rays or vectors?
01:20:32 So that’s what Einstein gave us as his arena, his place to play, his his canvas.
01:20:43 So there’s a bunch of questions I can ask here.
01:20:45 But like I said, I’m working on this book, Geometric Unity for Idiots.
01:20:51 And and I think what would be really nice as your editor
01:20:57 to have like beautiful, maybe even visualizations that people could try to
01:21:05 play with, try to try to reveal small little beauties about the way you’re
01:21:09 thinking about the score.
01:21:10 Well, I usually use the Joe Rogan program for that.
01:21:13 Sometimes I have him doing the Philippine wine glass dance.
01:21:16 I had the hop vibration.
01:21:18 The part of the problem is that most people don’t know this language about
01:21:23 spinners, bundles, metrics, gauge fields.
01:21:27 And they’re very curious about the theory of everything, but they have no
01:21:31 understanding of even what we know about our own world.
01:21:34 Is it, is it a hopeless pursuit?
01:21:37 So like even gauge theory, right?
01:21:39 Just this, I mean, it seems to be very inaccessible.
01:21:43 Is there some aspect of it that could be made accessible?
01:21:46 I mean, I could go to the board right there and give you a five minute lecture
01:21:50 on gauge theory that would be better than the official lecture on gauge theory.
01:21:54 You would know what gauge theory was.
01:21:56 So it is, it’s, it’s possible to make it accessible, but nobody does.
01:22:01 Like, in other words, you’re going to watch over the next year, lots of
01:22:05 different discussions about quantum entanglement or, you know, the multiverse.
01:22:09 Where are we now?
01:22:11 Or, you know, many worlds, are they all equally real?
01:22:15 Yeah.
01:22:17 Right.
01:22:17 I mean, yeah, that’s okay.
01:22:19 But you’re not going to hear anything about the hop vibration except if
01:22:22 it’s from me and I hate that.
01:22:24 Why, why can’t you be the one?
01:22:26 Well, because I’m going a different path.
01:22:28 I think that we’ve made a huge mistake, which is we have things we can show
01:22:31 people about the actual models.
01:22:34 We can push out visualizations where they they’re not listening by analogy.
01:22:38 They’re watching the same thing that we’re seeing.
01:22:40 And as I’ve said to you before, this is like choosing to perform sheet music
01:22:45 that hasn’t been performed in a long time.
01:22:47 Or, you know, the experts can’t afford orchestras.
01:22:50 So they just trade Beethoven symphonies as sheet music.
01:22:53 And they, Oh, wow, that was beautiful.
01:22:55 But it’s like, nobody heard anything.
01:22:57 They just looked at the score.
01:22:59 Well, that’s how mathematicians and physicists trade papers and ideas is that
01:23:03 they, they write down the things that represent stuff.
01:23:07 I want to at least close out the thought line that you started, which is how does
01:23:13 the canvas order all of this other stuff into being so I at least want to say some
01:23:22 incomprehensible things about that.
01:23:23 And then we’ll, we’ll have that much done.
01:23:26 All right.
01:23:27 And that just point, does it have to be incomprehensible?
01:23:32 Do you know what the Schrodinger equation is?
01:23:34 Yes.
01:23:35 Do you know what the Dirac equation is?
01:23:38 What does no mean?
01:23:39 Well, my point is you’re going to have some feeling that, you know, what the
01:23:42 Schrodinger equation is, as soon as we get to the Dirac equation, your eyes are
01:23:47 going to get a little bit glazed, right?
01:23:51 So now why is that?
01:23:53 Well, the answer to me is, is that you, you want to ask me about the theory
01:23:59 of everything, but you haven’t even digested the theory of everything as
01:24:05 we’ve had it since 1928 when Dirac came out with his equation.
01:24:10 So for whatever reason, and this isn’t a hit on you, you haven’t been motivated
01:24:17 enough in all the time that you’ve been on earth to at least get as far as the
01:24:21 Dirac equation.
01:24:22 And this was very interesting to me after I gave the talk in Oxford new scientist.
01:24:28 Who had done kind of a hatchet job on me to begin with sent a reporter to come to
01:24:32 the third version of the talk that I gave.
01:24:34 And that person had never heard of the Dirac equation.
01:24:37 So you have a person who’s completely professionally, not qualified to ask
01:24:43 these questions wanting to know, well, how does, how does your theory solve
01:24:49 new problems and like, well, in the case of the Dirac equation, well, tell me
01:24:53 about that.
01:24:53 I don’t know what that is.
01:24:54 So then the point is, okay, I got it.
01:24:57 You’re not even caught up minimally to where we are now.
01:25:01 And that’s not a knock on you.
01:25:03 Almost nobody even knows where you are.
01:25:04 And that’s not a knock on you, almost nobody is.
01:25:08 Yeah.
01:25:08 But then how does it become my job to digest what has been available
01:25:14 for like over 90 years?
01:25:17 Well, to me, the open question is whether what’s been available for over 90 years
01:25:22 can be, um, there could be, uh, a blueprint of a journey that one takes to
01:25:30 understand it, not to do that with you.
01:25:32 And I, I, one of the things I think I’ve been relatively successful at, for
01:25:36 example, you know, when you ask other people what gauge theory is, you get
01:25:41 these very confusing responses and my response is much simpler.
01:25:45 It’s, oh, it’s a theory of, uh, differentiation where when you calculate
01:25:49 the instantaneous rise over run, you measure the rise, not from a flat
01:25:54 horizontal, but from a custom endogenous reference level.
01:25:58 What do you mean by that?
01:25:59 It’s like, okay.
01:26:00 And then I do this thing with Mount Everest, which is Mount Everest is how
01:26:04 high then they give the height I say above what then they say sea level.
01:26:07 And I say, which sea is that in Nepal?
01:26:10 Like, oh, I guess there isn’t a sea cause it’s landlocked.
01:26:12 It’s like, okay, well, what do you mean by sea level?
01:26:14 Oh, there’s this thing called the geoid I’d never heard of.
01:26:17 Oh, that’s the reference level.
01:26:18 That’s a custom reference level that we imported.
01:26:22 So you, all sorts of people have remembered the exact height of Mount
01:26:27 Everest without ever knowing what it’s a height from.
01:26:31 Well, in this case, engage theory, there’s a hidden reference level where
01:26:35 you measure the rise in rise over run to give the slope of the line.
01:26:40 What if you have different concepts of what, of where that rise should be
01:26:46 measured from that vary within the theory that are endogenous to the theory.
01:26:51 That’s what gauge theory is.
01:26:53 Okay.
01:26:54 We have a video here, right?
01:26:55 Yeah.
01:26:55 Okay.
01:26:56 Okay.
01:26:57 I’m going to use my phone.
01:26:59 If I want to measure my hand and its slope, this is my attempt to
01:27:05 measure it using standard calculus.
01:27:07 In other words, the reference level is apparently flat and I measure the
01:27:11 rise above that phone using my hand.
01:27:14 Okay.
01:27:15 If I want to use gauge theory, it means I can do this or I can do that, or
01:27:20 I can do this, or I can do this, or I could do what I did from the beginning.
01:27:24 Okay.
01:27:24 At some level, that’s what gauge theory is.
01:27:27 Now that is an act.
01:27:27 No, I’ve never heard anyone describe it that way.
01:27:31 So while the community may say, well, who is this guy and why does he
01:27:34 have the right to talk in public?
01:27:35 I’m waiting for somebody to jump out of the woodwork and say, you know,
01:27:39 Eric’s whole shtick about rulers and protractors, uh, leading to a derivative.
01:27:44 Derivatives are measured as rise over run above reference level.
01:27:47 The reference levels don’t fit together.
01:27:48 Like I go through this whole shtick in order to make it accessible.
01:27:51 I’ve never heard anyone say it.
01:27:54 I’m trying to make Prometheus would like to discuss fire with everybody else.
01:28:00 All right.
01:28:00 I’m going to just say one thing to close out the earlier line, which is what I
01:28:03 think we should have continued with.
01:28:05 When you take the naturally occurring spinners, the unadorned spinners, the
01:28:10 naked spinners, not on this 14 dimensional manifold, but on something very closely
01:28:18 tied to it, which I’ve called the chimeric tangent bundle, that is the object
01:28:24 which stands in for the thing that should have had length and angle on it,
01:28:27 but just missed.
01:28:28 Okay.
01:28:30 When you take that object and you form spinners on that and you don’t adorn them.
01:28:34 So you’re still in the single origin story.
01:28:37 You get very large spin oriel objects upstairs on this 14 dimensional world.
01:28:43 Why 14, which is part of the observers.
01:28:46 When you pull that information back from Y 14 down to X four, it miraculously
01:28:56 looks like the adorned spinners, the festoon spinners, the spinners that
01:29:03 we play with in ordinary reality.
01:29:06 In other words, the 14 dimensional world looks like a four dimensional world
01:29:11 plus a 10 dimensional compliment.
01:29:13 So 10 plus four equals 14, that 10 dimensional compliment, which is called
01:29:17 a normal bundle, generates spin properties, internal quantum numbers that look like
01:29:24 the things that give our, our particles personality that make let’s say up quarks
01:29:30 and down quarks charged by negative one third or plus two thirds, you know, that
01:29:36 kind of stuff, or whether or not, you know, some quarks feel the weak side.
01:29:42 Quarks feel the weak force and other quarks do not.
01:29:46 So the X four generates Y 14 Y 14 generates something called the chimeric
01:29:52 tangent bundle chimeric tangent bundle generates unadorned spinners.
01:29:56 The unadorned spinners get pulled back from 14 down to four where they
01:30:00 look like adorned spinners.
01:30:03 And we have the right number of them.
01:30:05 You thought you needed three.
01:30:06 You only got two, but then something else that you’d never seen before
01:30:10 broke apart on this journey and it broke into another copy of the thing that you
01:30:15 already have two copies of one piece of that thing broke off.
01:30:19 So now you have two generations plus an imposter third generation, which is, I
01:30:25 don’t know why we never talk about this possibility in regular physics.
01:30:28 And then you’ve got a bunch of stuff that we haven’t seen, which has descriptions.
01:30:32 So people always say, does it make any falsifiable predictions?
01:30:34 Yes, it does.
01:30:35 It says that the matter that you should be seeing, um, next has particular
01:30:41 properties that can be read off like, like a weak ISIS spin, weak hypercharge,
01:30:47 like the responsiveness to the strong force.
01:30:50 The one I can’t tell you is what energy scale it would happen at.
01:30:54 So you would, if you can’t say if those characteristics can be
01:30:58 detected with the current, but it may be that somebody else can.
01:31:02 I’m not a physicist.
01:31:02 I’m not a quantum field theorist.
01:31:04 I can’t, I don’t know how you would do that.
01:31:07 The hope for me is that there’s some simple explanations for all of it.
01:31:14 Like, should we have a drink?
01:31:17 You’re having fun.
01:31:18 No, I’m trying to have fun with you.
01:31:20 You know, there’s a bunch of fun things to talk about here.
01:31:26 Anyway, that was how I got what I thought you wanted, which is,
01:31:30 if you think about the fermions as the artists and the bosons as the brushes
01:31:37 and the paint, what I told you is that’s how we get the artists.
01:31:43 What are the open questions for you in this?
01:31:46 What were the challenges?
01:31:48 So you’re not done.
01:31:49 Well, there’s, there’s things that I would like to have in better order.
01:31:53 So a lot of people will say, see, if you’re going to do this, you have to
01:31:59 say, see, the reason I hesitate on this is I just have a totally different
01:32:03 view than the community.
01:32:04 So for example, I believe that general relativity began in 1913
01:32:10 with Einstein and Grossman.
01:32:13 Now that was the first of like four major papers in this line of thinking.
01:32:19 To most physicists, general relativity happened when Einstein produced, uh,
01:32:25 a divergence free, um, gradient, which turned out to be the gradient of the,
01:32:32 of the so called Hilbert or Einstein Hilbert action.
01:32:36 And from my perspective, that wasn’t true.
01:32:39 This is that it began when Einstein said, look, this is about, um, differential
01:32:45 geometry and it’s the final answer is going to look like a curvature tensor
01:32:50 on one side and matter and energy on the other side.
01:32:53 And that was enough.
01:32:54 And then he published a wrong version of it where it was the Ricci tensor,
01:32:58 not the Einstein tensor.
01:32:59 Then he corrected the reach, the Ricci tensor to make it into the Einstein
01:33:03 tensor, then he corrected that to add a cosmological constant.
01:33:08 I can’t stand that the community thinks in those terms.
01:33:11 There’s some things about which, like there’s a question about
01:33:15 which contraction do I use?
01:33:17 There’s an Einstein contraction.
01:33:19 There’s a Ricci contraction.
01:33:20 They both go between the same spaces.
01:33:22 I’m not sure what I should do.
01:33:23 I’m not sure which contraction I should choose.
01:33:26 This is called a shiab operator for ship in a bottle and my stuff.
01:33:32 You have this big platform in many ways that inspires people’s
01:33:39 curiosity about physics and mathematics.
01:33:42 Right.
01:33:43 Now, and I’m one of those people and, but then you start using a lot of words
01:33:50 that I don’t understand and, or like I might know them, but I don’t understand.
01:33:58 And what’s unclear to me, if I’m supposed to be listening to those words, or if
01:34:03 it’s just, if this is one of those technical things that’s intended for
01:34:08 a very small community, or if I’m supposed to actually take those words and start,
01:34:14 you know, a multi year study, not, not a serious study, but a, the community
01:34:20 study, but the kind of study when you, you’re interested in learning about
01:34:24 machine learning, for example, or any kind of discipline, that’s where
01:34:28 I’m a little bit confused.
01:34:29 So you’ve, you’ve speak beautifully about ideas.
01:34:32 You often reveal the beauty in math, in geometry, and I’m unclear in what
01:34:39 are the steps I should be taking.
01:34:42 I, I’m curious, how can I explore?
01:34:45 How can I play with something?
01:34:46 How can I play with these ideas?
01:34:48 And, and, and enjoy the beauty of not necessarily understanding the
01:34:52 depth of the theory that you’re presenting, but start to share in the
01:34:56 beauty, as opposed to sharing and enjoying the beauty of just the way,
01:35:01 the passion with which you speak, which is in itself fun to listen to, but
01:35:08 also starting to be able to understand some aspects of this theory that I can
01:35:14 enjoy it to, and start to build an intuition, what the heck we’re even
01:35:19 talking about, because you’re basically saying we need to throw a lot of our
01:35:23 ideas of, of views of the universe out.
01:35:29 And I’m trying to find accessible ways in, not in this conversation.
01:35:36 No, I appreciate that.
01:35:37 So one of the things that I’ve done is I’ve, I’ve picked on one
01:35:40 paragraph from Edward Witten, and I said, this is the paragraph.
01:35:46 If I could only take one paragraph with me, this is the one I’d take.
01:35:49 And it’s almost all in prose, not an equation.
01:35:53 And he says, look, this is, this is our knowledge of the
01:35:55 universe at its deepest level.
01:35:57 And he was writing this during the 1980s.
01:35:59 And he has three separate points that constitute our deepest knowledge.
01:36:04 And those three points refer to equations, one to the Einstein field
01:36:08 equation, one to the Dirac equation, and one to the Yang Mills Maxwell equation.
01:36:14 Now, one thing I would do is take a look at that paragraph and say, okay,
01:36:20 what do these three lines mean?
01:36:22 Like it’s a finite amount of verbiage.
01:36:24 You can write down every word that you don’t know.
01:36:27 And you can say, what do I think done now?
01:36:32 Young man.
01:36:33 Yes.
01:36:33 There’s a beautiful wall in Stony Brook, New York built by someone
01:36:39 who I know you will interview named Jim Simons and Jim Simons.
01:36:45 He’s not the artist, but he’s the guy who funded it.
01:36:47 World’s greatest hedge fund manager.
01:36:49 And on that wall contain the three equations that Witten
01:36:53 refers to in that paragraph.
01:36:56 And so that is the transmission from the paragraph or graph to the wall.
01:37:01 Now that wall needs an owner’s manual, which Roger Penrose has written
01:37:07 called the road to reality.
01:37:09 And let’s call that the tome.
01:37:11 So this is the subject of the so called graph wall tome project that is going
01:37:17 on in our discord server and our general group around the portal community, which
01:37:22 is how do you take something that purports in one paragraph to say what the deepest
01:37:28 understanding man has of the universe in which he lives, it’s memorialized on a
01:37:34 wall, which nobody knows about, which is an incredibly gorgeous piece of, uh, of
01:37:40 art.
01:37:41 And that was written up in a book, which is, has been written for no man.
01:37:47 Right.
01:37:47 Maybe, maybe it’s for a woman.
01:37:48 I don’t know, but no, no one should be able to read this book because either
01:37:52 you’re a professional and you know, a lot of this book, in which case it’s kind of
01:37:56 a refresher to see how Roger thinks about these things, or you don’t even know that
01:38:00 this book is a self contained, uh, invitation to understanding our deepest
01:38:05 nature.
01:38:06 So I would say find yourself in the graph wall tome transmission sequence and join
01:38:12 the graph wall tome project if that’s of interest.
01:38:15 Okay.
01:38:16 Beautiful.
01:38:17 Uh, now just to linger on a little longer, what kind of journey do you
01:38:20 see geometric community taking?
01:38:22 I don’t know.
01:38:23 I mean, that’s the thing is that.
01:38:25 First of all, the professional community has to get very angry and outraged and
01:38:28 they have to work through their feeling that this is nonsense.
01:38:31 This is bullshit or like, no, wait a minute.
01:38:33 This is really cool.
01:38:35 Actually, I need some clarification over here.
01:38:37 So there’s going to be some sort of weird coming back together process.
01:38:41 Are you already hearing murmurings of that?
01:38:45 It was very funny.
01:38:46 Officially I’ve seen very little.
01:38:50 So it’s perhaps happening quietly.
01:38:52 Yeah.
01:38:52 You, you often talk about, we need to get off this planet.
01:38:55 Yep.
01:38:57 Can I try to sneak up on that by asking what in your kind of view is the
01:39:01 difference, the gap between the science of it, the theory and the actual
01:39:07 engineering of building something that leverages the theory to do something?
01:39:11 Like how big is that?
01:39:12 We don’t know.
01:39:13 Gap.
01:39:14 I mean, if you have 10 extra dimensions to play with that are the rules of
01:39:19 protractors of the world themselves, can you gain access to those dimensions?
01:39:25 Do you have a hunch?
01:39:26 So I don’t know.
01:39:28 I don’t want to get ahead of myself because you have to appreciate, I can
01:39:31 have hunches and I can, I can jaw off.
01:39:35 But one of the ways that I’m succeeding in this world is to not bow down to my
01:39:42 professional communities nor to ignore them.
01:39:45 Like I’m actually in the middle of a world where I’m not
01:39:47 going to ignore them, like I’m actually interested in the criticism.
01:39:50 I just want to denature it so that it’s not mostly interpersonal and irrelevant.
01:39:58 I believe that they don’t want me to speculate and I don’t
01:40:01 need to speculate about this.
01:40:02 I can simply say I’m open to the idea that it may have engineering prospects
01:40:08 and it may be a death sentence.
01:40:09 We may find out that there’s not enough new here that even if it were right, that
01:40:15 there would be nothing new to do.
01:40:16 Can’t tell you that’s what you mean by death sentences.
01:40:19 There would not be exciting breakthroughs.
01:40:21 Wouldn’t it be terrible if you couldn’t, like you can do new things in an
01:40:25 Einsteinian world that you couldn’t do in a Newtonian world, right?
01:40:29 You know, like you have twin paradoxes or Lorentz contraction of length or
01:40:33 any one of a number of new cool things happen in relativity theory
01:40:36 that didn’t happen for Newton.
01:40:38 What if there wasn’t new stuff to do at the next and final level?
01:40:43 Yeah, that would be quite sad.
01:40:47 Let me ask a silly question, but we’ll say it with a straight face.
01:40:55 Impossible.
01:40:57 So let me mention Elon Musk.
01:41:01 What are your thoughts about he’s more, you’re more on the physics theory side
01:41:07 of things, he’s more on the physics engineering side of things in terms of
01:41:11 SpaceX efforts, what do you think of his efforts to, uh, get off this planet?
01:41:18 Well, I think he’s the other guy who’s semi serious about getting off this planet.
01:41:26 I think there are two of us who are semi serious about getting off the planet.
01:41:29 What do you think about his methodology and yours when you look at them?
01:41:33 Don’t, and I don’t want to be against you because like I was so excited that like
01:41:38 your top video was Ray Kurzweil and then I did your podcast and we had some
01:41:42 chemistry, so it zoomed up and I thought, okay, I’m going to beat Ray Kurzweil.
01:41:46 So just as I’m coming up on Ray Kurzweil, you’re like, and now Alex Fridman
01:41:50 special Elon Musk and he blew me out of the water.
01:41:53 So I don’t want to be petty about it.
01:41:55 I want to say that I don’t, but I am.
01:41:58 Okay.
01:41:59 But here’s the funny part.
01:42:00 Um, he’s not taking enough risk.
01:42:03 Like he’s trying to get us to Mars.
01:42:05 Imagine that he got us to Mars, the moon, and we’ll throw in Titan and nowhere
01:42:12 good enough, the diversification level is too low.
01:42:15 Now there’s a compatibility.
01:42:18 First of all, I don’t think Elon is serious about Mars.
01:42:22 I think Elon is using Mars as a, as a narrative, as a story, as a dream to
01:42:29 make the moon jealous to make the, uh,
01:42:33 uh, I think he’s using it as a story to organize us, to reacquaint ourselves
01:42:39 with our need for space, our need to get off this planet.
01:42:42 It’s a concrete thing.
01:42:43 He shown that, um, many people think that he’s shown that he’s the most
01:42:48 brilliant and capable person on the planet.
01:42:50 I don’t think that’s what he showed.
01:42:52 I think he showed that the rest of us have forgotten our capabilities.
01:42:55 And so he’s like the only guy who has still kept the faith and is like,
01:42:59 what’s wrong with you people?
01:43:00 So you think the lesson we should draw from Elon Musk is there’s, uh, there’s
01:43:04 a capable person within, within a lot of us, Elon makes sense to me in what way
01:43:10 he’s doing, what any sensible person should do.
01:43:12 He’s trying incredible things and he’s partially succeeding, partially failing
01:43:17 to try to solve the obvious problems before, you know, when he comes up with
01:43:21 things like, uh, you know, I got it.
01:43:24 We’ll come up with a battery company, but batteries aren’t sexy.
01:43:26 So we’ll, we’ll make a car around it.
01:43:28 It’s like, great, you know, or, um, any one of a number of things.
01:43:34 Elon is behaving like a sane person and I view everyone else is insane.
01:43:40 And my feeling is, is that we really have to get off this planet.
01:43:45 We have to get out of this.
01:43:46 We have to get out of the neighborhood.
01:43:48 To linger on a little bit.
01:43:49 Do you think that’s a physics problem or an engineering problem?
01:43:54 I think it’s a cowardice problem.
01:43:55 I think that we’re afraid that we had 400 hitters of the mind, like Einstein
01:44:01 and Dirac and that, that era is done.
01:44:03 And now we’re just sort of copy editors.
01:44:07 So it’s some of it money, like if we become brave enough to go outside the
01:44:13 solar system, can we afford to financially?
01:44:17 Well, I think that that’s not really the issue.
01:44:19 The issue is look what Elon did well, he amassed a lot of money and then he,
01:44:28 you know, he plowed it back in and he spun, spun the wheel and he made more
01:44:31 money and now he’s got F you money.
01:44:35 Now the problem is, is that a lot of the people who have F you money are not
01:44:41 people whose middle finger you ever want to see.
01:44:43 I want to see Elon’s middle finger.
01:44:46 I want to see what he’s doing by that.
01:44:47 Or like when you say, fuck it, I’m going to do the biggest possible.
01:44:50 Do whatever the fuck you want, right?
01:44:53 Fuck you.
01:44:54 Fuck anything that gets in his way that he can afford to push out of his way.
01:44:57 And you’re saying he’s not actually even doing that enough.
01:45:00 No, I’m he’s not going, please.
01:45:02 I’m going to go.
01:45:03 Elon’s doing fine with his money.
01:45:05 I just want him to enjoy himself, have the most, you know, Dionysian, but
01:45:11 you’re saying Mars is playing it safe.
01:45:14 He doesn’t know how to do anything else.
01:45:15 He knows rockets and he might know some physics at a fundamental level.
01:45:25 Yeah.
01:45:25 I guess, okay, just, let me just go right back to how much physics do you really,
01:45:30 how much brilliant breakthrough ideas on the physics side do you
01:45:34 need to get off this planet?
01:45:37 I don’t know.
01:45:38 And I don’t know whether like in my most optimistic dream, I don’t know
01:45:41 whether my stuff gets us out of this.
01:45:42 Like in my most optimistic dream, I don’t know whether my stuff gets us off the
01:45:46 planet, but it’s hope it’s hope that there’s a more fundamental theory that
01:45:51 we can access that we don’t need.
01:45:54 Um, you know, whose elegance and beauty will suggest that this is probably
01:46:00 the way the universe goes.
01:46:01 Like you have to say this weird thing, which is this, I believe, and this,
01:46:06 I believe is a very dangerous statement, but this, I believe, I believe that my
01:46:11 theory, um, points the way now, Elon might or might not be able to access my
01:46:18 theory.
01:46:18 I don’t know.
01:46:19 I don’t know what he knows, but keep in mind, why are we all so focused on Elon?
01:46:25 It’s really weird.
01:46:26 It’s kind of creepy too.
01:46:28 Why he’s just the person who’s just asking the, the obvious questions
01:46:32 and doing whatever he can, but he makes sense to me.
01:46:35 You see Craig Venter makes sense to me.
01:46:37 Jim Watson makes sense to me, but we’re focusing on Elon.
01:46:41 Because he’s, he’s somehow is rare.
01:46:44 Well, that’s the weird thing.
01:46:45 Like we’ve come up with a system that eliminates all Elon from our pipeline
01:46:51 and Elon somehow, uh, snuck through when they weren’t quality adjusting
01:46:56 everything, you know?
01:46:57 And this, this idea of, uh, of disc, right?
01:47:02 Distributed idea suppression complex.
01:47:04 Yeah.
01:47:04 Is that what’s bringing the Elans of the world down?
01:47:09 You know, it’s so funny.
01:47:10 It’s like, he’s asking Joe Rogan, like, is that a joint, you know, it’s like,
01:47:14 well, what, what will happen if I smoke it?
01:47:16 What will happen to the stock price?
01:47:17 What will happen if I scratch myself in public?
01:47:20 What will happen if I say what I think about Thailand or COVID or who knows what?
01:47:26 And everybody’s like, don’t say that, say this, go do this, go do that.
01:47:30 Well, it’s crazy making, it’s absolutely crazy making.
01:47:34 And if you think about what we put through people through, um, we, we
01:47:41 need to get people who can use FU money, the FU money they need to insulate
01:47:46 themselves from all of the people who know better, because the, the, my
01:47:51 nightmare is, is that why did we only get one Elon?
01:47:55 What if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of Elans?
01:47:59 And the weird thing is like, this is all that remains you’re, you’re looking
01:48:03 at like OB one and Yoda, and it’s like, this is the only, this is all that’s
01:48:09 left after X, uh, order 66 has been executed.
01:48:14 And that’s the thing that’s really upsetting to me is we used, we
01:48:16 used to have Elon’s five deep.
01:48:18 And then we could talk about Elon in the context of his cohort.
01:48:23 But this is like, if you were to see a giraffe in the Arctic with no
01:48:27 trees around, you’d think why the long neck, what a strange sight, you know?
01:48:32 You know, how do we get more Elans?
01:48:35 How do we change these?
01:48:37 So I think the use, so we know MIT and Harvard, so maybe returning to our
01:48:44 previous conversation, my sense is that the Elans of the world are supposed
01:48:48 to come from MIT and Harvard, right?
01:48:51 And how do you change?
01:48:53 Let’s think of one that MIT sort of killed.
01:48:57 Have any names in mind?
01:48:58 Aaron Schwartz leaps to my mind.
01:49:01 Yeah.
01:49:01 Okay.
01:49:02 Are we MIT supposed to shield the Aaron Schwartz’s from, I don’t know, journal
01:49:11 publishers, or are we supposed to help the journal publishers so that we can
01:49:15 throw 35 year sentences in his face or whatever it is that we did that depressed
01:49:19 him? Okay.
01:49:21 So here’s my point.
01:49:22 Yeah.
01:49:22 I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz, and if you want to
01:49:29 send Aaron Schwartz to a state where he’s looking at 35 years in prison or
01:49:36 something like that, you are my sworn enemy.
01:49:39 You are not MIT.
01:49:41 Yeah.
01:49:42 You are the traitors, uh, irresponsible, middle brow, pencil pushing green
01:49:53 eyeshade fool that needs to not be in the seat at the, at the presidency of MIT
01:49:59 period, the end, get the fuck out of there and let one of our people sit in that
01:50:03 chair.
01:50:04 And the thing that you’ve articulated is that the people in those chairs are not
01:50:10 the way they are because they’re evil or somehow morally compromised is that it’s
01:50:15 just the, that’s the distributed nature is that there’s some kind of aspect of
01:50:19 the system that people who wed themselves to the system, they adapt every instinct.
01:50:25 And the fact is, is that they’re not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt.
01:50:32 Let me ask a silly question.
01:50:33 Do you think institutions generally just tend to become that?
01:50:38 No.
01:50:38 We get some of the institutions, we get Caltech.
01:50:41 Here’s what we’re supposed to have.
01:50:42 We’re supposed to have Caltech.
01:50:44 We’re supposed to have a read.
01:50:46 We’re supposed to have deep springs.
01:50:49 We’re supposed to have MIT.
01:50:50 We’re supposed to have a part of Harvard.
01:50:54 And when the sharp elbow crowd comes after the shelf, sharp, uh, mind crowd,
01:50:58 we’re supposed to break those sharp elbows and say, don’t come around here
01:51:01 again.
01:51:02 So what are the weapons that the sharp minds are supposed to use in our modern
01:51:06 day?
01:51:06 So to reclaim MIT, what, what is the, what’s the future?
01:51:11 Are you kidding me?
01:51:12 First of all, assume that this is being seen at MIT.
01:51:15 Hey everybody is okay.
01:51:18 Hey everybody, try to remember who you are.
01:51:22 You’re the guys who put the police car on top of the great dump.
01:51:25 You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge.
01:51:28 You created a Tetris game in the green building.
01:51:31 Now, what is your problem?
01:51:33 Is your problem they killed one of your own.
01:51:37 You should make their life a living hell.
01:51:40 You should be the ones who keep the mayor memory of Aaron Schwartz alive and all
01:51:45 of those hackers and all of those mutants, you know,
01:51:50 it’s like it’s either our place or it isn’t.
01:51:54 And if we have to throw 12 more pianos off of the
01:51:58 roof, right?
01:52:01 If Harold Edgerton was taking those photographs, you know,
01:52:06 uh, with slow mo back in the forties,
01:52:10 if Noam Chomsky is on your faculty,
01:52:13 what the hell is wrong with you kids?
01:52:16 You are the most creative and insightful people and you can’t figure out how to
01:52:19 defend Aaron Schwartz. That’s on you guys.
01:52:22 So some of that is giving more power to the young, like you said,
01:52:25 no, it’s taking power from taking power from the feeble and the middle
01:52:30 Brown. Yeah. But how do you, what is the mechanism to me?
01:52:32 I don’t know. You, you have some nine volt batteries, copper wire.
01:52:38 I, uh, I tend to, do you have a capacitor?
01:52:41 I tend to believe you have to create an alternative and, uh,
01:52:46 make the alternative so much better that it makes MIT obsolete unless
01:52:51 they change. And that’s what forces change. So as opposed to somehow,
01:52:56 okay, so use projection mapping, what’s projection mapping,
01:53:00 where you take some complicated edifice and you map all of its planes.
01:53:04 And then you actually project some unbelievable graphics,
01:53:07 re skinning a building, let’s say at night. That’s right. Yeah. Okay.
01:53:10 So you want to do some graffiti art with like basically want to hack the system.
01:53:13 No, I’m saying, look, listen to me. Yeah. We’re smarter than they are.
01:53:18 And they, you know what they say? They say things like,
01:53:21 okay, I think we need some geeks. Get me two PhDs.
01:53:26 Right. You treat PhDs like that. That’s a bad move.
01:53:31 Because PhDs are capable and we act like our job is to peel
01:53:35 grapes for our betters.
01:53:37 Yeah. That’s a strange thing. And I,
01:53:39 I you speak about it very eloquently is how we treat basically
01:53:43 the greatest minds in the world, which is like at their prime,
01:53:48 which is PhD students like that. We pay them nothing.
01:53:54 Uh, I’m done with it. Yeah. Right. We got to take what’s ours.
01:53:58 So, so take back MIT, become ungovernable,
01:54:04 become ungovernable. And by the way, when you become ungovernable,
01:54:08 don’t do it by throwing food.
01:54:12 Don’t do it by pouring salt on the lawn, like a jerk,
01:54:15 do it through brilliance, because what you Caltech and MIT can do,
01:54:19 and maybe Rensselaer Polytechnic or Worcester Polytech, I don’t know.
01:54:23 Lehigh. God damn it. What’s wrong with you technical people?
01:54:27 You act like you’re a servant class.
01:54:30 It’s unclear to me how you reclaim it except with brilliance,
01:54:33 like you said. Uh,
01:54:35 but to me that the way you reclaim it with brilliance is to go outside the
01:54:39 system.
01:54:39 Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class.
01:54:42 What are you guys going to do about it? Right.
01:54:44 The super capable people need to flex,
01:54:49 need to be individual. They need to stop giving away all their power to,
01:54:53 you know, a zeitgeist or a community or this or that you’re not,
01:54:56 you’re not indoor cats. You’re outdoor cats. Go be outdoor cats.
01:54:59 Do you think we’re going to see this, this kind of one asking me, you know,
01:55:03 before, like what about the world war II generation? Right.
01:55:06 Oh,
01:55:06 and I’m trying to say is that there’s a technical revolt coming here’s you want
01:55:10 to talk about it, but I’m trying to lead it. I’m trying to see,
01:55:13 no, you’re not trying to lead it. I’m trying to get a blueprint here.
01:55:15 All right, Lex. Yeah.
01:55:17 How angry are you about our country pretending that you and I can’t actually do
01:55:22 technical subjects so that they need an army of, uh,
01:55:26 kids coming in from four countries in Asia.
01:55:29 It’s not about the four countries in Asia. It’s not about those kids.
01:55:32 It’s about lying about us that we don’t care enough about science and
01:55:35 technology that we’re incapable of it as if we don’t have Chinese and Russians
01:55:40 and Russians and Koreans and Croatians. Like we’ve got everybody here.
01:55:46 The only reason you’re looking outside is,
01:55:48 is that you want to hire cheap people from the family business because you don’t
01:55:52 want to pass the family business on. And you know what?
01:55:56 You didn’t really build the family business. It’s not yours to decide.
01:56:00 You the boomers and you the silent generation, you did your bit,
01:56:03 but you also fouled a lot of stuff up and you’re custodians.
01:56:07 You are caretakers. You were supposed to hand something.
01:56:11 What you did instead was to gorge yourself on cheap foreign labor,
01:56:16 which you then held up as being much more brilliant than your own children,
01:56:20 which was never true.
01:56:22 But I’m trying to understand how we create a better system without anger,
01:56:26 without revolution, not, not,
01:56:28 not by kissing and hugs and, and,
01:56:32 but by any,
01:56:35 I don’t understand within MIT what the mechanism of building a better MIT is.
01:56:39 We’re not going to pay Elsevier. Aaron Schwartz was right.
01:56:42 JSTOR is an abomination.
01:56:45 But why, who within MIT, who within institutions is going to do that?
01:56:50 When just like you said,
01:56:51 the people who are running the show are more senior.
01:56:54 I don’t know, get Frank Wilczek to speak out.
01:56:58 So you’re, it’s basically individuals that step up. I mean,
01:57:01 one of the surprising things about Elon is that one person can inspire so
01:57:05 much.
01:57:06 He’s got academic freedom. It just comes from money.
01:57:10 I don’t agree with that. That you think money. Okay.
01:57:15 So yes, certainly. Sorry.
01:57:19 And testicles. Yes.
01:57:20 I think that testicles are more important than money or guts.
01:57:25 I think I do agree with you.
01:57:27 You speak about this a lot that because the money in academic institutions
01:57:30 has been so constrained that people are misbehaving and horrible.
01:57:35 Yes.
01:57:36 But I don’t think that if we reverse that and give a huge amount of money,
01:57:40 people will all of a sudden behave well. I think it also takes guts.
01:57:43 No, you need to give people security. Security. Yes.
01:57:46 Like you need to know that you have a job on Monday when on
01:57:51 Friday you say, I’m not so sure I really love diversity and inclusion.
01:57:56 And somebody is like, wait, what? You didn’t love diversity?
01:57:59 We had a statement on diversity and you wouldn’t sign.
01:58:02 Are you against the inclusion part or are you against diverse?
01:58:05 Do you just not like people like you?
01:58:06 Like actually that has nothing to do with anything.
01:58:09 You’re making this into something that it isn’t.
01:58:11 I don’t want to sign your goddamn stupid statement and get out of my lab,
01:58:16 right? Get out of my lab. It all begins from the middle finger.
01:58:19 Get out of my lab. The administrators need to find other
01:58:24 work.
01:58:25 Yeah. Listen, I agree with you and I hope to seek your advice
01:58:30 and wisdom as we change this, because I’d love to see…
01:58:35 I will visit you in prison if that’s what you’re asking.
01:58:38 I have no… I think prison is great.
01:58:41 You get a lot of reading done and good working out.
01:58:45 Well, let me ask something I brought up before is the Nietzsche quote
01:58:52 of beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
01:58:56 For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
01:59:01 Are you worried that your focus on the flaws in the system
01:59:05 that we’ve just been talking about has damaged your mind
01:59:09 or the part of your mind that’s able to see the beauty in the world
01:59:13 in the system that because you have so sharply been able to see
01:59:20 the flaws in the system, you can no longer step back and appreciate its beauty?
01:59:25 Look, I’m the one who’s trying to get the institutions to save themselves
01:59:31 by getting rid of their inhabitants, but leaving the institution
01:59:34 like a neutron bomb that removes the unworkable leadership class,
01:59:40 but leaves the structures.
01:59:42 So the leadership class is really the problem.
01:59:45 The leadership class is the problem.
01:59:46 But the individual, like the professors, the individual scholars…
01:59:48 No, the professors are going to have to go back into training
01:59:52 to remember how to be professors.
01:59:54 Like people are cowards at the moment because if they’re not cowards,
01:59:58 they’re unemployed.
02:00:00 Yeah, that’s one of the disappointing things I’ve encountered is to me, tenure…
02:00:06 But nobody has tenure now.
02:00:10 Whether they do or not, they certainly don’t have the kind of character
02:00:19 and fortitude that I was hoping to see.
02:00:22 But they’d be gone.
02:00:25 See, you’re dreaming about the people who used to live at MIT.
02:00:33 You’re dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university.
02:00:37 And if you looked at somebody like, you know, Isidore Singer is very old.
02:00:42 I don’t know what state he’s in, but that guy was absolutely the real deal.
02:00:46 And if you look at Noam Chomsky, tell me that Noam Chomsky has been muzzled.
02:00:51 Right?
02:00:52 Yeah.
02:00:53 Now, what I’m trying to get at is you’re talking about younger energetic people,
02:00:58 but those people…
02:00:59 Like when I say something like, I’m against…
02:01:02 I’m for inclusion and I’m for diversity, but I’m against diversity and inclusion TM,
02:01:09 like the movement.
02:01:12 Well, I couldn’t say that if I was a professor.
02:01:16 Oh my God, he’s against our sacred document.
02:01:18 Okay.
02:01:19 Well, in that kind of a world, do you want to know how many things I don’t agree with you on?
02:01:24 Like we could go on for days and days and days, all the nonsense that you’ve parroted inside of the institution.
02:01:30 Any sane person like has no need for it.
02:01:33 They have no want or desire.
02:01:37 Do you think you have to have some patience for nonsense when many people work together in a system?
02:01:44 How long has string theory gone on for?
02:01:45 And how long have I been patient?
02:01:48 Okay.
02:01:48 So you’re talking about…
02:01:49 There’s a limit to patience.
02:01:50 You’re talking about like 36 years of modern nonsense and string theory.
02:01:54 So you can do like eight to 10 years, but not more.
02:01:57 I can do 40 minutes.
02:02:01 This is 36 years.
02:02:02 Well, you’ve done that over two hours already.
02:02:03 No, but I appreciate it.
02:02:05 But it’s been 36 years of nonsense since the anomaly cancellation in string theory.
02:02:11 It’s like, what are you talking about about patience?
02:02:13 I mean, Lex, you’re not even acting like yourself.
02:02:18 You’re trying to stay in the system.
02:02:20 I’m not trying…
02:02:22 I’m trying to see if perhaps… So my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it,
02:02:29 which you highlight, and the fundamentals of the system are broken.
02:02:35 Because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken, then I just don’t see a way for MIT to succeed.
02:02:42 Like, I don’t see how young people take over MIT.
02:02:47 I don’t see how…
02:02:49 By inspiring us.
02:02:52 You know, the great part about being at MIT, like when you saw the genius in these pranks,
02:02:59 the heart, the irreverence, it’s like, don’t…
02:03:03 We were talking about Tom Lehrer the last time.
02:03:05 Tom Lehrer was as naughty as the day is long.
02:03:08 Agreed?
02:03:09 Agreed.
02:03:10 Was he also a genius?
02:03:11 Was he well spoken?
02:03:12 Was he highly cultured?
02:03:14 He was so talented, so intellectual that he could just make fart jokes morning,
02:03:19 noon and night.
02:03:20 Okay.
02:03:21 Well, in part, the right to make fart jokes, the right to, for example, put a functioning
02:03:26 phone booth that was ringing on top of the great dome at MIT has to do with we are such
02:03:31 bad asses that we can actually do this stuff.
02:03:34 Well, don’t tell me about it anymore.
02:03:36 Go break the law.
02:03:38 Go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not want to prosecute you.
02:03:43 Break the law in a way that lets us know that you’re calling us out on our bullshit, that
02:03:48 you’re filled with love, and that our technical talent has not gone to sleep, it’s not incapable.
02:03:56 And if the idea is that you’re going to dig a moat around the university and fill it with
02:04:00 tiger sharks, that’s awesome because I don’t know how you’re going to do it.
02:04:06 But if you actually manage to do that, I’m not going to prosecute you under a reckless
02:04:10 endangerment.
02:04:13 That’s beautifully put.
02:04:15 I hope those, first of all, they’ll listen, I hope young people at MIT will take over
02:04:19 in this kind of way.
02:04:22 In the introduction to your podcast episode on Jeffrey Epstein, you give to me a really
02:04:29 moving story, but unfortunately for me, too brief, about your experience with a therapist
02:04:37 and a lasting terror that permeated your mind.
02:04:40 Can you go there, can you tell?
02:04:45 I don’t think so.
02:04:46 I mean, I appreciate what you’re saying.
02:04:47 I said it obliquely, I said enough.
02:04:51 There are bad people who cross our paths and the current vogue is to say, oh, I’m a survivor,
02:05:00 I’m a victim, I can do anything I want.
02:05:05 This is a broken person and I don’t know why I was sent to a broken person as a kid.
02:05:11 And to be honest with you, I also felt like in that story, I say that I was able to say
02:05:15 no and this was like the entire weight of authority and he was misusing his position
02:05:23 and I was also able to say no.
02:05:28 What I couldn’t say no to was having him re inflicted in my life.
02:05:32 Right, so you were sent back a second time.
02:05:36 I tried to complain about what had happened and I tried to do it in a way that did not
02:05:42 immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself because we don’t
02:05:48 have the tools to deal with sexual misbehavior.
02:05:55 We have nuclear weapons, we don’t have any way of saying this is probably not a good
02:06:01 place or a role for you at this moment as an authority figure and something needs to
02:06:07 be worked on.
02:06:08 So in general, when we see somebody who is misbehaving in that way, our immediate instinct
02:06:15 is to treat the person as Satan and we understand why.
02:06:23 We don’t want our children to be at risk.
02:06:28 Now I personally believe that I fell down on the job and did not call out the Jeffrey
02:06:33 Epstein thing early enough because I was terrified of what Jeffrey Epstein represents and this
02:06:38 recapitulated the old terror trying to tell the world this therapist is out of control.
02:06:45 And when I said that, the world responded by saying, well, you have two appointments
02:06:50 booked and you have to go for the second one.
02:06:52 So I got re inflicted into this office on this person who was now convinced that I was
02:06:57 about to tear down his career and his reputation and might have been on the verge of suicide
02:07:01 for all I know.
02:07:02 I don’t know.
02:07:03 But he was very, very angry and he was furious with me that I had breached a sacred confidence
02:07:08 of his office.
02:07:11 What kind of ripple effects does that have?
02:07:13 Has that had to the rest of your life?
02:07:16 The absurdity and the cruelty of that?
02:07:19 I mean, there’s no sense to it.
02:07:22 Well, see, this is the thing people don’t really grasp, I think there’s an academic
02:07:30 who I got to know many years ago, um, named Jennifer fried, who has a theory of betrayal,
02:07:39 which she calls institutional betrayal.
02:07:41 And her gambit is, is that when you were betrayed by an institution that is sort of like a fiduciary
02:07:47 or a parental obligation to take care of you, that you find yourself in a far different
02:07:54 situation with respect to trauma than if you were betrayed by somebody who’s a peer.
02:08:02 And so I think that my, in my situation, um, I kind of repeat a particular dynamic with
02:08:12 authority.
02:08:13 I come in not following all the rules, trying to do some things, not trying to do others,
02:08:20 blah, blah, blah.
02:08:21 And then I get into a weird relationship with authority.
02:08:25 And so I have more experience with what I would call institutional betrayal.
02:08:29 Now, the funny part about it is that when you don’t have masks or PPE in a influenza
02:08:38 like pandemic and you missing ICU beds and ventilators, that is ubiquitous institutional
02:08:45 betrayal.
02:08:46 So I believe that in a weird way, I was very early, the idea of, and this is like the really
02:08:53 hard concept pervasive or otherwise universal institutional betrayal where all of the institutions
02:09:01 you can count on any hospital to not charge you properly for what their services are.
02:09:06 You can count on no pharmaceutical company to produce the drug that will be maximally
02:09:11 beneficial to the people who take it.
02:09:14 You know that your financial professionals are not simply working in your best interest.
02:09:19 And that issue had to do with the way in which growth left our system.
02:09:25 So I think that the weird thing is, is that this first institutional betrayal by a therapist
02:09:30 left me very open to the idea of, okay, well maybe the schools are bad.
02:09:34 Maybe the hospitals are bad.
02:09:35 Maybe the drug companies are bad.
02:09:37 Maybe our food is off.
02:09:39 Maybe our journalists are not serving journalistic ends.
02:09:42 And that was what allowed me to sort of go all the distance and say, huh, I wonder if
02:09:47 our problem is that something is causing all of our sensemaking institutions to be off.
02:09:54 That was the big insight and that tying that to a single ideology.
02:09:59 What if it’s just about growth?
02:10:00 They were all built on growth and now we’ve promoted people who are capable of keeping
02:10:05 quiet that their institutions aren’t working.
02:10:08 So we’ve, the privileged silent aristocracy, the people who can be counted upon, not to
02:10:15 mention a fire when a raging fire is tearing through a building.
02:10:20 But nevertheless, it’s how big of a psychological burden is that?
02:10:25 It’s huge.
02:10:26 It’s terrible.
02:10:27 It’s crushing.
02:10:28 It’s very, it’s very comforting to be the parental, I mean, I don’t know.
02:10:34 I treasure, I mean, we were just talking about MIT.
02:10:38 We can, until I can intellectualize and agree with everything you’re saying, but there’s
02:10:42 a comfort, a warm blanket of being within the institution and up until Aaron Schwartz,
02:10:49 let’s say, in other words, now, if I look at the provost and the president as mommy
02:10:54 and daddy, you did what to my big brother?
02:11:00 You did what to our family?
02:11:03 You sold us out in which way?
02:11:06 What secrets left for China?
02:11:09 You hired which workforce?
02:11:10 You did what to my wages?
02:11:13 You took this portion of my grant for what purpose?
02:11:15 You just stole my retirement through a fringe rate.
02:11:18 What did you do?
02:11:19 But can you still, I mean, the thing is about this view you have is it often turns out to
02:11:26 be sadly correct.
02:11:27 Well, this is the thing.
02:11:29 But let me just, in this silly, hopeful thing, do you still have hope in institutions?
02:11:37 Can you within your, psychologically, I’m referring not intellectually, because you
02:11:42 have to carry this burden, can you still have a hope within you?
02:11:47 When you sit at home alone and as opposed to seeing the darkness within these institutions,
02:11:53 seeing a hope.
02:11:54 Well, but this is the thing.
02:11:55 I want to confront, not for the purpose of a dust up.
02:12:02 I believe, for example, if you’ve heard episode 19, that the best outcome is for Carol Greider
02:12:09 to come forward, as we discussed in episode 19, and say, you know what, I screwed up.
02:12:17 He did call.
02:12:18 He did suggest the experiment.
02:12:20 I didn’t understand that it was his theory that was producing it.
02:12:24 I was slow to grasp it.
02:12:27 But my bad.
02:12:30 And I don’t want to pay for this bad choice on my part, let’s say.
02:12:38 For the rest of my career, I want to own up, and I want to help make sure that we do what’s
02:12:44 right with what’s left.
02:12:45 And that’s one little case within the institution that you would like to see made.
02:12:48 I would like to see MIT very clearly come out and say, Margot O’Toole was right when
02:12:54 she said David Baltimore’s lab here produced some stuff that was not reproducible with
02:13:02 Teresa Imanishi Kari’s research.
02:13:05 I want to see the courageous people.
02:13:08 I would like to see the Aaron Schwartz wing of the computer science department.
02:13:14 Yeah, wouldn’t, no, let’s think about it.
02:13:17 Wouldn’t that be great if we said, you know, an injustice was done and we’re going to write
02:13:22 that wrong just as if this was Alan Turing?
02:13:26 Which I don’t think they’ve righted that wrong.
02:13:28 Well then let’s have the Turing Schwartz wing.
02:13:33 They’re starting a new college of computing.
02:13:34 It wouldn’t be wonderful to call it the Turing Schwartz wing.
02:13:37 I would like to have the Madame Wu wing of the physics department.
02:13:41 And I’d love to have the Emmy Nerder statue in front of the math department.
02:13:45 I mean, like you want to get excited about actual diversity and inclusion?
02:13:48 Yeah.
02:13:49 Well, let’s go with our absolute best people who never got theirs because there is structural
02:13:53 bigotry, you know?
02:13:56 But if we don’t actually start celebrating the beautiful stuff that we’re capable of
02:14:00 when we’re handed heroes and we fumble them into the trash, what the hell?
02:14:05 I mean, Lex, this is such nonsense.
02:14:10 We just pulling our head out.
02:14:16 You know, on everyone’s cecum should be tattooed, if you can read this, you’re too close.
02:14:25 Beautifully put and I’m a dreamer just like you.
02:14:30 So I don’t see as much of the darkness genetically or due to my life experience, but I do share
02:14:38 the hope.
02:14:39 From my teeth, the institution that we care a lot about.
02:14:42 You both do.
02:14:43 Yeah.
02:14:44 And a Harvard institution I don’t give a damn about, but you do.
02:14:48 So I love Harvard.
02:14:49 I’m just kidding.
02:14:50 I love Harvard, but Harvard and I have a very difficult relationship.
02:14:53 And part of what, you know, when you love a family that isn’t working, I don’t want
02:14:58 to trash.
02:14:59 I didn’t bring up the name of the president of MIT during the Aaron Schwartz period.
02:15:05 It’s not vengeance.
02:15:06 I want the rot cleared out.
02:15:09 I don’t need to go after human beings.
02:15:11 Yeah.
02:15:12 Just like you said with the, with the disc formulation, the individual human beings aren’t
02:15:19 don’t necessarily carry them.
02:15:22 It’s those chairs that are so powerful that in which they sit.
02:15:26 It’s the chairs, not the humans, not the humans without naming names.
02:15:34 Can you tell the story of your struggle during your time at Harvard, maybe in a way that
02:15:41 tells the bigger story of the struggle of young bright minds that are trying to come
02:15:47 up with big, bold ideas within the institutions that we’re talking about?
02:15:54 You can start.
02:15:55 I mean, in part, uh, it starts with, uh, coffee with, uh, a couple, uh, of Croatians in the
02:16:06 math department at MIT.
02:16:09 And, um, we used to talk about, um, music and dance and math and physics and love and
02:16:17 all this kind of stuff as Eastern Europeans, uh, love to, and I ate it up and my friend
02:16:24 Gordon, uh, who was, uh, an instructor in the MIT math department when I was a graduate
02:16:30 student at Harvard said to me, I’m probably gonna do a bad version of her accent, but
02:16:36 here we go.
02:16:37 It, um, will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar?
02:16:42 And I said, w what secret seminar, Eric, don’t joke.
02:16:48 I said, I’m not used to this style of humor.
02:16:52 Then she’s Eric, the secret seminar that your advisor is running.
02:16:57 I said, what are you talking about?
02:17:00 Ha ha ha, uh, you know, your advisor is running a secret seminar on this aspect.
02:17:06 I think it was like the churn Simon’s invariant.
02:17:09 I’m not sure what the topic was again, but she gave me the room number and the time and
02:17:14 she was like not cracking a smile.
02:17:16 I’ve never known her to make this kind of a joke.
02:17:18 And I thought this was crazy and I was trying to have an advisor.
02:17:22 I didn’t want an advisor, but people said you have to have one.
02:17:24 So I took one and I went to this room at like 15 minutes early and there was not a soul
02:17:32 inside it.
02:17:33 It was outside of the math department and it was still in the same building, the science
02:17:38 center at Harvard.
02:17:41 And I sat there and I let five minutes go by, I let seven minutes go by, 10 minutes
02:17:45 go by.
02:17:46 There’s nobody.
02:17:47 I thought, okay, so this was all an elaborate joke.
02:17:50 And then like three minutes to the hour, this graduate student walks in and like sees me
02:17:56 and does a double take.
02:17:58 And then I start to see the professors in geometry and topology start to file in and
02:18:05 everybody’s like very disconcerted that I’m in this room.
02:18:11 And finally the person who was supposed to be my advisor walks in to the seminar and
02:18:18 sees me and goes white as a ghost.
02:18:22 And I realized that the secret seminar is true, that the department is conducting a
02:18:30 secret seminar on the exact topic that I’m interested in, not telling me about it.
02:18:36 And that these are the reindeer games that the Rudolph’s of the department are not invited
02:18:41 to.
02:18:42 And so then I realized, okay, I did not understand it.
02:18:45 There’s a parallel department.
02:18:49 And that became the beginning of an incredible odyssey in which I came to understand that
02:19:00 the game that I had been sold about publication, about blind refereeing, about openness and
02:19:12 scientific transmission of information was all a lie.
02:19:18 I came to understand that at the very top, there’s a second system that’s about closed
02:19:24 meetings and private communications and agreements about citation and publication that the rest
02:19:33 of us don’t understand.
02:19:36 And that in large measure, that is the thing that I won’t submit to.
02:19:41 And so when you ask me questions like, well, why wouldn’t you feel good about, you know,
02:19:45 talking to your critics or why wouldn’t you feel the answer is, oh, you don’t know.
02:19:49 Like if you stay in a nice hotel, you don’t realize that there is an entire second structure
02:19:54 inside of that hotel where like there’s usually a worker’s cafe in a resort complex that isn’t
02:20:01 available to the people who are staying in the hotel.
02:20:03 And then there are private hallways inside the same hotel that are parallel structures.
02:20:11 So that’s what I found, which was in essence, just the way you can stay hotels your whole
02:20:16 life and not realize that inside of every hotel is a second structure that you’re not
02:20:20 supposed to see as the guest.
02:20:23 There is a second structure inside of academics that behaves totally differently with respect
02:20:28 to how people get dinged, how people get their grants taken away, how this person comes to
02:20:33 have that thing named after them.
02:20:37 And by pretending that we’re not running a parallel structure, um, I have no patience
02:20:44 for that anymore.
02:20:45 So I got a chance to see how the game, how hard ball is really played at Harvard.
02:20:52 And I’m now eager to play hard ball back with the same people who played hard ball with
02:20:59 me.
02:21:00 Let me ask two questions on this.
02:21:02 So one, do you think it’s possible, so I call those people assholes, that’s the technical
02:21:10 term.
02:21:11 Do you think it’s possible that that’s just not the entire system, but a part of the system?
02:21:18 Sort of that there’s, you can navigate, you can swim in the waters and find the groups
02:21:23 of people who do aspire to the openness.
02:21:26 The guy who rescued my phd was one of the people who filed in to the secret seminar.
02:21:33 Right.
02:21:35 But are there people outside of this, right?
02:21:38 Is he an asshole?
02:21:39 Well, yes, I was, it was a bad, no, but I’m trying to make this point, which is this isn’t
02:21:44 my failure to correctly map these people.
02:21:48 It’s yours.
02:21:49 You, you have a simplification that isn’t going to work.
02:21:53 I think, okay.
02:21:54 If I asked what was the wrong term, I would say lacking of character and what would you
02:21:59 have had these people do?
02:22:02 Why did they do this?
02:22:03 Why have a secret seminar?
02:22:06 I don’t understand the exact dynamics of a secret seminar, but I think the right thing
02:22:09 to do is to, I mean, to see individuals like you, there might be a reason to have a secret
02:22:15 seminar, but they should detect that an individual like you, a brilliant mind who’s thinking
02:22:23 about certain ideas could be damaged by this.
02:22:25 I don’t think that they see it that way.
02:22:27 The idea is we’re going to sneak food to the children we want to survive.
02:22:32 Yeah.
02:22:33 So that that’s highly problematic and there should be people within that room.
02:22:36 I’m trying to say this is the thing, the ball that can’t is thrown, but won’t be caught.
02:22:41 The problem is they know that most of their children won’t survive and they can’t say
02:22:50 that.
02:22:51 I see.
02:22:52 Sorry to interrupt.
02:22:54 You mean that the fact that the whole system is underfunded, that they naturally have to
02:23:00 pick favorites.
02:23:02 They live in a world which reached steady state at some level, let’s say, you know,
02:23:08 in the early seventies and in that world before that time you have a professor like Norman
02:23:16 Steenrod and you’d have 20 children that is graduate students and all of them would go
02:23:20 on to be professors and all of them would want to have 20 children, right?
02:23:25 So you start like taking higher and higher powers of 20 and you see that the system could
02:23:30 not, it’s not just about money, the system couldn’t survive.
02:23:34 So the way it’s supposed to work now is that we should shut down the vast majority of PhD
02:23:41 programs and we should let the small number of truly top places populate, um, mostly teaching
02:23:49 and research departments that aren’t PhD producing.
02:23:53 We don’t want to do that because we use PhD students as a labor force.
02:23:56 So the whole thing has to do with growth, resources, dishonesty, and in that world you
02:24:04 see all of these adaptations to a ruthless world where the key question is where are
02:24:10 we going to bury this huge number of bodies of people who don’t work out?
02:24:14 So my problem was I wasn’t interested in dying.
02:24:18 So you clearly highlight that there’s aspects of the system that are broken, but as an individual,
02:24:26 is your role to, uh, exit the system or just acknowledge that it’s a game and win it?
02:24:32 My role is to survive and thrive in the public eye.
02:24:37 In other words, when you have an escapee of the system, like yourself, such as, and that
02:24:45 person says, you know, I wasn’t exactly finished, let me show you a bunch of stuff.
02:24:50 Let me show you that, uh, the theory of telomeres never got reported properly.
02:24:55 Let me show you that all of, uh, marginal economics, uh, is supposed to be redone with
02:25:00 a different version of the differential calculus.
02:25:03 Let me show you that you didn’t understand the self dual Yang Mills equations correctly
02:25:07 in topology and physics because they’re in fact, uh, much more broadly found and it’s
02:25:15 only the mutations that happen in special dimensions.
02:25:17 There are lots of things to say, but this particular group of people, like if you just
02:25:24 take, where are all the gen X and millennial university presidents?
02:25:30 Right.
02:25:31 Okay.
02:25:32 They’re all, they’re all in a holding pattern.
02:25:36 Now where, why in this story, you know, was it of telomeres?
02:25:42 Was it an older professor and a younger graduate student?
02:25:45 It’s this issue of what would be called interference competition.
02:25:50 So for example, orcas try to drown minke whales by covering their blow holes so that they
02:25:55 suffocate because the needed resource is air.
02:25:58 Okay.
02:25:59 Well, what do the universities do?
02:26:01 They try to make sure that you can’t be viable, that you need them, that you need their grants.
02:26:08 You need to be, uh, zinged with overhead charges or fringe rates or all of the games that the
02:26:15 locals love to play.
02:26:17 Well, my point is, okay, what’s the cost of this?
02:26:20 How many people died as a result of these interference competition games?
02:26:25 You know, when you take somebody like Douglas Prasher who did green fluorescent protein
02:26:30 and he drives a shuttle bus, right?
02:26:32 Cause he, his grant runs out and he has to give away all of his research and all of that
02:26:36 research gets a Nobel prize and he gets to drive a shuttle bus for $35,000 a year.
02:26:40 What do you mean by died?
02:26:41 You mean their career, their dreams, their passions?
02:26:43 Yeah, the whole, as an academic, Doug Prasher was dead for a long period of time.
02:26:49 Okay.
02:26:51 So as a, as a person who’s escaped the system, can’t you at this, cause you also have in
02:26:58 your mind a powerful theory that may turn out to be a useful, maybe not.
02:27:05 So can’t you also play the game enough?
02:27:09 Like with the children, so like publish and, but also if you told me that this would work,
02:27:16 really what I want to do, you see, is I would love to revolutionize a field with an H index
02:27:23 of zero, like we have these proxies that count how many papers you’ve written, how cited
02:27:31 are the papers you’ve written.
02:27:34 All of this is nonsense.
02:27:35 That’s interesting.
02:27:36 Sorry.
02:27:37 What do you mean by field with an H index as your, so a totally new field.
02:27:40 H index is count somehow.
02:27:42 How many papers have you gotten that get so many citations?
02:27:46 Let’s say H index undefined, like for example, um, I don’t have an advisor for my PhD, but
02:27:56 I have to have an advisor as far as something called the math genealogy project that tracks
02:28:01 who advised who, who advised whom down the line.
02:28:07 So I am my own advisor, which sets up a loop, right?
02:28:10 How many students do I have?
02:28:11 An infinite number.
02:28:12 Um, your descendants, they don’t want to have that story.
02:28:16 So I have to be, I have to have formal advisor, Raul bought, and my Wikipedia entry, for example,
02:28:21 says that I was advised by Raul bought, which is not true.
02:28:25 So you get fit into a system that says, well, we have to know what your H index is.
02:28:31 We have to know, um, you know, where are you a professor?
02:28:34 If you want to apply for a grant, it makes all of these assumptions.
02:28:38 What I’m trying to do is in part to show all of this is nonsense.
02:28:41 This is proxy BS that came up in the institutional setting.
02:28:45 And right now it’s important for those of us who are still vital, like Elon, it would
02:28:50 be great to have Elon as a professor of physics and engineering.
02:28:53 Yeah.
02:28:54 Right.
02:28:55 It seems ridiculous to say, but just as a shot, just as a shot in the arm.
02:29:00 Yeah.
02:29:01 You know, like it’d be great to have Elon at Caltech even one day a week, one day a
02:29:07 month.
02:29:08 Okay.
02:29:09 Well, why can’t we be in there?
02:29:10 It’s the same reason.
02:29:11 Well, why can’t you be on the view?
02:29:13 Why can’t you be on bill Martin?
02:29:14 We need to know what you’re going to do before we take you on the show on the show.
02:29:18 Well, I don’t want to tell you what I’m going to do.
02:29:20 Do you think you need to be able to dance the dance a little bit?
02:29:24 I can dance the dance fun to be on the view.
02:29:26 Oh, come on.
02:29:27 So you can, yeah, you do.
02:29:28 You’re not, I can do that.
02:29:30 Fine.
02:29:31 Here’s where the place that it goes south is there like a set of questions that get
02:29:37 you into this more adversarial stuff.
02:29:39 And you’ve in fact asked some of those more adversarial questions, the setting, and they’re
02:29:44 not things that are necessarily aggressive, but they’re things that are making assumptions.
02:29:49 Right.
02:29:50 Right.
02:29:51 So when you make a, I have a question is like, you know, Lex, are you avoiding your critics?
02:29:57 You know, it’s just like, okay, well why did you?
02:29:58 You frame that that way.
02:29:59 Or the next question would be like, um, do you think that you should have a special exemption
02:30:04 and that you should have the right to break rules and everyone else should have to follow
02:30:07 them?
02:30:08 Like that question I find innervating.
02:30:09 Yeah.
02:30:10 It doesn’t really come out of anything meaningful.
02:30:12 It’s just like we feel we’re supposed to ask that of the other person to show that we’re
02:30:16 not captured by their madness.
02:30:18 That’s not the real question you want to ask me.
02:30:20 If you want to get really excited about this, you want to ask, do you think this thing is
02:30:24 right?
02:30:25 Yeah.
02:30:26 Weirdly I do.
02:30:27 Do you think that it’s going to be immediately seen to be right?
02:30:30 I don’t.
02:30:31 I think it’s going to, it’s going to have an interesting fight and it’s going to have
02:30:34 an interesting evolution and well, what do you hope to do with it in nonphysical terms?
02:30:39 Gosh, I hope it revolutionizes our relationship of well with people outside of the institutional
02:30:47 framework and it re inflicts us into the institutional framework where we can do the most good to
02:30:52 bring the institutions back to health.
02:30:55 You know, it’s like these are positive, uplifting questions and if you had Frank will check,
02:31:00 you wouldn’t say, Frank, let’s be honest, you have done very little with your life after
02:31:05 the original, a huge show that you used to break onto the physics scene.
02:31:10 Like we weirdly ask people different questions based upon how they sit down.
02:31:14 Yeah.
02:31:15 That’s very strange, right?
02:31:16 But you have to understand that.
02:31:20 So here’s the thing.
02:31:21 I get these days, a large number of emails from people with the equivalent of a theory
02:31:27 of everything for AGI and I use my own radar, BS radar to detect unfairly, perhaps whether
02:31:39 they’re full of shit or not, because I love where you’re going with this, by the way.
02:31:48 My concern I often think about is there’s elements of brilliance in what people write
02:31:54 to me and I’m trying to right now, as you made it clear, the kind of judgments and assumptions
02:32:01 we make, how am I supposed to deal with you who are not an outsider of the system and
02:32:08 think about what you’re doing because my radar is saying you’re not full of shit.
02:32:15 But I’m also not completely outside of the system.
02:32:18 That’s right.
02:32:19 You’ve danced beautifully.
02:32:20 You’ve actually got all the credibility that you’re supposed to get, all the nice little
02:32:26 stamps of approval, not all, but a large enough amount.
02:32:33 I mean, it’s hard to put into words exactly why you sound, whether your theory turns out
02:32:41 to be good or not, you sound like a special human being.
02:32:46 I appreciate that and thank you in a good way.
02:32:50 So but what am I supposed to do with that flood of emails from AGI?
02:32:54 Why do I sound different?
02:32:56 I don’t know.
02:32:58 And I would like to systemize that.
02:32:59 I don’t know.
02:33:01 Look, you know, when you’re talking to people, you very quickly can surmise, like, am I claiming
02:33:09 to be a physicist?
02:33:10 No, I say it every turn.
02:33:11 I’m not a physicist, right?
02:33:14 When I say to you, when you say something about bundles, you say, well, can you explain
02:33:17 it differently?
02:33:18 You know, I’m pushing around on this area, that lever over there.
02:33:25 I’m trying to find something that we can play with and engage.
02:33:30 And you know, another thing is that I’ll say something at scale.
02:33:34 So if I was saying completely wrong things about bundles on the Joe Rogan program, you
02:33:38 don’t think that we wouldn’t hear a crushing chorus.
02:33:41 Yes.
02:33:42 Absolutely.
02:33:43 And you know, same thing with geometric unity.
02:33:45 So I put up this video from this Oxford lecture.
02:33:50 I understand that it’s not a standard lecture, but you haven’t heard, you know, the most
02:33:56 brilliant people in the field say, well, this is obviously nonsense.
02:34:00 They don’t know what to make of it.
02:34:01 And they’re going to hide behind, well, he hasn’t said enough details.
02:34:06 Where’s the paper?
02:34:07 Where’s the paper?
02:34:08 I’ve seen the criticism.
02:34:10 I’ve gotten the same kind of criticism.
02:34:11 I’ve published a few things and like, especially stuff related to Tesla that we did studies
02:34:19 on Tesla vehicles and the kind of criticism I’ve gotten, which showed that they’re completely.
02:34:24 Oh, right.
02:34:25 Like the guy who had Elon Musk on his program twice is going to give us an accurate assessment.
02:34:29 Next.
02:34:30 Exactly.
02:34:31 Exactly.
02:34:32 Exactly.
02:34:33 It’s just very low level.
02:34:34 Like without actually ever addressing the content.
02:34:40 You know, Lex, I think that in part you’re trying to solve a puzzle that isn’t really
02:34:44 your puzzle.
02:34:45 I think, you know, that I’m sincere.
02:34:47 You don’t know whether the theory is going to work or not.
02:34:50 And you know that it’s not coming out of somebody who’s coming out of left field, like the story
02:34:55 makes sense.
02:34:56 There’s enough that’s new and creative and different in other aspects where you can check
02:35:01 me that your real concern is, are you really telling me that when you start breaking the
02:35:08 rules, you see the system for what it is and it’s become really vicious and aggressive.
02:35:13 And the answer is yes, and I had to break the rules in part because of learning issues
02:35:18 because I came into this field, you know, with a totally different set of attributes.
02:35:23 My profile just doesn’t look like anybody else’s remotely, but as a result, what that
02:35:28 did is it showed me what is the system true to its own ideals or does it just follow these
02:35:34 weird procedures and then when it, when you take it off the rails, it behaves terribly.
02:35:39 And that’s really what my story I think does is it just says, well, he completely takes
02:35:45 the system into new territory where it’s not expecting to have to deal with somebody with
02:35:49 these confusing sets of attributes.
02:35:52 And I think what he’s telling us is he believes it behaves terribly.
02:35:56 Now, if you take somebody with perfect standardized tests and you know, a winner of math competitions
02:36:04 and you put them in a PhD program, they’re probably going to be okay.
02:36:09 I’m not saying that the system, um, you know, breaks down for any everybody under all circumstances.
02:36:17 I’m saying when you present the system with a novel situation at the moment, it will almost
02:36:23 certainly break down with probability approaching 100%.
02:36:29 But to me, the painful and the tragic thing is it, uh, sorry to bring out my motherly
02:36:35 instinct, but it feels like it’s too much.
02:36:39 It could be too much of a burden to exist outside the system, maybe, but psychologically,
02:36:44 first of all, I’ve got a podcast that I kind of like and I’ve got amazing friends.
02:36:51 I have a life which has more interesting people passing through it than I know what to do
02:36:55 with.
02:36:56 Yeah.
02:36:57 And they haven’t managed to kill me off yet.
02:36:58 So, so far, so good.
02:37:02 Speaking of which you host an amazing podcast that we’ve mentioned several times, but should
02:37:06 mention over and over the portal, uh, where you somehow manage every single conversation
02:37:13 is a surprise.
02:37:15 You go, I mean, not just the guests, but just the places you take them, uh, the, the kind
02:37:22 of ways they become challenging and how you recover from that.
02:37:25 I mean, it’s, uh, there’s just, it’s full of genuine human moments.
02:37:30 So I really appreciate what you’re, it’s a fun, fun podcast to listen to.
02:37:35 Uh, let me ask some silly questions about it.
02:37:38 What have you learned about conversation about human to human conversation?
02:37:43 Well, I have a problem that I haven’t solved on the portal, which is that in general, when
02:37:50 I ask people questions, they usually find their deeply grooved answers and I’m not so
02:37:56 interested in all of the deeply grooved answers.
02:37:59 And so there’s a complaint, which I’m very sympathetic to actually that I talk over people
02:38:03 that I won’t sit still for the answer.
02:38:05 And I think that that’s weirdly sort of correct.
02:38:09 It’s not that I’m not interested in hearing other voices.
02:38:12 That I’m not interested in hearing the same voice on my program that I could have gotten
02:38:16 on somebody else’s.
02:38:17 And I haven’t solved that well.
02:38:19 So I’ve learned that I need a new conversational technique where I can keep somebody from finding
02:38:25 their comfortable place and yet not be the voice talking over that person.
02:38:29 Yeah.
02:38:30 It’s funny.
02:38:31 I can sense like your conversation with Brett, I can sense you detect that the line he’s
02:38:36 going down, you know how it’s going to end and you think it’s a useless line, so you’ll
02:38:43 just stop it right there and you take them into the direction that you think it should
02:38:47 go.
02:38:48 But that requires interruption.
02:38:49 Well, and it does so far.
02:38:51 I haven’t found a better way.
02:38:52 I’m looking for a better way.
02:38:54 It’s not like I don’t hear the problem.
02:38:57 I do hear the problem.
02:38:59 I haven’t solved the problem.
02:39:01 And you know, on the, on the bread episode, um, I was insufferable.
02:39:06 It was very difficult to listen to.
02:39:08 It was so overbearing.
02:39:10 But on the other hand, I was right.
02:39:12 You know, it’s like funny.
02:39:14 You keep saying that, but I didn’t find it maybe because I heard brothers, like I heard
02:39:19 a big brother.
02:39:20 Yeah.
02:39:21 It was pretty bad.
02:39:22 Really?
02:39:23 I think so.
02:39:24 I didn’t think it was bad.
02:39:25 Well, a lot of people found it interesting.
02:39:26 And I think it also has to do with the fact that this has become a frequent experience.
02:39:31 I have several shows where somebody who I very much admire and think of as courageous,
02:39:35 um, you know, I’m talking with them, maybe we’re friends and they sit down on the show
02:39:41 and they immediately become this fake person.
02:39:44 Like two seconds in there, they’re sort of saying, well, I don’t want to be too critical
02:39:49 or too harsh.
02:39:50 I don’t want to name any names.
02:39:51 I wanted this story.
02:39:52 He was like, okay, I’m going to put my listeners through three hours of you being sweetness
02:39:57 and light.
02:39:58 Like at least give me some reality and then we can decide to shelve the show and never
02:40:04 let it hear, uh, you know, the, the, the call of freedom in the, in the bigger world.
02:40:10 But I’ve seen you break out of that a few times.
02:40:12 I’ve seen you to be successful that, uh, I forgot to guess, but she was dressed with,
02:40:18 um, um, you were at the end of the episode, you had an argument about Brett.
02:40:24 I forgot.
02:40:25 Agnes Callard.
02:40:26 Yeah.
02:40:27 She was one of the philosophers for at the university of Chicago.
02:40:30 Yeah.
02:40:31 You’ve continuously broken out of her.
02:40:33 Uh, you guys went, you know, uh, I didn’t even seem pretty genuine.
02:40:38 I like her.
02:40:39 I’m completely ethically opposed to what she’s ethically for.
02:40:42 Well, she was great.
02:40:44 And she wasn’t like that.
02:40:46 You’re both going hard.
02:40:47 She’s a grownup.
02:40:48 Yeah.
02:40:49 And she knows that I care about her.
02:40:50 So that was awesome.
02:40:51 Yeah.
02:40:52 But you’re saying that some people are difficult to break out.
02:40:55 Well, it’s just that, you know, she was bringing the courage of her convictions.
02:40:59 She was sort of defending the system and I thought, wow, that’s a pretty indefensible
02:41:05 system that you’re doing.
02:41:06 That’s great though.
02:41:07 She’s doing that.
02:41:08 Isn’t it?
02:41:09 I mean, it made for an awesome, it’s very informative for the world.
02:41:13 Yes.
02:41:14 You just hated.
02:41:15 I just can’t stand the idea that somebody says, well, we don’t care who gets paid or
02:41:19 who gets the credit as long as we get the goodies.
02:41:21 Cause that seems like insane.
02:41:24 Have you ever been afraid leading into a conversation?
02:41:30 Gary Kasparov.
02:41:31 By the way, I mean, I know I’m just a fan taking requests, but I started, I started
02:41:39 the beginning in Russian and in fact I used one word incorrectly.
02:41:43 Is that terrible?
02:41:44 You know, it was, it was pretty good.
02:41:46 It’s pretty good Russian.
02:41:47 What was terrible is I think he complimented you.
02:41:49 Right?
02:41:50 No.
02:41:51 Did he compliment you or was that me?
02:41:52 Did he compliment you on your Russian?
02:41:54 Well, he said almost perfect Russian.
02:41:57 Yeah.
02:41:58 Like he was full of shit.
02:42:00 That was not great Russian, but that was not great Russian.
02:42:03 That was great.
02:42:04 That was hard.
02:42:05 That was, you tried hard, which is what matters.
02:42:07 That is so insulting.
02:42:08 I hope so.
02:42:10 But I do hope you continue.
02:42:12 It felt like, I don’t know how long it went.
02:42:13 It might’ve been like a two hour conversation, but it felt, I hope it continues.
02:42:18 Like I feel like you have many conversations with Gary.
02:42:21 Yeah.
02:42:22 I would love to hear.
02:42:23 There’s certain conversations I would just love to hear a long, much longer.
02:42:27 He’s coming from a very, it’s this issue about needing to overpower people in a very dangerous
02:42:33 world.
02:42:34 And so Gary has that need.
02:42:36 Yeah.
02:42:37 He wasn’t, he was interrupting you.
02:42:38 Sure.
02:42:39 It was an interesting dynamic.
02:42:40 It was a, it was an interesting dynamic.
02:42:43 Two Weinsteins going at you.
02:42:44 I mean, two powerhouse egos, brilliant.
02:42:47 No, don’t say egos, minds, spirits.
02:42:51 You don’t have an ego.
02:42:52 You’re the most humble person I know.
02:42:54 Is that true?
02:42:55 No, that’s a complete lie.
02:42:58 Do you think about your own mortality, death?
02:43:01 Sure.
02:43:02 Are you afraid?
02:43:03 Well, I released a theory during something that can kill older people.
02:43:07 Sure.
02:43:08 Oh, is there a little bit of a parallel there?
02:43:12 Of course.
02:43:13 Of course.
02:43:14 I don’t want it to die with me.
02:43:16 What do you hope your legacy is?
02:43:20 Oh, I hope my legacy is accurate.
02:43:28 I’d like to write on my accomplishments rather than how my community decided to ding me while
02:43:33 I was alive.
02:43:34 That would be great.
02:43:35 What about if it was significantly exaggerated?
02:43:38 I don’t want it.
02:43:39 You want it to be accurate.
02:43:42 I’ve got some pretty terrific stuff and whether it works out or doesn’t that I would like
02:43:48 it to reflect what I actually was.
02:43:52 I’ll settle for accurate.
02:43:56 What would you say, what is the greatest element of a Eric Weinstein accomplishment in life
02:44:04 in terms of being accurate?
02:44:09 What are you most proud of?
02:44:14 The idea that we were stalled out in the hardest field at the most difficult juncture and that
02:44:27 I didn’t listen to that voice ever that said, stop, you’re hurting yourself.
02:44:36 You’re hurting your family.
02:44:37 You’re hurting everybody.
02:44:38 You’re embarrassing yourself.
02:44:39 You’re screwing up.
02:44:40 You can’t do this.
02:44:41 You’re a failure.
02:44:42 You’re a fraud.
02:44:43 Turn back, save yourself.
02:44:46 That voice, I didn’t ultimately listen to it and it was going for 35, 37 years.
02:44:58 Very hard.
02:45:02 And I hope you never listen to that voice.
02:45:05 That’s why you’re an inspiration.
02:45:07 Thank you.
02:45:08 I appreciate that.
02:45:09 I’m just infinitely honored that you would spend time with me.
02:45:15 You’ve been a mentor to me, almost a friend.
02:45:21 I can’t imagine a better person to talk to in this world.
02:45:23 So thank you so much for talking to me.
02:45:24 I can’t wait till we do it again.
02:45:26 Lex, thanks for sticking with me and thanks for being the most singular guy in the podcasting
02:45:32 space.
02:45:33 In terms of all of my interviews, I would say that the last one I did with you, many
02:45:38 people feel was my best and it was a nonconventional one.
02:45:43 So whatever it is that you’re bringing to the game, I think everyone’s noticing and
02:45:46 keep at it.
02:45:48 Thank you.
02:45:49 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein.
02:45:52 And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
02:45:55 Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast.
02:46:00 If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
02:46:06 subscribe on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
02:46:11 And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Eric Weinstein’s first appearance
02:46:16 on this podcast.
02:46:19 Everything is great about war, except all the destruction.
02:46:24 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.