Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein,
00:00:02 the third time we’ve spoken on this podcast.
00:00:05 He is the wise turtle master Oogway to my Kung Fu Panda,
00:00:10 one of my favorite people to talk to in this world.
00:00:13 A complicated and fascinating mind
00:00:15 that I’m grateful to have the chance to accompany
00:00:17 in exploring this world through conversation
00:00:20 on this podcast and on his, the latter called The Portal.
00:00:26 Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts
00:00:29 related to the episode.
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00:01:05 Please check out these sponsors in the description
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00:01:11 As a side note, let me say that wherever this life takes me,
00:01:15 I’m drawn to the possibility of having many more
00:01:17 conversations with Eric through the years.
00:01:21 I think we have just the right kind of contrast
00:01:24 in having worldviews and a deep respect and appreciation
00:01:29 of each other’s life stories that creates for
00:01:32 this magical experience in the realm of conversation
00:01:36 that feels like we’re always looking for something
00:01:41 that we never quite find,
00:01:43 but are always better for having tried.
00:01:46 I’m not sure how or why the universe has connected
00:01:50 Eric and me, but it did.
00:01:52 And I would be a fool not to trust its judgment
00:01:56 and enjoy the journey.
00:01:58 If somehow you like this podcast,
00:02:01 please subscribe on YouTube,
00:02:03 review it with five stars on Apple podcast,
00:02:05 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
00:02:08 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
00:02:11 And now here’s my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
00:02:16 Who’s the greatest musician of all time, would you say?
00:02:19 We were just off camera talking about Eddie Van Halen.
00:02:21 He unfortunately passed away.
00:02:24 Who’s the greatest musician of all time?
00:02:26 Yeah.
00:02:27 Jonathan Richman.
00:02:28 Who’s that?
00:02:30 It’s a weird question.
00:02:31 So I’m gonna give you a weird answer.
00:02:32 It’s not because of…
00:02:33 Thank you.
00:02:34 Okay, Jonathan Richman.
00:02:35 The reason I’m picking on him is that he had a quote.
00:02:37 He was the front man of a group called the Modern Lovers.
00:02:41 And his quote was something like,
00:02:43 “‘We have to be prepared to play music
00:02:46 “‘when our instruments are broken,
00:02:48 “’the electricity’s out and it’s raining,’
00:02:50 “‘something like that.”
00:02:52 And I thought that that quote was very interesting
00:02:53 because what it said was,
00:02:55 you have to be able to strip this thing down
00:02:57 farther and farther back
00:02:58 to get to something that is intrinsically musical.
00:03:01 So we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity.
00:03:05 We’re talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing.
00:03:07 And that affected me emotionally.
00:03:09 I don’t know whether it affected you.
00:03:10 I was never a Van Halen, the group fan,
00:03:13 but I revered Eddie Van Halen’s capacity for innovation.
00:03:18 I saw him like Rodney Mullen, the skateboarder.
00:03:23 I had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast
00:03:26 just to talk about what it’s like
00:03:27 to totally discontinuously innovate.
00:03:30 And he posted a video of Spanish Fly, I think,
00:03:33 and saying like,
00:03:34 I didn’t know the guitar could make those kinds of sounds.
00:03:36 Like, what is this voodoo magic?
00:03:37 What is it?
00:03:38 Well, this is the thing, right?
00:03:39 The arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast
00:03:43 and the attacks from the hammer ons,
00:03:46 when they go at light speed as he did, particularly.
00:03:51 And the reason I chose that was,
00:03:52 is that I wanted to strip out the electronics
00:03:55 because part of the claim will be is
00:03:56 that he’s a rock musician.
00:03:57 And a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar
00:04:01 to sort of the electrified setup.
00:04:03 His use of the whammy bar, for example,
00:04:05 or the Frankenstrat that he built from different pieces.
00:04:11 All of those aspects, in my opinion,
00:04:15 are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship.
00:04:19 And that’s why I chose Spanish Fly,
00:04:21 because everyone, of course,
00:04:22 will go to something like your eruption
00:04:24 or running with the devil,
00:04:25 which is the first things that they heard
00:04:27 that let them know that there was a new force erupting
00:04:30 out of Southern California that was Eddie Van Halen, right?
00:04:32 I mean, I’m in love with the story of it.
00:04:36 You’re often so poetic about music.
00:04:40 Like it clearly touches your soul on many levels.
00:04:43 What is that?
00:04:45 Is it deeper than just rocking out
00:04:47 with the in your convertible Corvette 69?
00:04:52 I imagine Eric Weinstein is driving down
00:04:54 the California highways, blasting some kind of music.
00:04:58 Is it just like being able to be carefree
00:05:01 for moments of time?
00:05:03 Or is there something more fundamental
00:05:05 that connects to like the theory of everything
00:05:08 in physics and life and all of that?
00:05:11 How often do you have the chance, for example,
00:05:13 to hear mathematics performed as you do in Bach, right?
00:05:17 Like something with that kind of precision
00:05:19 and elegance that can’t really be grasped,
00:05:22 where to go back to Leonard Cohen’s famous line,
00:05:28 the baffled king composing, right?
00:05:31 Such a good song.
00:05:32 Such a good song, but it’s also like individual verses
00:05:35 of that song are insanely important.
00:05:39 The baffled king is how we often make music.
00:05:43 We don’t really understand what did we just do
00:05:46 that broke that person’s heart sitting on the couch, right?
00:05:50 And so it’s a very strange thing
00:05:52 that you should be able to have.
00:05:54 Think of it like you’re a computer.
00:05:55 You’ve got this weird open music port, port 37.8, you know?
00:06:00 Like it’s not even supposed to be there.
00:06:03 And suddenly somebody starts playing guitar
00:06:05 and they’re making you feel things.
00:06:07 Or like in particular, particular instruments
00:06:10 like the violin, it’s so difficult.
00:06:14 It’s so unforgiving.
00:06:15 And when it gives up its secrets,
00:06:16 it just, you know, it wraps its fingers
00:06:19 around your heart and won’t let go.
00:06:22 Sometimes I talk about head, heart, and loins.
00:06:24 When something can grab your head, heart, and your loins
00:06:27 at the same moment and integrate them,
00:06:32 there are very few opportunities to live like that.
00:06:34 And if you think about Eddie Van Halen,
00:06:36 as far as your head, the musical innovations
00:06:42 and the fact that he was drawing directly
00:06:43 from the classical canon really speaks to the idea
00:06:48 that maybe rock is what somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it
00:06:53 as being, you know, an infinitely extensible medium.
00:06:56 In terms of heart, I always notice the smile on his face.
00:07:01 It’s painful to look at an Eddie Van Halen solo now.
00:07:05 Like sometimes you’ll see the cigarette dripping off
00:07:07 the side of his mouth and you’re like,
00:07:09 that’s gonna fucking kill you.
00:07:10 And I’m not even worried about it for you.
00:07:12 I’m worried about it for me.
00:07:13 You’re gonna rob.
00:07:14 I don’t even need to hear you play another note.
00:07:16 I just like knowing that you’re in the world,
00:07:19 that there is somebody that everyone looks to that nobody,
00:07:22 I’ve never heard a guitarist say, eh, I don’t know.
00:07:25 I think he was okay.
00:07:26 Like I’ve never heard it.
00:07:28 You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius.
00:07:31 There are very few people like that in the world.
00:07:34 And then loins, those leaps,
00:07:37 that guy was incredibly good looking
00:07:39 and, you know, skin tight pants, super athleticism.
00:07:43 He completely owned the male sexuality of the stage,
00:07:47 both being the completely dominant,
00:07:50 you know, sort of mythical alpha male.
00:07:52 I hate that expression, but there you are.
00:07:54 But also this kind of little boy with this mischievous smirk
00:07:58 and, you know, the sense that it all came together.
00:08:02 How could you not eat that up?
00:08:04 You could just imagine the millions
00:08:05 of like young teenage boys, gorgeous,
00:08:07 like playing air guitar in their room,
00:08:11 just that, yeah, basically dreaming
00:08:13 of being that kind of God,
00:08:17 the most perfect example of what a human being can be.
00:08:20 Yeah, it’s fascinating to think.
00:08:22 It is, and then, you know,
00:08:24 as in many of the cases with these bands,
00:08:27 you get these multiple talents in the same outfit.
00:08:30 And I think that the original configuration
00:08:33 with David Lee Roth, I mean,
00:08:34 David Lee Roth is such a hot mess at all times.
00:08:38 I would love you to talk to David Lee Roth.
00:08:41 Like if the, that dance would be just gorgeous.
00:08:46 I don’t know.
00:08:47 Can you handle it?
00:08:48 Can you ride that?
00:08:49 Probably not.
00:08:50 Yeah.
00:08:51 Probably not because I think he’s very,
00:08:54 I get the feeling that he’s very smart
00:08:57 and very dysregulated.
00:09:00 And I don’t know that I could,
00:09:02 like bring him down to earth for a moment.
00:09:04 Well, I can also get pretty dysregulated, you know?
00:09:07 And so I don’t know whether, it could be magic.
00:09:10 It could be a shit show.
00:09:11 I don’t know what you thought of his appearance on Rogan.
00:09:14 That was an interesting one.
00:09:15 I loved it, but Joe and that,
00:09:17 and Joe does this sometimes,
00:09:19 sometimes he just sits back and listens
00:09:21 and he just lets like the music play,
00:09:24 which works really well.
00:09:26 I think you have a chance to kind of jump into the chaos
00:09:31 and then you’ll just start.
00:09:32 And the places you will go,
00:09:34 you may not even talk about music for like hours.
00:09:37 It might just go to this,
00:09:38 cause he, I think lives in Japan.
00:09:40 Like there’s a weird,
00:09:41 he’s been an EMT after he was a rock star.
00:09:45 He chose to be kind of like,
00:09:47 I don’t know.
00:09:48 You know, it’s like there’s depth to that man
00:09:50 that hasn’t been explored by him either.
00:09:53 So that’ll be an exciting conversation.
00:09:56 Can we go back to Larry Cohen?
00:09:58 Yeah.
00:09:58 Can we just,
00:09:59 the things I feel when I listen to Hallelujah
00:10:03 by Leonard Cohen or anything by him really,
00:10:05 but that one.
00:10:07 Do you really want to get into it?
00:10:08 Let’s go.
00:10:09 What is it that song mean to you?
00:10:14 Is it love?
00:10:15 Oh boy.
00:10:17 Well, first of all, it’s mystery.
00:10:19 Like it starts off about mystery.
00:10:22 So what are you doing?
00:10:24 You’re doing this alternation between the two chords.
00:10:28 So three notes at the same time.
00:10:30 One is called the tonic,
00:10:33 or you have the major and the relative minor
00:10:36 and he’s alternating between them.
00:10:38 There’s only one note of difference
00:10:39 between those two chords.
00:10:41 One of them would be feeling sad.
00:10:42 One of them would be more joyous, typically described.
00:10:46 And so by altering one note,
00:10:48 it’s the minimal amount to take you back and forth
00:10:50 between joy and happiness as that’s encoded in us.
00:10:54 So he starts off with,
00:10:55 I heard there was a scene,
00:10:57 David played the please a little bit.
00:10:58 You don’t really care for music, do you?
00:11:02 That’s really interesting
00:11:03 because he’s using this technique called Bethos, right?
00:11:06 So the alternation between the sublime
00:11:10 and kind of the guttural or ridiculous or the mundane, right?
00:11:13 So he’s like.
00:11:15 There’s a bitterness to it too.
00:11:16 Is it just play?
00:11:18 Well, the way I hear it, again,
00:11:19 a great song allows for different interpretations.
00:11:21 You happen to be asking me,
00:11:23 so I’m going to impart some stuff
00:11:24 that probably isn’t in the song,
00:11:25 but why it speaks to me,
00:11:26 that’s what makes it great.
00:11:28 The way I hear it is he doesn’t believe the audience.
00:11:31 You don’t really care for music, do you?
00:11:32 Then what are you doing listening to this?
00:11:34 You stupid idiots, of course you care for music.
00:11:37 You’re too cool to care.
00:11:39 So I see through you and screw you.
00:11:41 That’s the energy I get.
00:11:45 Then he does this weird thing.
00:11:46 It goes like this is where he should put the description
00:11:50 of where he is in the chord progression,
00:11:51 which is the tonic, right?
00:11:53 It goes like this.
00:11:54 And then he hits the fourth and the fifth,
00:11:56 which are the two other major elements,
00:11:58 the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony.
00:12:02 So he’s describing the chord progression
00:12:04 in real time in the lyrics.
00:12:07 There’s two ways this can come about in other songs.
00:12:10 We had this example of every time we say goodbye.
00:12:14 Do you know this song?
00:12:15 Every time we say goodbye.
00:12:17 No, I think it was a Cole Porter, maybe,
00:12:20 or Gershwin, maybe Porter, I don’t know.
00:12:22 I cry a little, there is no love song finer,
00:12:27 but how strange the change from major to minor, right?
00:12:32 Like it’s a beautiful use of it.
00:12:34 Then there’s times when it’s duplicitous.
00:12:37 So for example, you’ll have,
00:12:41 I guess my favorite examples of this
00:12:42 are Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire.
00:12:45 I fell into a burning ring of fire.
00:12:48 And then what does he do with the lyrics in the tune?
00:12:53 I went down, down, down.
00:12:55 He goes up, right?
00:12:56 And so the idea is like, oh, okay, that was a head fake.
00:13:00 And another one of these is Nina Simone’s Feeling Good.
00:13:05 Oh, okay, so what do you get?
00:13:07 Birds flying high, you know how I feel.
00:13:12 Then sun up in the sky, you know how I feel.
00:13:18 That woman’s voice, she doesn’t give a damn yet.
00:13:22 She’s just.
00:13:22 And I feel it, but then what’s the, da dum, da dum.
00:13:26 It’s like heavy stripping music.
00:13:28 It’s, you’re not in a good place.
00:13:30 You’re probably in some strip club,
00:13:33 with the last of your money,
00:13:34 you’re drinking lousy beer, some bad situation.
00:13:39 And she’s feeling good?
00:13:40 No, it’s funereal.
00:13:41 It’s oppressive, right?
00:13:43 I never thought of that song that way.
00:13:45 Wow.
00:13:46 Well, you think of it as joyous?
00:13:48 Yeah.
00:13:49 No, no, no, if you think about it,
00:13:50 contrast it with Ray Charles, for example.
00:13:53 You know, do you know Lonely Avenue?
00:13:56 Well, my room has got two windows,
00:14:00 but the sunshine never comes through.
00:14:02 It’s really depressed.
00:14:04 It’s the same sort of vibe as Nina,
00:14:07 but she’s claiming that she’s in great shape.
00:14:09 So she’s like a good case of the unreliable narrator.
00:14:13 Leonard Cohen, to me,
00:14:14 is talking about the unreliable audience.
00:14:16 That’s too cool to be with the performer on stage.
00:14:18 There are things that go with the music,
00:14:20 like the Cole Porter stuff,
00:14:21 there’s go against like the Johnny Cash.
00:14:23 I think these are the games that musicians play
00:14:26 that the rest of us only sort of notice subliminally.
00:14:30 Okay.
00:14:31 Fourth, the fifth, then he,
00:14:33 when he, he should say something about the relative minor
00:14:36 or the, he’s giving you the secret,
00:14:38 the baffled king, in other words,
00:14:40 he doesn’t know why it works.
00:14:42 Did Pachelbel know why Pachelbel’s Canon would work?
00:14:45 It was a discovery.
00:14:47 That’s the whole thing.
00:14:48 Like some music is discovered and some music is invented.
00:14:52 And he’s talking about a musical discovery.
00:14:56 He’s talking about the Pythagorean power
00:14:59 of the wave equation and then superimpose,
00:15:01 like there’s two genius intellectual concepts behind music.
00:15:05 One of which is the wave equation.
00:15:07 Usually we solve it for a one dimensional medium
00:15:09 because we’re talking about strings or air columns.
00:15:11 Occasionally you’re talking about things like handpans
00:15:15 or steel drums or metallophones or gamelons, whatever.
00:15:19 And those have a wave equation too,
00:15:21 that’s much more chaotic.
00:15:23 The other equation is this crazy thing
00:15:25 that two to the 19 twelfths is almost exactly equal to three,
00:15:29 which is what gave us even temperament.
00:15:31 And so the tension between those two things
00:15:34 is in fact one of these most beautiful stories
00:15:37 inside of that system.
00:15:40 That formula of the baffled king is a discovery.
00:15:43 It’s not, he’s not really composing it.
00:15:46 The reason he’s baffled,
00:15:47 it’s imagine that you took like a little brush
00:15:50 and you started brushing off a pyramid under the sands.
00:15:55 You might think that you created the pyramid
00:15:57 by your brushing, but in fact, if somebody else did it,
00:16:00 that’s why you’re baffled, right?
00:16:02 That’s beautifully put, you’re right.
00:16:04 And as creating one of the greatest songs of all time
00:16:07 and as he’s doing it, he’s baffled.
00:16:10 And he’s within the song.
00:16:13 And he Leonard is baffled is my contention,
00:16:15 but he knows enough to know that he’s baffled, right?
00:16:19 And so the idea is that he is composing,
00:16:20 he has the audacity to compose as David.
00:16:27 He’s echoing David at a minimum.
00:16:30 And then in a later song,
00:16:31 which I really wish we would discuss,
00:16:32 that’s totally dystopic and you will not like it at all,
00:16:36 is the future, which contains this line
00:16:39 that I think I used in my episode
00:16:41 with Roger Penrose on the portal.
00:16:44 Note the subtle plug.
00:16:45 The portal, the portal, the portal, the portal.
00:16:49 I’m the little Jew that wrote the Bible.
00:16:51 So there is this way in which Leonard Cohen,
00:16:54 I think is constantly coming to the idea
00:16:56 of being a biblical like scribe.
00:16:59 And I think this is one of the great things
00:17:01 that you see Dylan doing this with all along the watchtower.
00:17:04 You saw Warren Zevon, who we should talk much more about,
00:17:07 doing this with a song called I Was in the House
00:17:10 When the House Burned Down.
00:17:11 Do you know this thing?
00:17:12 No.
00:17:13 This is embarrassing.
00:17:14 Sweetheart.
00:17:14 This is a great day.
00:17:16 Warren Zevon is one of the most important songwriters
00:17:19 of our time.
00:17:20 And he’s been largely forgotten by this generation.
00:17:26 But Bob Dylan would sing one of his songs in tribute.
00:17:29 I’ve heard Bob Dylan, you know,
00:17:33 very small number of songwriters really move him.
00:17:35 Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Warren Zevon.
00:17:40 By the way, Bob Dylan, if you’re out there,
00:17:43 appear on either one of our podcasts.
00:17:45 We need to get your voice into a new medium
00:17:47 for a new group.
00:17:48 Definitely.
00:17:49 This is a time for Bob Dylan, my friend.
00:17:52 Honestly, you’ve been doing an amazing job in this space.
00:17:55 One of the reasons I’m super excited to do this podcast
00:17:57 again is that I’ve learned some things
00:18:01 about what I don’t do well.
00:18:03 And I also have sort of struggled with the question,
00:18:07 should I do those things better?
00:18:08 Because what if it’s, you know,
00:18:10 I always use the same example of the fitted sheet
00:18:12 when you’re trying to put a queen size fitted sheet
00:18:14 on a king size mattress.
00:18:15 He’s like, okay, I got that corner squared away.
00:18:17 Then you get another corner that pops off
00:18:19 and they have to go back around.
00:18:21 I wonder whether I can improve my style in the ways in which,
00:18:24 you know, I think it’s just a recognition of a difference.
00:18:28 You do a better job of getting to the soul
00:18:32 of a really top intellectual guest
00:18:35 and making them accessible and presenting them
00:18:38 as themselves for a huge number of people.
00:18:42 And I’d give my eye tooth to be able to do that.
00:18:45 Do you ever think about this?
00:18:46 Like, cause I think about what is the greatest
00:18:50 conversation I’ll ever have.
00:18:52 You know, like in a sense of the portal,
00:18:55 not to reduce it to anything,
00:18:57 but there will be the greatest conversation.
00:19:00 You may have already had it, but it’s very possible.
00:19:03 If enough people like me can keep twisting your arm
00:19:07 to keep doing the portal, please,
00:19:09 that is, there’ll be an amazing conversation.
00:19:12 One of the questions that I ask myself is like,
00:19:16 who is the person that I’m especially equipped?
00:19:20 For some reason, I’m convinced on Putin.
00:19:23 There’s something in my head that says,
00:19:25 I can do this man better than anyone else in this world.
00:19:30 I got this thought in my head about it, I don’t know why.
00:19:32 And I’m convinced, but I think the universe works
00:19:34 in that way.
00:19:35 Like if it tells you, it’s gonna happen.
00:19:38 The way I would say it is, is that almost everybody
00:19:40 who becomes a Supreme Court justice believes
00:19:43 at a very early age, they’re going to become
00:19:45 a Supreme Court justice.
00:19:46 Many people believe at an early age that they can do it,
00:19:48 don’t get there.
00:19:49 But of those who get there, almost all of them
00:19:52 had this sort of, well, I call it pathological
00:19:55 self confidence.
00:19:56 And I do think you have pathological self confidence
00:20:01 and you also have humility.
00:20:02 And most people would hear those as a contradiction.
00:20:05 I think that you would not be able to get away
00:20:07 with what you do if you didn’t have the humility.
00:20:11 And so I think the great danger is that your equation
00:20:15 becomes unbalanced, that you either lose the humility
00:20:18 or you lose the humility overwhelms the ego and the drive.
00:20:24 Because right now you’ve got a Mexican standoff
00:20:26 in your mind and the rest of us are just benefiting.
00:20:28 That’s beautifully put.
00:20:29 My Mexican standoffs aren’t as stable as yours.
00:20:32 It’s all reservoir dogs all the time.
00:20:36 But actually the person who that describes is Peter Thiel.
00:20:39 Peter Thiel thinks more, people always say like,
00:20:42 what does Peter think about X, Y, and Z, P, and Q?
00:20:44 It’s like, well, do you want communist Peter?
00:20:46 Do you want hyper capitalist Peter?
00:20:47 He’s got all these minds in there, oh my God, right?
00:20:50 On everything.
00:20:50 That’s why he’s successful is that he’s got all these minds
00:20:52 fighting each other.
00:20:53 And so when people say Peter is this or Peter is that,
00:20:56 I just laugh because like nobody who knows him
00:20:59 would describe him as having thoughts at the level
00:21:02 that people are claiming.
00:21:04 And I do think that in my case,
00:21:12 there’s also pathological epistemic humility.
00:21:14 Like just, I know how little I can do in one life.
00:21:20 I know how many things I’ve screwed up.
00:21:22 I know how many things I’ve got wrong.
00:21:25 And on the other hand, I know that if not,
00:21:28 it’s like Hillel’s questions,
00:21:30 if I’m not for myself, who will be for me?
00:21:32 And if I’m only for myself, what am I?
00:21:34 If not now, when?
00:21:36 At some level, there’s a question about
00:21:39 if I don’t decide that someone is capable
00:21:43 and that that somebody is me.
00:21:45 And if I apply that to everyone else on the planet,
00:21:49 then nobody’s gonna do anything.
00:21:50 And so I do think that one of the things
00:21:52 that people like you and I get is who are you to say that?
00:21:57 F that, man, just sign me up for some Dunning Kruger.
00:22:03 Yeah, but it’s multiple minds like you said.
00:22:06 Like this morning, I was feeling so good and confident
00:22:09 about I couldn’t think no wrong.
00:22:12 And I remember last night clearly thinking
00:22:14 that I’m the dumbest human who’s ever lived
00:22:16 and nothing I’ve ever said is worth anything.
00:22:19 What the fuck am I doing with my life?
00:22:22 Why am I scared?
00:22:23 I was terrified of this conversation.
00:22:26 Who the hell am I?
00:22:27 This conversation?
00:22:28 Because I’m an idiot.
00:22:29 And because, you know, Lex, but no, no, no, no.
00:22:34 But this morning, I was the baddest motherfucker
00:22:38 who’s ever walked this earth.
00:22:39 So I was very conscious.
00:22:41 I think it was the coffee, I’m not sure, maybe some sleep.
00:22:44 This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages,
00:22:47 some of them being alcoholic, others containing caffeine.
00:22:49 There’s, in fact, I can’t share the story behind it,
00:22:53 but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge.
00:22:56 Okay.
00:22:57 So, I mean, I should have hit you for coffee
00:23:00 because this is a morning show here.
00:23:02 So I put out a call that we get a chance
00:23:05 to have this conversation
00:23:06 and people ask these wonderful questions.
00:23:08 A few people asked about depression and suicide.
00:23:16 This is a Russian program, so we have to go there.
00:23:19 And I think about Leonard Cohen
00:23:20 and one of the things that always kind of broke my heart
00:23:28 and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just,
00:23:33 I don’t know, for love in a person’s life
00:23:36 is to hear how much depression was a part
00:23:39 of Leonard Cohen’s life and how much he suffered.
00:23:44 I guess one way, I’m not sure where we can go
00:23:47 with this question, but do you think about the places
00:23:50 that the mind can go, like these dark places?
00:23:54 Yeah.
00:23:55 Is there something like where the only escape out
00:24:00 is suicide, for example, that’s the darkest version of it?
00:24:02 That, I really think suicide is a big place
00:24:07 in suicidal ideation and self harm
00:24:09 and we don’t talk a lot about it.
00:24:14 It’s a similar problem to trying to talk about trans.
00:24:17 These are umbrella categories.
00:24:19 And if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves,
00:24:23 but we don’t know whether that’s coming
00:24:25 because of a problem in brain chemistry,
00:24:28 because of an event in their life,
00:24:30 whether evolutionary programming for suicide
00:24:34 is weirdly normal, whether or not
00:24:37 it might have a religious motivation.
00:24:40 There’s too many different forms of self harm.
00:24:43 It’s something like the 10th largest killer thereabouts.
00:24:49 And I think that you can look at it from different angles.
00:24:53 I’m old enough to have had Pete Seeger come to my college
00:24:58 when I was at university and to watch his good humor
00:25:04 in the face of all adversity.
00:25:07 I think of Odetta, I used to go to Odetta concerts.
00:25:10 I don’t know if you know who she is.
00:25:13 Okay, this is gonna be one of the better days of your life.
00:25:15 Check out Odetta when we’re done with the interview.
00:25:19 She was a civil rights figure,
00:25:20 but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship.
00:25:25 These people were in the struggle, right?
00:25:29 And they saw lots of bad things happen
00:25:32 and they kept their humor about them.
00:25:34 And the thing is that you can take on the Weltschmerz,
00:25:41 the pain of the planet,
00:25:43 or you can try to do something else,
00:25:46 which is to be a happy warrior,
00:25:48 even if the odds are terrible
00:25:51 and the cost of failure is catastrophic.
00:25:55 So even when surrounded by darkness.
00:25:58 But the thing is with Leonard Cohen
00:26:00 is he created such beautiful music.
00:26:03 And yet it’s like Anthony Bourdain, the same.
00:26:08 And yet they go to this dark place.
00:26:11 And it could be, it’s easy to say it’s just biochemistry.
00:26:16 There’s a linkage between this highly generative,
00:26:19 creative side and in some cases,
00:26:23 dark depression, in other cases, not.
00:26:26 So you can’t say that it’s tied,
00:26:29 the genius and madness are always co traveling
00:26:32 or the beauty and pain are one in the same.
00:26:35 What you can say is that there’s a cluster of people
00:26:38 that tell you that for that cluster,
00:26:40 there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty.
00:26:43 And I do think that in part,
00:26:45 it’s squaring circles that can’t be squared.
00:26:47 We were just talking before about the inability
00:26:54 to serve two perfect systems,
00:26:56 the perfect system of the wave equation
00:26:58 and the perfect system of even temperament.
00:27:01 They’re both perfect, they’re not compatible.
00:27:05 And once you realize that there is perfection
00:27:07 and an inability to make contact with perfection,
00:27:11 I think you recognize that there is no solution
00:27:20 to this world.
00:27:23 Yeah, that’s weird with the poets and musicians.
00:27:26 Do you want to say this is a particular thing that you do,
00:27:29 but then there’s Spanish fly by Van Halen.
00:27:33 And then you realize, oh, well,
00:27:34 what do you get out of Spanish fly by Van Halen?
00:27:37 I think it’s very singular because of the fact
00:27:40 that it’s purely acoustic.
00:27:42 For some reason, I always,
00:27:44 I couldn’t imagine Eddie Van Halen separate from the band
00:27:47 in front of thousands of people just screaming
00:27:51 and rocking out with lights everywhere.
00:27:53 And Spanish fly made me think like,
00:27:55 it made me imagine him sitting alone
00:27:57 on a couch in a room.
00:27:58 I think that’s who he was, I really do.
00:28:00 I mean, believe me, I get it.
00:28:03 He was a rockstar, he was a rock god.
00:28:04 Got it, got it, got it, got it.
00:28:07 I’m almost positive that you can’t get
00:28:10 to where he got to without being a complete introvert.
00:28:13 Yeah, it made me imagine
00:28:14 that there’s some half naked supermodel walking around,
00:28:20 hoping that they can do their thing together.
00:28:24 And Eddie’s completely disinterested.
00:28:26 He’d be with the guitar.
00:28:27 He’d be with the guitar, right?
00:28:28 Yeah.
00:28:29 Because honestly, at some level,
00:28:31 in one case, maybe you’re conquesting,
00:28:35 maybe you’re pursuing love and romance.
00:28:37 In the other case, you’re talking about a relationship
00:28:39 to the order, the creator, the almighty,
00:28:42 whatever it is you want to call that substrate
00:28:44 that is reality.
00:28:46 And do I believe that Eddie Van Halen
00:28:51 and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and Heifetz
00:28:53 jacked into the true essence of the world?
00:28:56 Yeah, they did.
00:28:57 I don’t think it’s as good as differential geometry.
00:29:00 I’m sorry.
00:29:01 I do think it’s amazing for other reasons.
00:29:05 And thank God, because it’s very typical
00:29:07 to communicate differential geometry at scale.
00:29:10 But the thing about eruption, for example,
00:29:13 what level do you want to come into eruption?
00:29:15 Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry?
00:29:18 Do you want the theatrics?
00:29:20 Like you could put him on wires
00:29:21 and set his pants on fire or whatever,
00:29:24 and it’d be totally in keeping with it.
00:29:27 On the other hand, you want to talk
00:29:28 to something completely precise
00:29:31 that shows off the virtuosity
00:29:33 of what’s possible with the Stratocaster.
00:29:36 Everything works.
00:29:38 Multi axis.
00:29:39 But there’s a precision to it,
00:29:40 which is very different than Hendrix.
00:29:44 There’s a messiness to Hendrix that to me,
00:29:46 somebody who has OCD has always been a struggle.
00:29:49 How does Hendrix affect you?
00:29:50 I mean, let’s have the Jimi Hendrix conversation.
00:29:52 I don’t know that we can do anything to it
00:29:53 that hasn’t already been done to it.
00:29:56 Maybe that’s not true.
00:29:56 Maybe the idea is that every generation
00:29:58 has to have its Hendrix conversation,
00:30:01 and this is a long form part.
00:30:02 It’s Jimi Hendrix experience.
00:30:03 Yeah.
00:30:04 Yeah, so funny.
00:30:05 I hear you stole it from Joe Rogan.
00:30:07 Yeah.
00:30:10 There’s so many details.
00:30:11 One, it hurt my soul on so many levels
00:30:17 that you can put a thumb over the guitar
00:30:20 to play a note, to hold the note.
00:30:23 And it doesn’t, because I want it to be the Russian virtuoso
00:30:27 that sits with his classical guitar in a perfect form,
00:30:30 plays really fast with the fingers,
00:30:32 and then you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed
00:30:36 and supporting the neck.
00:30:37 So that’s the Russian conservatory student.
00:30:39 Conservatory student, yeah.
00:30:40 Then there’s the Russian wild man.
00:30:43 Which one is that?
00:30:44 Well, they’re different Russian archetypes, right?
00:30:47 So the completely idiosyncratic Russian
00:30:50 is very different in a weird way from the,
00:30:55 I can do this backwards in any key in my sleep
00:30:58 and in any time signature that you just snap your fingers.
00:31:03 We’ve discussed my piano tuner in previous episodes.
00:31:08 No, no, that was offline conversation.
00:31:10 You told me the story.
00:31:11 I should tell you the story.
00:31:13 You should retell the story.
00:31:14 There I was in darkest Manhattan
00:31:16 with the world’s shittiest, it wasn’t even an upright,
00:31:19 it was a spinet piano.
00:31:21 A friend had given it to me.
00:31:23 The piano fell out of tune and I would have to tune it.
00:31:27 And the only tuner I knew was this Russian guy
00:31:29 and I hated dealing with him.
00:31:31 There was something about his attitude
00:31:32 that just really rubbed me the wrong way.
00:31:35 So anyway, my wife says, tune that thing.
00:31:37 So we get the piano tuner to come and he’s tuning this.
00:31:40 He’s like, are you sure you wanna tune this piece of shit?
00:31:44 Okay, fine.
00:31:45 So he’s like, okay, it’s your money.
00:31:48 The phone rings and I have the phone ringer set
00:31:51 on a landline to Paganini Caprice 24.
00:31:55 And immediately as the phone rings,
00:31:58 he figures out what key the phone ringer is
00:32:02 and which is not the key that like list composed
00:32:05 the variations on Caprice 24.
00:32:09 And he starts going into theme and variations
00:32:11 on Caprice 24 at some level I’ve never heard before,
00:32:14 just jaw dropping it.
00:32:17 And like the phone stops ringing
00:32:18 and we have this awkward silence.
00:32:20 I said, I didn’t know you were such a great piano player.
00:32:23 And then he says one of these things
00:32:24 in Russian accented English hurts in a way
00:32:28 you can’t imagine.
00:32:29 He said, no, you are the piano player.
00:32:31 I am merely the piano tuner.
00:32:33 And I was just like, oh man, through the heart.
00:32:38 You know, it’s kind of reminiscent.
00:32:40 I’d love to hear actually your opinion.
00:32:41 This is reminiscent of the Good Will Hunting story.
00:32:44 What do you think about that?
00:32:45 That movie?
00:32:46 That movie.
00:32:47 What about it?
00:32:48 It’s MIT.
00:32:49 Yeah, I guess when I think of that film,
00:32:51 I think about Matt Damon as a young guy,
00:32:56 risking everything, giving up Harvard.
00:33:00 I think probably the most accomplished group
00:33:02 of people in the world are people
00:33:03 who choose to give up Harvard voluntarily.
00:33:07 Beautiful, right?
00:33:08 That’s true.
00:33:09 Bigger than Harvard.
00:33:10 That’s very true.
00:33:10 Ives was one of these people, Bill Gates, of course.
00:33:18 And then oddly, you know.
00:33:19 Zuckerberg.
00:33:20 What?
00:33:21 But then Steve Jobs gave up a Reed,
00:33:24 and Reed is like the weirdest, craziest college
00:33:26 in the world.
00:33:27 People should pay much more attention to Reed.
00:33:29 And I’m sorry it’s going through a hard time at the moment,
00:33:31 but what it was before the current craziness
00:33:33 is really an interesting story.
00:33:36 Irregardless, as we say in the 617 Area Code,
00:33:40 I think that a lot of my reaction
00:33:43 is to the real story of Matt Damon having this vision
00:33:47 and being the young guy to pull it off.
00:33:49 And I also think about Robin Williams
00:33:52 trying to explore heart through this lens of acting.
00:33:58 And as you and I, you’ve hung out with comedians.
00:34:04 They know that they already screwed up a bunch of people.
00:34:07 They do.
00:34:08 They’re proud about it.
00:34:10 They really are.
00:34:11 The idea that Robin Williams, who I saw many years ago
00:34:14 when I was in LA in the comedy clubs around here,
00:34:17 he was a straight up crazy, dysregulated genius
00:34:21 in tremendous pain.
00:34:25 And his desire to do it earnestly through acting
00:34:28 rather than constantly by just sniping
00:34:32 or being a clown or showing us how fast his mind worked
00:34:37 relative to ours, I was really moved by that.
00:34:42 I thought that he brought some authenticity
00:34:45 and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that real.
00:34:49 And again, like you said, it doesn’t always have to be,
00:34:52 but in that case, the madness and the genius were neighbors.
00:34:56 That one couldn’t have been any other way.
00:34:58 Yeah.
00:34:59 No, because his mind,
00:35:01 the thing about seeing him in a comedy club
00:35:04 was that he would react to random stimulus
00:35:07 in the environment.
00:35:08 You know, it could be a heckler.
00:35:09 Sometimes you almost got the feeling
00:35:10 that he wanted a heckler
00:35:11 because it gave him something to play against, right?
00:35:16 He was infinitely, instantly inventive.
00:35:20 But I actually, to me, the best Robin Williams
00:35:24 is as he got closer and closer to the end of his life
00:35:27 because there was a sadness
00:35:30 and he’s almost fighting the sadness
00:35:33 with this improvisational,
00:35:36 like the weapons he has is this wit and humor
00:35:40 and this dancing that he does with language.
00:35:42 But, and then sometimes when you just fall silent,
00:35:46 you can see the sadness.
00:35:48 And I don’t know, there’s something so beautiful about that.
00:35:51 It’s like this bird with a broken wing
00:35:53 that’s like trying to fly, you know,
00:35:55 and it’s getting older and older.
00:35:56 And I mean, those,
00:36:01 he would have made a one hell of a podcast guest,
00:36:03 I’ll tell you that.
00:36:04 That’s a sad.
00:36:05 Yeah, I have some sadness that I really do think
00:36:07 that part of what we call podcasting
00:36:11 is actually just getting to know a soul
00:36:13 over and over again.
00:36:14 Like maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression
00:36:20 and sadness and heavy feelings
00:36:25 is not an American specialty.
00:36:28 Seeing that in context with the beauty of life
00:36:31 is a Russian specialty.
00:36:33 Like it is very much.
00:36:34 Russian specialty, sounds like a diner menu.
00:36:38 What?
00:36:38 Yeah.
00:36:39 You want the Russian specialty?
00:36:40 A big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression.
00:36:46 I do think that we’re in a really terrifying
00:36:49 and depressing time.
00:36:51 And I think that part of it is that we don’t know
00:36:54 if something huge is about to get started.
00:36:57 And we don’t even know what this is.
00:36:59 I mean, we just sit here in this weird world
00:37:01 that is falling into some new state
00:37:04 and we’re not even super curious.
00:37:06 It’s like, what the hell just happened?
00:37:08 Everybody’s got an answer.
00:37:09 And I’m positive that all of those answers are wrong.
00:37:13 Let’s try to at least sneak up on the good answer.
00:37:17 So the central core of the answer is
00:37:20 that the US seemed to be the greatest thing in the world
00:37:24 in large measure because we hadn’t noticed
00:37:27 that we were getting a benefit from having no plan,
00:37:30 not having to make a plan for low growth.
00:37:33 As long as we had growth, we were in great shape.
00:37:38 Let’s imagine that you could run an experiment,
00:37:42 you have a billion copies of Earth
00:37:44 and you start the initial conditions slightly different.
00:37:48 On some giant number of planets,
00:37:50 a lot of the things that were discovered
00:37:54 from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century
00:37:58 are discovered in a period of time
00:38:01 because a lot of that just has to do with
00:38:03 once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments,
00:38:06 you can see more.
00:38:08 And the more you can see,
00:38:09 the more you can make use of what you can see.
00:38:11 And it turns out there was lots of stuff to do
00:38:13 with like germs or electron orbitals
00:38:19 or spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum.
00:38:22 And so we got to do all of those things
00:38:25 and the US roughly corresponded
00:38:27 for a good chunk of its history with this bonanza.
00:38:30 And so of course we look like an amazing genius country.
00:38:34 We have no plan.
00:38:35 Imagine that you could sell a car,
00:38:37 you don’t have to put in seat belts,
00:38:38 you don’t have to put in airbags,
00:38:40 you don’t have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors
00:38:43 or a rear view mirror.
00:38:44 You could save a lot of money on a car
00:38:46 by not putting in all of the stuff
00:38:48 to keep things from going wrong.
00:38:52 And I think that’s what we had.
00:38:53 We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good,
00:38:57 we plowed it back, the riches and spoils and then treasure
00:39:01 back into the system and made more genius stuff.
00:39:04 And we carried along a good chunk of humanity,
00:39:07 hundreds of millions of people.
00:39:09 We did not have a plan for what happens
00:39:11 when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society.
00:39:16 How confident should we be that the growth has slowed
00:39:19 in a way that is permanent rather than a kind of slap
00:39:24 in the face where we…
00:39:26 It’s not the right concept.
00:39:27 Right concept is, I try to use the same words
00:39:31 over and over again in case people see mold
00:39:33 because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere.
00:39:35 So I use this analogy of the orchard
00:39:38 because everyone talks about low hanging fruit.
00:39:40 They know the concept of low hanging fruit,
00:39:43 but they don’t think in terms of orchards.
00:39:47 So they say things like,
00:39:48 you think we’ve picked all the low hanging fruit,
00:39:50 but I believe in the inventiveness of the human mind.
00:39:53 It’s like, okay, that doesn’t even work as an analogy.
00:39:58 What if the idea is we only picked
00:40:00 all the low hanging fruit here,
00:40:01 and then we’re having this stupid argument
00:40:03 about low hanging fruit,
00:40:04 and we’re not going and looking for new orchards.
00:40:06 We’re not planting new orchards.
00:40:08 We’re not looking for forests.
00:40:09 We’re just sitting here arguing about low hanging fruit.
00:40:11 So my claim is there’s probably a lot more low hanging fruit
00:40:14 and it’s not here.
00:40:15 It’s in other orchards.
00:40:16 It’s in other orchards.
00:40:17 One of those turned out to be the digital orchard.
00:40:20 The digital orchard has not been as stagnant
00:40:24 as lots of these other, like the chemical orchard.
00:40:29 I have faith that there is a small percentage
00:40:33 of the population, but not zero,
00:40:36 that’s looking for those other orchards.
00:40:38 Like I’m excited about one of those orchards,
00:40:40 which is, I believe there’ll be robots in everybody’s homes
00:40:43 and that will unlock some totally new thing.
00:40:48 Totally new set of technologies, ideas,
00:40:51 the way we live life, the productivity,
00:40:54 all the everything, it’ll change everything.
00:40:57 So I’m excited about that orchard.
00:40:59 So I’m roaming that orchard
00:41:01 and wondering how the hell you kind of bring back
00:41:05 like the ant that finds a new source of food.
00:41:08 I’m trying to find an apple I can bring back to the.
00:41:11 Great, so you’re in an explorer idiom.
00:41:16 And do you have faith that there’s enough of those?
00:41:18 I don’t think there are very many of us.
00:41:20 I mean, I’m one of them too.
00:41:22 How many does it take?
00:41:23 It takes one ant.
00:41:25 It takes one ant.
00:41:26 What are you talking about?
00:41:28 How many elons does it take to screw in a light bulb?
00:41:31 Okay, let’s imagine that we went,
00:41:35 imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food, right?
00:41:39 And then it comes back to the colony and it says,
00:41:42 hey, I think I found a new source of food.
00:41:44 And the initial reaction is,
00:41:46 you’re not authorized to find new food.
00:41:49 What?
00:41:51 Why would you try to go find new food?
00:41:52 We’re gonna remove you from Twitter.
00:41:54 Yeah, and by the way,
00:41:55 I think the fact that you think you’re allowed
00:41:56 to go find new food shows how privileged you are as an ant.
00:41:59 Get out of the colony, kill him, kill him.
00:42:01 Well, that’s probably not a great model
00:42:04 for finding new orchards.
00:42:06 And I think that what we find is that
00:42:08 where there’s a system that allows somebody to ascend
00:42:11 without a lot of gatekeeping, you can have that.
00:42:15 But I saw this happen in hedge funds.
00:42:17 Hedge funds for a while hoovered up a lot of talent
00:42:22 because they were places that had funding and had freedom.
00:42:27 And in general, really smart people want to be free
00:42:32 and they don’t wanna think a lot about
00:42:34 how they’re gonna feed themselves.
00:42:37 They wanna get lost in their minds.
00:42:39 So you can either give them productive places to play,
00:42:42 dangerous places to play.
00:42:45 They’re either gonna break into computers
00:42:47 or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies.
00:42:53 And we’re not providing for the people who have to disrupt
00:42:58 and have to innovate and trying to channel that effort.
00:43:01 We’re so focused on this other thing,
00:43:03 which is fairness and safety.
00:43:06 And fairness and safety, by the way, are really important.
00:43:08 I don’t wanna denigrate them.
00:43:10 But the singular focus on fairness and safety
00:43:12 without, in the same breath, being focused on growth
00:43:17 and discovery and creation is gonna doom us
00:43:21 because what we’re talking about is we’re always talking
00:43:23 about divvying up the pie that is
00:43:25 as opposed to the pie that will be.
00:43:28 Imagine that you spent all your time trying to divvy up
00:43:30 the 13th century pie and you destroyed your ability
00:43:34 to get to the 20th century.
00:43:36 You’d be an idiot.
00:43:38 But one place I think I disagree with you
00:43:42 is I don’t think you need that many people
00:43:45 to empower the geniuses, the innovators,
00:43:47 the people who refuse to spend most of their days
00:43:50 in meetings about fairness.
00:43:52 This is good.
00:43:53 Let’s have a disagreement.
00:43:54 I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium,
00:43:57 is just one little example of a tool
00:44:01 that you can give power to,
00:44:03 like you and your podcast can have the next Elon Musk
00:44:09 and make him a star.
00:44:09 Now I see where you’re going.
00:44:11 Okay.
00:44:11 There have been a series of places
00:44:14 for people to play and be free.
00:44:17 And we’ve lost them successively.
00:44:19 What’s a good place you remember?
00:44:21 Because I disagree with you there too.
00:44:23 I think they’re still there.
00:44:24 You can still play.
00:44:25 You interviewed Noam Chomsky.
00:44:28 Yes.
00:44:29 Okay.
00:44:30 Noam Chomsky comes from an era.
00:44:32 Where you can play?
00:44:33 Where you could play?
00:44:34 At MIT.
00:44:35 At MIT.
00:44:36 And you can’t play.
00:44:37 This is where I disagree with you.
00:44:38 We’ve already had this.
00:44:39 But.
00:44:40 Go check the Clips channel for the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:44:43 I think I wasn’t brave enough at that time
00:44:46 and I’m not really brave enough now.
00:44:48 Come on.
00:44:49 Because I don’t.
00:44:50 Where’s the vodka?
00:44:51 It’s a feeling and people are gonna tear me apart.
00:44:54 Oh, what are you?
00:44:55 And you speak from emotion and facts.
00:44:58 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
00:44:59 The feeling.
00:45:00 What podcast is this?
00:45:01 It’s yours.
00:45:01 Yes.
00:45:02 Tell the people who are currently editing your brain,
00:45:05 because I saw that move right now.
00:45:07 Yeah.
00:45:08 That they should go find another podcast.
00:45:10 Right?
00:45:11 Let’s get rid of some of your audience right now.
00:45:14 Please go find another podcast
00:45:16 if you’re editing my brain.
00:45:17 Nevertheless, all the self doubt,
00:45:19 they’re sitting in that brain.
00:45:20 So.
00:45:21 I can’t stand to watch this.
00:45:22 But all right.
00:45:23 What is this self doubt loop that you’re in?
00:45:25 The thing is,
00:45:27 when I walk the halls of MIT.
00:45:30 Yeah.
00:45:32 There’s bureaucracy, there’s administrators
00:45:34 that never have done anything interesting
00:45:36 in their entire lives.
00:45:37 There’s meetings, there’s.
00:45:39 All the usual crap.
00:45:40 All the usual crap.
00:45:41 But there’s, in the eyes of individuals.
00:45:45 Yeah.
00:45:46 There’s this glow of excitement
00:45:48 that has nothing to do with career.
00:45:49 I understand this.
00:45:51 And it’s still a playground.
00:45:52 There’s little pockets of playgrounds
00:45:55 from which genius can emerge still.
00:45:58 And they’re unaffected by diversity meetings
00:46:01 or fairness meetings or blah, blah, blah.
00:46:04 I love to hear that.
00:46:05 Yeah?
00:46:06 Well, you don’t think so?
00:46:07 I don’t believe it.
00:46:08 Cause I’ve watched the change, Lex.
00:46:10 I’ve watched people.
00:46:11 We were all editing ourselves all the time.
00:46:13 I remember my old mind.
00:46:14 I liked it better.
00:46:17 All of this relentless focus on critical race theory
00:46:21 and critical theory, postmodernism, fairness,
00:46:25 social justice.
00:46:26 It’s making many of us into worse people.
00:46:29 You think that’s that?
00:46:30 Do you think the Matt Damon’s of the character
00:46:34 is paying attention to any of that?
00:46:35 You think that has an effect?
00:46:36 Have you seen what happened to Matt Damon himself?
00:46:39 Matt Damon has tried to say various things at various times
00:46:41 that seemed to be relatively innocuous.
00:46:44 He can’t speak.
00:46:45 Okay.
00:46:46 Well, let’s not mix up.
00:46:48 Matt Damon is just an actor.
00:46:49 Well, I don’t know.
00:46:50 He was just a Harvard student
00:46:52 who came up with his own genius screenplay,
00:46:55 acted and made it happen.
00:46:56 No.
00:46:57 No, we’re somewhere else.
00:46:59 You don’t think you can build a rocket company
00:47:01 out of MIT still?
00:47:03 I think that there are things that you can still do.
00:47:06 But we’re losing them.
00:47:07 We lose them.
00:47:08 We keep losing them.
00:47:10 I would say the biggest problem,
00:47:13 here, let me just say,
00:47:14 what I think the solution would be
00:47:16 is to fire anybody who’s not faculty,
00:47:22 especially young faculty should have way more power
00:47:25 and administration should have much less power.
00:47:27 Because right now, the administration,
00:47:31 which used some of the, who used to be faculty,
00:47:33 but they’ve lost the fire, the spark that gave them,
00:47:37 they’ve lost the memories of the playground.
00:47:39 And so the people that admire and love the playground,
00:47:43 like you could see it in their behavior,
00:47:44 should have way more power.
00:47:46 And so we should create a systems that give them power.
00:47:49 I think I’ll take it.
00:47:50 You’re very idealistic.
00:47:51 Yeah.
00:47:52 And you’re very, you’ve got a huge heart.
00:47:55 It’s a weird time.
00:47:56 Cause I don’t want to dissuade you
00:47:58 from believing beautiful things.
00:48:02 Because I see how potent you are.
00:48:04 You do all these things,
00:48:05 Jiu Jitsu, guitar, podcasting, programming, computers,
00:48:11 et cetera, et cetera.
00:48:13 I don’t think you’re right.
00:48:14 I think we’re in a really deeply screwed up place
00:48:17 where even the tiny number of,
00:48:19 let me give you an alternate version of this dystopia.
00:48:23 I do think that there are people who are capable
00:48:25 and there’s still places to play
00:48:27 and cause things to happen that progress the story forward.
00:48:30 But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in
00:48:33 who fit that profile,
00:48:35 like how much crap has Elon Musk taken?
00:48:39 Quite considerable, right?
00:48:42 And not much admiration from the…
00:48:46 Craig Venter, Jim Watson.
00:48:51 These are very difficult people.
00:48:53 Steve Jobs is a very difficult guy, you know?
00:48:58 Yeah, it is a bit heartbreaking to me.
00:49:01 I mean, everybody is different generations.
00:49:03 I just, my mind is a little focused on Elon Musk
00:49:05 because he’s the modern person.
00:49:08 Well, you know him.
00:49:09 I mean, he’s a person to you.
00:49:11 It hurts my heart to see how few faculty
00:49:16 and people with Nobel prizes and so on admire Elon.
00:49:21 He gets a lot of fans from people that buy his products
00:49:28 and young minds just excited.
00:49:31 But why don’t we as an institution,
00:49:33 why doesn’t MIT say that somebody amongst us
00:49:39 will be the next Elon Musk and we want to encourage them?
00:49:43 Like say that, say that in meetings, say that.
00:49:46 Like that’s success for us as MIT.
00:49:51 And they, instead there’s this jealousy.
00:49:54 It’s like, did you hear what Elon Musk tweeted?
00:49:56 Did you see, like how irresponsible is what he’s doing?
00:50:00 How, like you’re just saying all these things
00:50:04 that are just dripping with jealousy and basically…
00:50:09 I want what he’s got.
00:50:10 That’s the thing, right?
00:50:13 Here’s the weird thing.
00:50:14 Rivalry has a different signature.
00:50:17 You see, when you know that you’re never going to make it,
00:50:22 that’s the position you take.
00:50:26 What is it in Kung Fu Panda, which you’ve watched now?
00:50:29 Yes. Yes.
00:50:31 What does Tai Lung say when he’s looking
00:50:35 for the dragon warrior and the furious five
00:50:37 come to defeat him on the bridge?
00:50:40 One of them gives up Poe’s name accidentally
00:50:44 and Tai Lung hears it.
00:50:46 Poe, so that is his name.
00:50:48 Finally, a worthy opponent.
00:50:50 Our battle will be legendary, right?
00:50:53 He’s excited.
00:50:54 Why is that?
00:50:56 Well, you learn about this in boxing.
00:50:58 Sometimes you’ll see a division or an MMA,
00:51:01 which is lousy with talent.
00:51:03 Just, you can’t swing a cat
00:51:05 without hitting an amazing athlete.
00:51:09 Sometimes you’ll have a division,
00:51:10 which at that particular moment has one star
00:51:12 and no real competition in that weight class or something.
00:51:16 That person is in bad shape
00:51:18 because you can’t build a legend without the other.
00:51:24 When you think of Muhammad Ali,
00:51:26 what are the names that you immediately think of?
00:51:28 And you have to phrase your,
00:51:31 you have to think of the other heavyweights.
00:51:33 Liston.
00:51:34 Right.
00:51:35 So those opponents are in part what made Muhammad Ali
00:51:40 Muhammad Ali.
00:51:42 And that’s why the Mayweather McGregor revelation that,
00:51:49 okay, this guy has got his opponent’s picture in his house.
00:51:53 How weird is that?
00:51:55 Well, because without the opponent,
00:51:56 you may not be able to get there.
00:51:58 Now, I am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries.
00:52:05 Do you have examples in mind?
00:52:06 Well, there are rivalries
00:52:08 where people take each other’s credit cards
00:52:10 and take each other’s credit and screw each other over.
00:52:12 And then there are other rivalries like the RNA Thai Club
00:52:17 where these guys were so in love with what they were doing
00:52:20 that they couldn’t wait to share everything.
00:52:22 And like Nobel prizes were so abundant
00:52:25 that most people got Nobel prizes
00:52:28 just for being a member of the RNA Thai Club
00:52:30 and doing cool stuff.
00:52:31 And yeah, that’s the golden kind of sweet spot.
00:52:36 Most of these people can’t do what Elon’s doing
00:52:38 because they can’t break rules,
00:52:40 they can’t take the pressure.
00:52:41 I’ll tell you what really concerns me
00:52:43 about your perspective.
00:52:45 I think that there are a lot of genius ideas
00:52:48 inside of people who don’t have the stomach
00:52:50 for conflict and derision.
00:52:53 And I think a lot of those people are female.
00:52:57 And I think that until we come up with a world
00:52:59 in which we can swat down the trolls,
00:53:02 or we can actually cause the trolls not to ruin everything.
00:53:07 And I don’t necessarily mean by shutting them up,
00:53:09 I don’t necessarily mean by being brutal to them,
00:53:13 but somehow separating off people who are working
00:53:15 and people who are trolling.
00:53:18 I think that we’re losing a huge amount of human genius
00:53:21 in part because women in particular
00:53:26 are not necessarily going to push an idea
00:53:29 if it results in 10 years of being derided.
00:53:34 Very few men are willing to do that either.
00:53:37 But there are some of us who are so dumb
00:53:39 that we will pigheadedly stick to an idea for 10 years
00:53:43 even if the world collapses.
00:53:44 I don’t think that there are as many women
00:53:47 who are going to make that calculation
00:53:49 even if they know the idea is correct.
00:53:51 And one of the things that I believe technology
00:53:53 can help us fight the trolls,
00:53:55 of all definitions of troll,
00:53:57 like I believe that a better Twitter can be built.
00:54:00 Interesting, I do not.
00:54:02 I don’t believe that a Twitter successor can be built
00:54:05 that solves most of the problems.
00:54:07 I think you can always improve what we have,
00:54:10 but I don’t think that converges in something
00:54:12 that really works because I think ultimately
00:54:14 the problem isn’t Twitter, the problem is us.
00:54:17 For example, I’ve recently made
00:54:19 a very disturbing realization,
00:54:23 which is academics and social scientists
00:54:26 and academics and trolls have very many similar behaviors.
00:54:30 Absolutely.
00:54:31 It’s largely a trolling community.
00:54:34 I tend to believe that the trolls are not,
00:54:38 it’s like the Peter Thiel mini mind idea,
00:54:42 which in all of the trolls,
00:54:45 there’s the possibility of goodness.
00:54:47 And all you have to do, not all you have to do,
00:54:50 what you have to do is create technology
00:54:52 that incentivizes them to embrace,
00:54:58 to discover, to embrace,
00:55:00 to practice the better angels of their nature.
00:55:04 And I believe that people actually want to do that.
00:55:10 The trolls is a short term dopamine rush
00:55:15 of childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome.
00:55:20 I believe that like deep within, we want to overcome that.
00:55:23 I try to keep myself from believing what you believe.
00:55:29 Because you’d be disappointed if it’s not true.
00:55:30 Because it’s dangerous,
00:55:31 because a lot of these people are implacable foes
00:55:34 and there aren’t many of them,
00:55:35 but when you meet somebody who’s like,
00:55:37 yeah, I just like screwing people up.
00:55:39 I’m here for the pain.
00:55:42 I just believe even in them, there’s a good.
00:55:44 There’s a wonderful book that I’m gonna recommend to you
00:55:47 where I hope this comes from.
00:55:49 Maybe I’ve got the source wrong,
00:55:50 but in any event, it’s a great book
00:55:52 called Maximum City about Bombay.
00:55:56 And I believe the conceit is that the author
00:56:01 leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult
00:56:04 and he realizes he has to rediscover the city
00:56:06 because he can’t live in the city he left.
00:56:09 So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas
00:56:12 of the city and one of them is the underworld.
00:56:15 He hangs out with the police,
00:56:16 but in the underworld, he’s talking to contract killers.
00:56:19 And he says, you know, it’s really weird.
00:56:22 Everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them.
00:56:26 And they always say this thing about,
00:56:28 I’ve got two kids at home.
00:56:32 He says, never say that to a contract killer
00:56:34 because we have terrible relationships with our parents.
00:56:37 Doesn’t it dare us to do that?
00:56:40 And I was just thinking like, oh, wow.
00:56:41 So there’s a minus sign in front of that statement.
00:56:44 You’re sitting there saying, you know,
00:56:45 I’ve got a three year old, it’s like,
00:56:46 okay, well, I’m gonna take this POS out of that kid’s life.
00:56:51 Maybe I’ll have a chance.
00:56:53 You don’t know how people are wired.
00:56:56 And as much as I hate to say it,
00:56:58 there are people whose wiring is so disturbing
00:57:01 and so different from yours
00:57:03 that you will never guess why you can’t reach them
00:57:07 or how much pleasure they may have gotten
00:57:09 because they may have gone over a point of no return.
00:57:11 Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy
00:57:15 who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis.
00:57:19 You do not know this for sure.
00:57:20 Nope.
00:57:21 And I am, you know, whatever the hell I am
00:57:27 that has a different hypothesis
00:57:29 that even in the darkest human beings
00:57:32 that seem to be only full of evil,
00:57:36 there’s a good person there that could be discovered.
00:57:39 And that’s one of the reasons I love doing your show
00:57:42 is that you have these beliefs, even as a Russian.
00:57:48 The Russian special.
00:57:49 As you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness
00:57:52 which is a total cynicism and total idealism
00:57:55 locked together, right?
00:57:56 That’s very much a part of the Russian character.
00:58:00 The reason I kept bothering you,
00:58:02 kept bothering you to have this conversation
00:58:04 is I’m really worried about the next couple of months.
00:58:09 No kidding.
00:58:10 And if there’s anybody in this world
00:58:13 that could help alleviate my worry
00:58:18 by at least walking along with me
00:58:22 through this worry of mine, it’s you.
00:58:25 Do you think we’re headed towards some kind of civil war?
00:58:30 Some kind of division that explodes
00:58:32 beyond just stuff on Twitter,
00:58:34 but something that’s really destructive
00:58:39 to the fabric of our society?
00:58:41 Well, I believe we’re in a revolution, as you know.
00:58:45 I’ve called it the no name revolution
00:58:46 or N squared revolution.
00:58:48 I’ve been talking about it for years.
00:58:51 I don’t think, I think waiting for this
00:58:54 to be called a civil war is not smart.
00:58:58 Only history will call it such.
00:59:00 Fine.
00:59:00 But I think that the problem is
00:59:01 is that you’re encountering things
00:59:03 that you’ve never seen trying to fit them
00:59:05 into things that you already know.
00:59:06 Right.
00:59:07 And.
00:59:08 But history repeats itself.
00:59:10 Yes, ish.
00:59:13 You don’t see lessons from history in.
00:59:15 I do.
00:59:16 We see today.
00:59:17 But I don’t see it repeating itself.
00:59:18 You know, the famous quote is that it rhymes.
00:59:22 It rhymes.
00:59:23 I mean, the thing I guess I’m speaking to is violence.
00:59:27 And.
00:59:28 We’re in there.
00:59:29 The abstraction of violence.
00:59:31 Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class.
00:59:36 Okay.
00:59:38 Thank you for speaking to the audience.
00:59:40 Trying to lose these people.
00:59:42 Come with me.
00:59:44 Go on.
00:59:45 No, no, no.
00:59:46 Look, I’ve dealt with your audience
00:59:48 and your audience contains the smartest people around.
00:59:51 I guarantee you if I say some stuff,
00:59:54 first of all, any wrong thing that I’ll say,
00:59:55 they’re gonna detail.
00:59:56 So that’ll be a little bit of catnip
00:59:58 to bring in the smart people.
01:00:00 But they’ll also digest it for each other.
01:00:02 It’s one of the great lessons of long form podcasting.
01:00:04 If you don’t waste all your time explaining things,
01:00:07 that’s the job of the audience to do amongst themselves.
01:00:11 They’re happy doing the work.
01:00:12 And those who aren’t, they leave.
01:00:14 Isn’t that great?
01:00:15 They’ll leave.
01:00:16 The people who don’t wanna struggle will leave.
01:00:18 You can get rid of them.
01:00:20 I think that the point is you would want to say
01:00:23 violence is defined relative to a context.
01:00:28 So let’s call it meta violence so that we don’t get
01:00:30 into the problem.
01:00:32 We already have a term for physical violence, right?
01:00:34 So we have meta violence and physical violence.
01:00:37 I would say that physical violence
01:00:38 is subclassed from meta violence.
01:00:40 Meta violence is the disruption of a system.
01:00:43 It’s sort of, for example, if a cell dies,
01:00:49 you can die through apoptosis or necrosis.
01:00:52 Apoptosis is controlled programmed cell death.
01:00:55 Necrosis is just like, okay, this didn’t work.
01:00:59 That was a violent disruption of the system.
01:01:02 And this meta class is presumed in the documentation.
01:01:05 Is it all negative?
01:01:07 No, what are you talking about?
01:01:10 So this is part of the problem
01:01:12 in the madness of our age, right?
01:01:14 Which is if you open up a drawer in your cabinet,
01:01:20 right, in your kitchen,
01:01:23 and you see knives, spoons, and forks,
01:01:25 do you have a sense that the spoons are good utensils
01:01:28 and the knives or forks are bad utensils
01:01:30 because they’re mean?
01:01:32 I mean, like if you start thinking in these terms,
01:01:36 that knife is there to do violence.
01:01:39 That’s violence you want done, right?
01:01:43 When I cut a mango, I’m doing violence to the mango.
01:01:46 The mango expects that I will do violence to it
01:01:48 because otherwise I won’t be able to get the meat
01:01:51 and it won’t get its seed spread somewhere else.
01:01:56 So in part, violence is absolutely part of our story.
01:02:01 So, okay, so there’s this meta violence class.
01:02:04 Yeah.
01:02:05 And what’s…
01:02:05 So the meta violence class is already,
01:02:08 it’s a multiple inheritance pattern.
01:02:10 Whatever’s going on right now inherits from meta violence.
01:02:13 No, but there’s certain subclasses
01:02:16 that allow evil to emerge.
01:02:21 So what I’m specifically worried about is that…
01:02:24 What’s on your mind, Lex?
01:02:26 What’s really going on?
01:02:27 Okay.
01:02:29 I worry that amidst the chaos of these protests
01:02:36 or the chaos that could be created by the feeling
01:02:42 that the election does not represent the voice
01:02:47 of the people, like saying that whoever gets,
01:02:50 quote unquote, wins the election
01:02:51 according to some kind of reporting of the numbers
01:02:55 that come out, that’s not going to represent
01:02:58 what people actually want to be the leader.
01:03:02 Like something in that narrative will create
01:03:05 so much division that people will resort
01:03:09 to literal violence, like protests that really…
01:03:14 That the United States loses its united aspect.
01:03:17 And because of that, because of that chaos and tension,
01:03:21 evil people, evil forces that my definition of evil
01:03:27 is just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power.
01:03:33 The kind of power that is ultimately goes against the ideal
01:03:37 of the United States.
01:03:39 That could be Donald Trump.
01:03:40 That could be another human being.
01:03:42 It doesn’t really matter.
01:03:43 My worry is that love doesn’t win out in this.
01:03:47 The unity doesn’t win out in this.
01:03:49 And I feel like you and I have responsibility.
01:03:57 No kidding. Yeah, I know.
01:03:58 And so how do we let love win in this moment
01:04:03 of potential chaos? We’re gonna have to fight for it.
01:04:07 You’re gonna have to become a fighter.
01:04:09 You’re gonna have to throw some serious punches
01:04:12 if that’s what you want.
01:04:13 You have to be Muhammad Ali here
01:04:15 because the moment you start criticizing anything,
01:04:19 people, you have to be a masterful communicator because…
01:04:23 That’s why you’re here.
01:04:26 Look, Lex, in part, your decency is allowing you
01:04:33 to do things that you couldn’t otherwise do.
01:04:35 I saw that you had Michael Malice on your podcast.
01:04:38 Yeah.
01:04:39 Now, Michael Malice is, I think of somebody
01:04:43 who at his best is extremely shrewd and insightful, yes?
01:04:49 He’s also got this trolling game,
01:04:51 which he’s quite open about and you talk to him about it,
01:04:53 which I can’t stand.
01:04:55 And this is the idea, oh, grandpa doesn’t get the internet.
01:04:58 Well, I’m grandpa, I don’t get the internet.
01:05:00 I don’t love the trolling.
01:05:01 There are trolls of the past who were incredibly good.
01:05:07 I don’t see any of the modern trolls
01:05:09 as being that kind of genius level trolling the people
01:05:12 who deserve it in the way that they deserve it.
01:05:16 Right now, what I see is that anything
01:05:18 that stands up gets cut down.
01:05:20 Yeah.
01:05:21 It’s like anything earnest,
01:05:23 you have to turn it into cynicism and a meme.
01:05:25 It’s this idea that the people who believe
01:05:28 that the world is chaos and has no point
01:05:30 are constantly trying to let you know,
01:05:33 don’t try to use the internet for meaning,
01:05:35 for decency, for goodness, because we are going to find out
01:05:39 that that’s all sanctimonious hypocrisy.
01:05:41 And we will make you suffer.
01:05:44 So I do think that there’s a lot
01:05:46 of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world.
01:05:48 Some of it mine, some of it yours, but we all have it.
01:05:53 And the trolls somewhat remove that,
01:05:55 but it’s not a judicious, kind, constructive,
01:05:57 compassionate, caring version most of the time.
01:06:00 And a lot of those trolls,
01:06:01 and I have this feeling about Michael Malice,
01:06:03 I don’t know whether it’s right,
01:06:05 that there’s somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath it
01:06:08 and that that’s motivating some of the trolling behavior.
01:06:11 And you and I don’t seem to be doing that.
01:06:13 I don’t see you as almost ever trolling.
01:06:16 Now you and I, I’m very much against trolling.
01:06:19 I’m very much against trolling.
01:06:21 It doesn’t mean that it’s selective.
01:06:23 You know what, it’s not even true.
01:06:26 Like everything we say, we say like,
01:06:28 I’m for it, I’m against it.
01:06:31 This isn’t my native language.
01:06:33 I speak nuance.
01:06:33 I don’t speak this internet shit.
01:06:35 And the more I have to communicate through internet shit,
01:06:40 right, I almost never take a tweet seriously
01:06:44 if it contains the letters LMAO, LOL, RTFOL, you know, FOL.
01:06:51 There’s an interesting effect where people say stuff
01:06:54 and then finish with LOL.
01:06:56 You put it beautifully that it indicates to me
01:06:59 that this is a person,
01:07:00 we’ve talked about like why I wear this stupid suit,
01:07:03 is like this is anti, this is to fight the LOL
01:07:06 at the end of sentences, is take,
01:07:09 it’s like stand up for the words you’re saying.
01:07:11 Don’t finish stuff with LOL,
01:07:14 removing completely the responsibility of the content
01:07:17 of the sentence that preceded it.
01:07:19 Yeah, also choosing the outfit that works both
01:07:22 for Men in Black and the Blues Brothers,
01:07:24 not a terrible choice.
01:07:26 Okay, but getting back, look, Lex,
01:07:28 we’re not in a position to do this.
01:07:31 You need to be seated in a different chair.
01:07:35 Your chair is the wrong chair.
01:07:37 You’re in the wrong chair.
01:07:39 It’s been so long.
01:07:41 All right, I want to talk about you and Joe Biden.
01:07:46 Joe Biden was a 29 year old guy
01:07:49 with nothing particular going on so far as I can tell.
01:07:54 Okay, I know people as impressive at age 29 as Joe Biden,
01:07:59 12 rows back, 3D, doesn’t matter, huge number of people.
01:08:05 None of them my age can get to where he got to.
01:08:09 Like we’re all morons.
01:08:12 Anytime somebody takes out,
01:08:14 like if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop,
01:08:19 you’d be angry.
01:08:20 What is this guy doing repairing guitars?
01:08:25 Then somebody will say, maybe he loves to repair guitars.
01:08:29 Yeah, I mean, what is your piano,
01:08:30 Russian piano tuner doing?
01:08:32 What is my Russian piano?
01:08:33 That was the whole point of that story,
01:08:36 which is what is it that happened in that life
01:08:40 that converted somebody?
01:08:41 And I find this, for example, with Russian doctors
01:08:44 who are technicians in offices now.
01:08:49 There’s a huge amount of talent in the world
01:08:52 that’s not sitting in its proper seat.
01:08:54 And quite honestly, I’ve gotten to the point
01:08:57 where my feeling is we’ve got to take the seats.
01:09:03 And maybe we don’t sit in them.
01:09:05 Maybe the idea is that we take the seats
01:09:06 and we put some smart Gen Z person in the seat
01:09:09 and say, look, no chanting.
01:09:12 I don’t wanna hear you say, no justice, no peace.
01:09:15 If there aren’t verbs, if it rhymes, it’s wrong.
01:09:20 Like I used to have this thing,
01:09:21 if it rhymed things that rhymed wrong,
01:09:23 if it rhymed things that rhyme are more true.
01:09:26 But like in general, if something starts out
01:09:28 one, two, three, four,
01:09:30 I don’t wanna hear what the rest of your sentences.
01:09:32 Yeah.
01:09:34 But I feel like the responsibility that you carry,
01:09:38 that I carry, this is where Joe Rogan
01:09:42 generally removes himself from being,
01:09:44 I’m just a comedian.
01:09:45 This idea of I’m just a comedian.
01:09:47 We all do that.
01:09:49 But at this moment in history,
01:09:52 like history literally can pivot
01:09:55 on the words of a tattooed,
01:10:01 ripped 50 year old comedian.
01:10:04 And I think the same is true with you.
01:10:07 Okay, well, I’m interested and I care.
01:10:10 Speaking of lyrics,
01:10:13 there are many here among us
01:10:14 who feel that life has been a joke.
01:10:17 That’s not us.
01:10:18 The hour is getting late.
01:10:19 That’s not us.
01:10:20 In the song, the joker and the thief
01:10:23 are on opposite sides of Jesus
01:10:24 having this conversation over Jesus.
01:10:27 You and I, we’ve been through that.
01:10:28 That’s not our fate.
01:10:29 That’s somebody else’s fate
01:10:31 to throw spitballs at the internet.
01:10:33 That’s not your fate.
01:10:34 You’re an earnest guy.
01:10:35 You’re filled with love.
01:10:36 You’re getting the most amazing podcasts.
01:10:38 Yes, you’re broadcasting.
01:10:39 But you can win over the internet.
01:10:40 This is the point I’m trying to make
01:10:42 that you’re saying I’m just a grandpa.
01:10:44 I don’t get the internet.
01:10:45 No, I’m telling you, you’re gonna get bigger
01:10:47 and then you’re gonna get cut down.
01:10:49 You’re gonna keep ascending for a while, Lex.
01:10:52 And then you’re saying, and naturally there’s a…
01:10:53 I’m telling you, I watch the same process.
01:10:55 People get up to a certain level.
01:10:57 And one of the things that’s going on,
01:10:59 in my opinion, with Joe Rogan,
01:11:01 is that when Joe Rogan starts to talk
01:11:03 about his misgivings about Joe Biden,
01:11:06 in a way that you find at any bar in America,
01:11:11 about cognitive decline in a 77 year old
01:11:13 who’s about to be 78, I believe in November,
01:11:16 we have never had anything remotely as insane
01:11:20 as a 78 year old person slated to win the White House.
01:11:26 And you’re saying when that idea is being communicated,
01:11:29 is there something about the disc concept
01:11:32 that you talk about, the system naturally starts to…
01:11:33 Some bad thing happens to Joe
01:11:35 or one of Joe’s close associates.
01:11:38 The ability to destroy people who become inconvenient
01:11:42 has been documented.
01:11:44 This is what we have done in the past.
01:11:47 Whether we are doing it now, we don’t know,
01:11:49 because we are not doing this church committee too.
01:11:53 In order to know whether or not
01:11:54 you are currently destroying American citizens
01:11:57 as we did in the past and as we have documented,
01:11:59 as we found out in 1976,
01:12:03 the federal government destroyed Americans
01:12:05 who had political beliefs
01:12:07 that the government didn’t want to continue.
01:12:11 And I don’t know whether you are grasping that.
01:12:14 One interpretation of why Jon Stewart
01:12:18 and why Joe Rogan and why Bill Maher,
01:12:21 all these people to some extent hide behind, it’s a joke.
01:12:25 Yeah.
01:12:25 It’s because they’re trying to find a protected class.
01:12:29 Is there some place I can stand and speak the truth
01:12:32 which does not result in my being garbage collected?
01:12:36 Interesting.
01:12:37 I guess you’re right.
01:12:38 My intuition is you can stand, as you gain more power,
01:12:43 you can stand behind your words.
01:12:46 There’s a fight over Joe Rogan right now.
01:12:49 I mean, I’ve talked about it for a few years now.
01:12:52 People did not understand how big that program was.
01:12:55 People didn’t understand long form podcasting.
01:12:57 I was derided by people who I think of as being very shrewd
01:13:03 for believing in these podcasts as a major force.
01:13:07 And most of the people who derided me have said,
01:13:09 wow, did I not get things?
01:13:11 It’s like if you started to propose,
01:13:14 you wanted to do the Sopranos
01:13:17 in the era of 30 minute sitcoms.
01:13:21 Like, you don’t get it, man.
01:13:22 The American people, they’re not interested
01:13:24 in these long plot storylines.
01:13:25 That’s your weird thing?
01:13:27 Nobody cares, dude.
01:13:28 Everybody just wants short, fast, memorable.
01:13:31 And like, okay, so if you do that,
01:13:33 you totally miss the opportunity.
01:13:35 And the savvy people used to say,
01:13:38 kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime
01:13:40 underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
01:13:43 Well, that was totally wrong
01:13:44 because they didn’t calculate opportunity costs.
01:13:46 I have been talking about the problem of Joe for a long time.
01:13:51 The problem is, is that when the system wakes up,
01:13:54 they’re gonna wanna control it.
01:13:56 And they come up with new different mechanisms
01:13:58 of doing that.
01:13:59 I guess one interesting one is cancel culture.
01:14:03 Well, look at the number of people around Joe
01:14:05 who they’ve come after since they realized
01:14:07 that Joe was really big.
01:14:09 Joey Diaz, Brian Callan, Chris Delia.
01:14:17 Now, I’m not saying that those are all related,
01:14:22 but I do notice that there are at least correlations
01:14:28 between when Joe says something
01:14:29 when something bad happens in Joe’s universe.
01:14:33 It’s easier for me to believe that that’s happening
01:14:36 when it’s happening around Joe himself.
01:14:40 But I’m worried about my friend.
01:14:43 And I don’t necessarily wanna push him
01:14:46 towards being more if he doesn’t want it.
01:14:48 Because I don’t wanna conscript people.
01:14:51 He’s got a great life.
01:14:52 He’s got a great situation.
01:14:53 He’s done a huge service.
01:14:56 Thank God.
01:14:57 How much do I owe Joe just for what he’s done for you
01:15:01 to say nothing of what he’s done for me
01:15:03 or for Brett or for Sam or any of these people?
01:15:06 And I’d like to think that we all try to give back,
01:15:10 but I’m worried about Joe.
01:15:13 He’s not worried.
01:15:15 One of the inspiring things about Joe
01:15:18 is he’s in this war alone.
01:15:21 And the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life.
01:15:25 Well, that’s his thing, as long as he stays close
01:15:27 to things that he loves and being,
01:15:30 one of the things is he’s honest about his drug use.
01:15:32 He loves to hunt.
01:15:34 So he’s just, he does a certain amount
01:15:36 of like semi vice signaling upfront.
01:15:40 And then you just also know him.
01:15:41 This is why every time they try to take him down,
01:15:43 you use the N word.
01:15:47 Unfortunately, everybody knows who Joe is.
01:15:50 And yes, he doesn’t act as if he went to a fancy
01:15:55 finishing school, right?
01:15:58 That’s not his energy.
01:16:00 The fact that you’ve got some super smart guy
01:16:02 who always pretends to be a meathead,
01:16:04 just like, hey, I’m a comedian.
01:16:06 It’s like all these defenses and disguises.
01:16:08 Okay, you’ve got this super smart guy
01:16:11 who he’s admitted to most of the things
01:16:14 that you can take him down for.
01:16:17 And because everybody’s been effectively in his den
01:16:19 his basement, think about that studio is his basement.
01:16:23 People have hung out with Joe so many hours
01:16:24 that you can’t tell them something about Joe
01:16:26 where they’re gonna say, wow,
01:16:27 I’m gonna believe the New York Times
01:16:28 and not the hundreds of hours I’ve spent
01:16:31 on the Joe Rogan experience.
01:16:32 But the cool thing is that this is what inspires me
01:16:35 is that the way he’s waging war against the system,
01:16:37 it’s just by being a good person
01:16:40 and talking enough hours in a week
01:16:44 where that message like bleeds throughout the words
01:16:48 and the gaps between.
01:16:49 And that’s so inspiring to me
01:16:51 that the good people can win by just being good.
01:16:55 And he’s kind and he’s tough.
01:16:57 And he also, he’s no pushover.
01:17:01 I always worry a little bit when I sit down in my chair.
01:17:05 You still get scared that he’ll call you
01:17:07 on some kind of bullshit that you weren’t even aware of?
01:17:09 No, the first time I was on the show,
01:17:12 the energy wasn’t great between us.
01:17:14 And it was in a sober October situation.
01:17:16 So I think I hadn’t understood that
01:17:18 and maybe our egos got a little bit off.
01:17:22 I don’t know.
01:17:23 I mean, I was having fun,
01:17:25 but maybe it was just too complicated life forms
01:17:28 getting to know each other.
01:17:29 The first one was probably,
01:17:34 yeah, that made me a little nervous for the future.
01:17:37 But then, Joe and I have become friends,
01:17:40 although sometimes we have miscommunications
01:17:42 like on Yom Kippur, I texted him and I said,
01:17:46 Joe, I want to apologize for ways I’ve let you down
01:17:50 as a friend that haven’t been there for you
01:17:51 and appreciate everything you’ve done for me all this time.
01:17:54 Like I get this text back like,
01:17:56 what the fuck is your problem?
01:17:57 You’re great, dude.
01:18:00 I don’t know what bad place you’re in, but cheer up.
01:18:02 It’s like, Joe, don’t you have any Jews in your life
01:18:04 that apologize for what they’ve done?
01:18:07 He was just like, dude, have you lost your mind?
01:18:09 What the hell’s gotten into you?
01:18:11 Yeah, what do you think about the Spotify thing?
01:18:17 What about it?
01:18:18 Ask me a question.
01:18:19 He’s now, as opposed to being just a comedian
01:18:23 with the podcast, he now is just a comedian
01:18:26 with the podcast who stepped like in the middle
01:18:28 of the center of cancel culture,
01:18:31 which is like, I know Spotify is in Sweden,
01:18:33 but they represent Silicon Valley.
01:18:37 They represent the very kind of structures.
01:18:40 They contain and represent the kind of structures
01:18:43 that threatened to destroy the Elans of the world.
01:18:48 And he just like stepped like with his Alex Jones
01:18:52 and his Joey Diaz just strolled right into the middle of it.
01:18:56 Yeah, I think it’s awesome.
01:18:58 I love it.
01:18:59 But do you think he’s strong enough to, I don’t know.
01:19:04 I mean, I don’t even know the right way to ask this,
01:19:06 but is he strong enough to persevere?
01:19:08 It’s a bit interesting.
01:19:10 It’s like when a lion decides, wow,
01:19:13 that honey badger looks tasty.
01:19:14 I’m gonna swallow it whole, see what happens.
01:19:17 Because I talked to him offline.
01:19:18 He really seems to be willing to give away the 100 million,
01:19:22 which gives him so much power.
01:19:24 Oh, I don’t, it’s a powerful thing to be able to say,
01:19:29 I don’t, yeah, to the honey badger.
01:19:33 He just strolls in, but he’s willing to walk away
01:19:35 from anything in this world.
01:19:36 Well, he’s gonna walk out the other side of the lion.
01:19:38 I don’t think he’s gonna go out the way he came in.
01:19:40 Yeah.
01:19:41 Well, you know what it is?
01:19:42 It’s Tommy Lee Jones entering the bug.
01:19:45 This is like a giant alien, he just walks into it?
01:19:47 He just, he gets swallowed by the bug
01:19:49 and he blasts out from the inside.
01:19:52 I have it as Tommy Lee Jones.
01:19:53 Yeah, that’s Joe Rogan to you.
01:19:55 Yeah, is that my feeling is that Spotify
01:19:58 doesn’t understand what they’re messing with.
01:19:59 I could be wrong, but I’m not.
01:20:01 No, you’re right.
01:20:02 I’m right.
01:20:05 Because Joe doesn’t need anything, man.
01:20:07 I mean, this is the weird thing about it.
01:20:08 It’s like, I’m sure that he loves all his toys,
01:20:10 whatever, blah, blah, blah.
01:20:11 He’s a rich guy.
01:20:12 Yes, he’s got a few money.
01:20:14 He had a few money a long time ago.
01:20:16 And you’re not, you know, the other thing about,
01:20:21 it’s a bit weird being friends with a dude like that.
01:20:23 It just is.
01:20:24 Cause like you call him up or he’ll call you up
01:20:26 and he’s like, what’s going on in your life?
01:20:29 I don’t know.
01:20:30 Kind of depressed, trying to get some math done.
01:20:32 What are you up?
01:20:33 Oh dude, I can cheer you up.
01:20:34 I just came off of a 29,000 person stadium.
01:20:38 It’s like, oh cool.
01:20:40 How’d you do that?
01:20:40 Oh, I don’t know.
01:20:41 I just announced it on Instagram a few days ago
01:20:43 and it filled up.
01:20:44 Just like, oh damn.
01:20:47 I mean, that thing is so powerful.
01:20:51 So there you go.
01:20:52 I mean, you could be that too.
01:20:54 The instant Joe takes an interest in politics
01:20:57 and saving the world.
01:20:58 You might destroy all of that.
01:20:59 It’s going bye bye.
01:21:01 I promise you.
01:21:02 I just disagree with you.
01:21:04 I mean, cause you have to do it.
01:21:05 Like you’ve said this many times before.
01:21:07 I’ll bet you, I’ll bet you a bottle of Stoli
01:21:11 that you can get, if you get Joe Rogan
01:21:14 to get highly politically active
01:21:16 and call out the system for all the bullshit that it is
01:21:18 in a very pointed and determined fashion
01:21:23 and he doesn’t get destroyed, I’ll give you the vodka.
01:21:26 The vodka?
01:21:27 Yeah.
01:21:27 That sounds like a pretty damn good deal.
01:21:29 But you’ve said this, I mean.
01:21:32 No living heroes, my friend, no living heroes.
01:21:36 I just.
01:21:37 No living heroes.
01:21:39 It’s just difficult.
01:21:40 You just have to be good at it.
01:21:42 I mean, if you just say generic political things.
01:21:45 No, no.
01:21:46 You’re going to be taken down.
01:21:48 But if you’re. The more heroic you are,
01:21:50 the more beautiful you are,
01:21:52 the more you will be made to suffer.
01:21:54 If they cannot get you on reputation.
01:21:56 If Jesus himself came down.
01:21:59 I don’t know if I ever read.
01:22:00 I probably have never read to you the hit piece
01:22:02 I did on Jesus.
01:22:04 You don’t know about this?
01:22:05 No, I did not know.
01:22:06 I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world.
01:22:09 Wow.
01:22:11 So whoever it was who cured cancer,
01:22:14 discovered new particles or whatever it is,
01:22:16 I did a hit piece against them to prove
01:22:18 that I can do it to anybody around anything at any time.
01:22:22 Except Eddie Van Halen is what we’re talking about.
01:22:24 Well, Eddie Van Halen is now dead.
01:22:26 But if this was a situation, you know, hot for teacher,
01:22:32 canceled.
01:22:33 Disrespectful.
01:22:35 Absolutely.
01:22:38 Also, you know, packaging female objectification
01:22:43 for young men.
01:22:44 Clearly Eddie Van Halen is one of the worst people alive.
01:22:47 But the skill, the incredible inspiration
01:22:53 that is just radiating from his music
01:22:55 inspires so many millions
01:22:57 that they will fight those canceled pieces.
01:23:00 This is your thing.
01:23:01 You have this idea that there’s a war between good and evil
01:23:03 and the good has already been designated the winner.
01:23:06 And it’s not true.
01:23:08 But your belief that it’s true.
01:23:11 Fake it till you make it, no?
01:23:13 I mean, you gotta, it’s motivating both of us.
01:23:16 Like I also believe that we’re gonna win
01:23:18 because if I don’t, then I can’t get out of bed
01:23:20 and it’s pretty heavy at the moment.
01:23:22 Do you think 2021 can make us feel good
01:23:28 about the trajectory of society?
01:23:31 So like where we emerge from this year feeling good.
01:23:36 Like there’s a smile on Eric Weinstein’s face
01:23:38 and the next time we talk,
01:23:40 we’ll be doing some kind of duet on guitar
01:23:42 and not having this worried look on our faces.
01:23:47 No.
01:23:49 Okay, but you’ve also promised
01:23:51 you’re going to somehow end this in a positive.
01:23:54 Okay, so how do you turn the no around?
01:23:57 What’s the U turn from the no?
01:23:59 Until we get some actually decent people
01:24:03 in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking
01:24:06 about their next paycheck, I don’t see a solution.
01:24:10 Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are
01:24:13 and to let you know why I don’t think it’s coming.
01:24:18 First of all, both of these political parties,
01:24:21 the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go.
01:24:24 They’re tearing us apart.
01:24:26 They lack the will to be Americans.
01:24:28 They don’t understand the subtlety of the project.
01:24:32 They’re simply the people who figured out
01:24:34 how to inhabit the seats and that is their great achievement.
01:24:41 I believe that in order to solve this,
01:24:43 you need people who can integrate,
01:24:45 who are not partisan at the level
01:24:47 of the partisan warriors that we’re seeing,
01:24:50 people who believe in dividing the pies of the future
01:24:52 rather than the present pie as our main task as Americans
01:24:56 because we are built around growth.
01:24:58 I’m sorry to say it.
01:25:02 You need an ability to have subtle conversations
01:25:06 and you need the ability to exclude.
01:25:09 And at the moment, everyone knows inclusion is good,
01:25:13 which it isn’t.
01:25:14 It’s like saying, well, water is good.
01:25:16 If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me.
01:25:18 It’s not, people drown.
01:25:22 People need to get dehydrated.
01:25:24 It can be life saving or life ending.
01:25:26 It isn’t good or bad.
01:25:28 Inclusion is not good or bad.
01:25:30 Inclusion is just inclusion.
01:25:31 Exclusion is part of inclusion.
01:25:34 We’ve taught people that they can reason through the world
01:25:38 as sub cocker spaniels.
01:25:43 They just bark things at each other.
01:25:45 I’m for safety.
01:25:48 I’m for inclusion.
01:25:49 I’m for growth.
01:25:51 Oh, really?
01:25:52 Do you guys use verbs, dependent clauses?
01:25:55 Are there compound complex sentences?
01:25:57 Where are we in this sea of nonsense?
01:26:01 You have to be able to build a place
01:26:03 where you have smart, talented people
01:26:06 who represent a diverse group of correct opinions.
01:26:10 You need to get rid of almost all of the people
01:26:13 who have opinions that are antithetical
01:26:15 to what we’re trying to accomplish.
01:26:17 You need to give them insulation, which we’re terrified
01:26:20 because we don’t trust anybody.
01:26:21 So everything has to be transparent.
01:26:23 If you’re going to the bathroom,
01:26:24 I want those walls to be plexiglass
01:26:25 so I can see what you’re doing.
01:26:27 It’s like, that’s too much transparency.
01:26:29 We have too much and not enough at the same time.
01:26:32 And then in essence, you need to ensure
01:26:36 that people aren’t worried about feeding their family
01:26:39 every four seconds for being real.
01:26:41 None of that is happening.
01:26:43 And our billionaires, our billionaires are pathetic.
01:26:47 What is the point of billionaires
01:26:48 if you’re not going to do billionaire type cool stuff
01:26:52 like saying, F you, and I’m going to throw $3 billion
01:26:57 at the project of restoring the national conversation?
01:27:05 I don’t grasp this.
01:27:06 What is the point of creating obscene wealth
01:27:09 if we don’t have anyone smart enough
01:27:10 and caring enough to use it?
01:27:12 So I agree with that last part for sure.
01:27:16 Let me slightly push back on the idea
01:27:20 that the leaders themselves are broken.
01:27:22 I feel like this goes to the Joe Rogan,
01:27:28 Joe Biden and Trump having a debate on that program.
01:27:31 I feel like Joe Biden has a lot of really interesting ideas
01:27:38 that he’s almost forgot how to communicate.
01:27:40 He’s been fake for so long within the system.
01:27:44 Hillary was fake for too long.
01:27:45 I’m sure she had real ideas at the beginning
01:27:47 that she still was campaigning on decades later.
01:27:50 But if the system, if the platforms empowered you
01:27:54 to search, to be honest, to be real,
01:27:56 to search for those ideas within yourself,
01:27:59 like long form conversations do,
01:28:02 then even the Donald Trump and Joe Biden leaders
01:28:05 we have now would take this country to a better place
01:28:10 that would unite people.
01:28:12 So like, we can keep the current Congress.
01:28:15 We just need to create better platforms.
01:28:17 This is going to the intuition
01:28:19 that there’s good in Donald Trump.
01:28:21 There’s depth and complexity and intelligence.
01:28:24 And the same with Joe Biden.
01:28:26 There’s good in Joe Biden.
01:28:28 And it’s just, we’re not incentivizing.
01:28:32 I mean, there’s several things I think are broken.
01:28:35 One of them is Twitter.
01:28:36 The other is journalism.
01:28:38 It’s just the platforms of us communicating with each other.
01:28:41 One of the reasons that I try to come up
01:28:43 with unifying explanations is that,
01:28:46 if you look at the number of wildfires in California,
01:28:49 let’s say, that we’ve just seen,
01:28:51 if you treat them all as spontaneous,
01:28:53 uncorrelated instances, it feels like,
01:28:57 oh my God, it’s just whack a mole.
01:28:58 Every time I send a fire truck here,
01:29:00 there’s a fire over there.
01:29:02 So you want to come up with something
01:29:03 like a central theory, which is,
01:29:06 why do I suddenly have a problem
01:29:07 when I hadn’t had a problem before?
01:29:09 So I look for these unifying explanations.
01:29:12 And I found one the other day that really speaks to me.
01:29:16 I mean, people are very frustrated
01:29:18 because they’ve been trained to think about this
01:29:20 incorrectly, in my opinion.
01:29:21 But here’s the graph that you need to look at.
01:29:25 On the x axis is time by year.
01:29:29 And on the y axis is something like average age of a human.
01:29:37 The title of the graph is any desirable situation
01:29:40 involving institutions.
01:29:44 So that could be CEO, it could be tenured professor.
01:29:50 It could be who’s getting grants.
01:29:53 It could be the age at which people win Nobel Prizes.
01:30:01 University presidents, all these things go up.
01:30:05 In other words, for a long period of time,
01:30:08 the average age of the person in a desirable situation
01:30:12 has been increasing something like nine months for every 12.
01:30:19 Those graphs have to go down at some point.
01:30:22 The specter of having five people all born in the 1940s
01:30:28 as the final entrance in the presidential context,
01:30:34 that makes no sense.
01:30:36 Think about how bizarre a thing
01:30:38 that nobody’s even really talking about.
01:30:40 The last five people were all ancient
01:30:45 by presidential standards.
01:30:47 Not one, not two, but five.
01:30:49 We are talking about a contest between somebody
01:30:54 who is the oldest of the baby boomers,
01:30:57 the very beginning of the baby boom,
01:30:58 summer of 46th birthday, fighting somebody
01:31:02 who is in the silent generation.
01:31:05 The silent generation guy in a town hall in Florida
01:31:08 gets this question from a Gen Z guy saying,
01:31:12 what’s going on with my future?
01:31:14 Joe Biden has the audacity to say,
01:31:18 I’m a transitional president.
01:31:20 You guys are the highly educated one.
01:31:22 When has any generation in history needed
01:31:25 a transitional 78 year old person to take office?
01:31:29 It’s bizarre, it’s preposterous.
01:31:31 That graph is the graph we can’t talk about.
01:31:35 That graph is the graph of our destruction.
01:31:39 Because it has the, you can make a one line argument,
01:31:44 which sounds like ageism, which isn’t a very good argument.
01:31:50 No.
01:31:51 But what it does is, is it muddles the conversation.
01:31:54 And you always have to ask yourself the question,
01:31:56 if this conversation becomes muddled,
01:31:58 who wins as a result of the muddling?
01:32:01 Well, it’s a battle, but let’s just win it.
01:32:04 Let’s win the battle.
01:32:05 You give.
01:32:06 Are you running?
01:32:07 For sure, I’ll run.
01:32:09 I was born in Russia, can’t run.
01:32:11 So, but we Russians can hack elections,
01:32:13 so we’ll figure it out.
01:32:15 This is me officially announcing my run for president.
01:32:17 I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida.
01:32:23 Yeah.
01:32:23 Lex, what is it that you really wanna ask?
01:32:25 I think, I wanna put some responsibility on the portal.
01:32:30 The portal.
01:32:31 The portal.
01:32:32 That the portal gives power to the people in that graph.
01:32:38 Like, cause you put it quite brilliantly
01:32:41 that the people that move the world,
01:32:44 their age has been going up.
01:32:47 And not move the world, but put in the position
01:32:49 where they get the chance to affect the world.
01:32:54 These new platforms, I think Twitter falls in them,
01:32:57 give power to the younger people.
01:33:00 It doesn’t have to be about age necessarily,
01:33:01 but the younger thinking people.
01:33:04 So that’s a promising thing.
01:33:06 And you are like, you’re like Gandalf.
01:33:09 You get to pick your Frodo’s or whatever.
01:33:11 I’m not very good with the analogy,
01:33:14 but the whole point is for you as Gandalf.
01:33:16 I don’t know that I make that much sense.
01:33:18 Gandalf makes sense.
01:33:20 I don’t know if people know how to fit me
01:33:22 into this ecosystem.
01:33:24 I think there’s something in my presentation
01:33:26 that people find very confusing.
01:33:27 No, figure it out.
01:33:28 I disagree with you, but you need to look at the mirror
01:33:30 and think like, what is it?
01:33:32 Is it, maybe you need a mustache.
01:33:36 I don’t know.
01:33:36 But there’s something about figuring out
01:33:41 how to be a charismatic communicator in this.
01:33:43 And that’s the responsibility.
01:33:45 You said like finishing sentences with the LOL
01:33:48 is painful for your soul.
01:33:50 Yeah, that’s just how somebody lets me know.
01:33:52 I don’t have to take their opinion seriously.
01:33:54 Yeah, it’s still the language,
01:33:55 the way that people are communicating
01:33:58 and you’re swimming that wave.
01:33:59 You have a big platform.
01:34:01 I have a growing platform.
01:34:02 It feels like this is the place to give power.
01:34:05 I agree, but we’re gonna get swatted down.
01:34:07 I just don’t think so.
01:34:08 You’re wrong.
01:34:09 Why are you afraid of the big?
01:34:10 Like this is, I’ve studied it.
01:34:13 Because I’ve studied, let me ask you a question, Lex.
01:34:18 I believe that every society is supposed to have
01:34:21 a collection of what I call break glass
01:34:25 in case of emergency people.
01:34:28 Yeah.
01:34:29 These are people who are universally loved
01:34:31 and trusted by your society.
01:34:33 For example, David Attenborough,
01:34:35 the great British naturalist and presenter,
01:34:39 recently came on Instagram.
01:34:40 He’s worried about the planet.
01:34:43 And I said, look, there are very few of these people left.
01:34:46 Let’s pay attention, find out what he has to say.
01:34:48 Maybe he’s gonna be an ass.
01:34:49 Maybe he’s gonna be in it.
01:34:50 Maybe he’s gonna say wrong things, don’t know.
01:34:52 Tell me about your top 10 universal American heroes.
01:34:57 This is not a rhetorical question.
01:34:58 No.
01:35:00 Give me five.
01:35:02 Okay, everybody looks to that person and says,
01:35:03 yep, the best of us.
01:35:06 Probably follow that person.
01:35:08 Well, everybody’s an interesting concept.
01:35:11 I mean, Elon Musk is very divisive, right?
01:35:14 But I’m talking about overwhelmingly people
01:35:16 would follow that person if that person gave a rousing,
01:35:21 intelligent speech that said, we must act now
01:35:25 because we’re in dire straits.
01:35:28 I think a lot of people fall in that category.
01:35:30 For me, it would be in the tech world,
01:35:33 in the engineering world.
01:35:34 No, no, no, no, no.
01:35:35 Tell me his names.
01:35:36 Elon Musk.
01:35:37 Elon Musk.
01:35:41 The Rock.
01:35:43 I’m thinking like, who is the most eloquent actor?
01:35:45 So like, you think celebrities, so people with platforms.
01:35:48 I didn’t say celebrities, but you have to be well known.
01:35:50 I believe like, yeah, so this goes to Joe Rogan.
01:35:55 Hmm.
01:35:59 First two did not really impress me
01:36:02 as being what I said, but okay.
01:36:05 Elon several years ago would have.
01:36:08 Can you try to?
01:36:10 Joe Rogan has.
01:36:11 Why do they fail?
01:36:12 Why does Elon fail?
01:36:13 Lots of people treat Joe Rogan
01:36:14 as if he’s some sort of right wing racist
01:36:17 because they’ve never watched his program.
01:36:19 They don’t know who his friends are.
01:36:20 I don’t know.
01:36:22 Oh, but when I thought you said everybody,
01:36:24 I thought you meant a large enough people
01:36:29 where a huge change can happen,
01:36:31 not actually literally everybody.
01:36:33 Because I think.
01:36:34 I mean people who’ve pulled off,
01:36:35 like people who’ve pulled off something
01:36:38 where everybody’s convinced that that person just deeply.
01:36:44 I mean, I think I’ve told you this story before,
01:36:47 but the one time I’ve seen the power of a figure like this,
01:36:52 I mean, very few times I’ve been in a large crowd
01:36:55 and I’ve seen people just moved
01:36:57 where they would do almost anything good,
01:36:59 bad and different because they were primed.
01:37:03 One was a Rolling Stones concert.
01:37:06 The other one was Nelson Mandela coming to Boston.
01:37:10 And man, you’ve never seen anything like this.
01:37:13 You check out the photos from the banks
01:37:15 of the Charles River when Nelson Mandela came.
01:37:18 There are people that you need in your dark hours
01:37:24 and we can’t agree on who they are.
01:37:26 And as soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit.
01:37:29 We get out the shit branch.
01:37:31 Yeah.
01:37:32 I just disagree with you.
01:37:33 So I think.
01:37:33 What do we disagree about here?
01:37:35 I think it doesn’t matter who it is.
01:37:37 I think really good speeches are needed.
01:37:40 And I think a lot.
01:37:41 Who’s gonna give them?
01:37:42 I saw Killer Mike try to give a good speech.
01:37:44 Yeah, he did.
01:37:45 Wow.
01:37:46 In Atlanta, right?
01:37:46 Yeah, he did.
01:37:47 That was something.
01:37:49 Very impressed.
01:37:50 Yeah.
01:37:51 Even Killer Mike immediately gets into this.
01:37:54 Sell out.
01:37:57 Yeah, but he didn’t take up the responsibility.
01:38:01 I would say.
01:38:02 He didn’t.
01:38:02 Of going bigger.
01:38:05 So he was speaking to the community.
01:38:07 And he was doing what he.
01:38:08 On this particular moment, he’s exceptional at it.
01:38:11 And he was speaking to this particular moment.
01:38:13 He didn’t take it a step farther,
01:38:16 which is like giving the same speech,
01:38:21 but bigger than race.
01:38:23 Bigger than this particular moment,
01:38:25 but more about the American project.
01:38:29 You know the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson?
01:38:31 Yes.
01:38:32 Yeah, there you go.
01:38:33 That’s a good example.
01:38:34 So that guy until we screw him up
01:38:38 is the kind of thing that I’m talking about.
01:38:40 Yeah, exactly.
01:38:41 Okay.
01:38:42 I mean, Jaco, maybe that’s another.
01:38:43 Jaco’s pretty good.
01:38:44 Can’t really tell.
01:38:45 Is he a Democrat?
01:38:46 Is he a Republican?
01:38:47 I don’t know.
01:38:47 He’s an American.
01:38:48 That’s for damn sure.
01:38:49 Yeah.
01:38:50 And I think there’s a lot of folks.
01:38:51 And then, you know.
01:38:52 No, I think Jaco, there aren’t.
01:38:54 That’s one of the reasons why Jaco’s so special.
01:38:56 That’s so important.
01:38:57 Yeah.
01:38:57 Your podcast, The Portal, is something in my little universe
01:39:03 is something a lot of people really love.
01:39:06 And it moves them.
01:39:08 They draw a lot of meaning from it.
01:39:11 And also, especially in difficult times.
01:39:16 It gives them a comfort of through like this kind of,
01:39:21 it’s not just nuance.
01:39:23 There’s like, even when you’re talking about chaos,
01:39:27 there’s love underneath all of it.
01:39:28 And I think people would draw a lot of meaning from it,
01:39:30 which is why they are wondering why you haven’t been doing
01:39:35 I’m wondering why you haven’t been doing that many podcasts
01:39:42 or you haven’t done it in maybe a month and a half
01:39:45 or two months in this most difficult of times.
01:39:49 Is there a good reason?
01:39:52 Yeah.
01:39:53 There are lots of good reasons.
01:39:56 So the first one is kind of weird,
01:39:58 which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous.
01:40:01 And if you say, I don’t want to be famous,
01:40:05 it’s like, oh, you’re just saying that
01:40:06 because you want to be everyone to think you’re famous.
01:40:09 You’re not that famous.
01:40:09 You know, okay.
01:40:12 I don’t love being as well known as I’ve become.
01:40:19 There’s lots of things that are fun about it.
01:40:21 It’s wonderful that you can go to,
01:40:23 I can go to any city in the world
01:40:24 and there are portal listeners there.
01:40:27 All I need to do is put out a tweet
01:40:28 and 20 people show up for a drink.
01:40:30 And they’re amazing people.
01:40:31 And they’re almost, I mean, you can see my live Q and A’s
01:40:36 on my Instagram page.
01:40:37 If you go to Eric R. Weinstein,
01:40:38 I just pick somebody randomly
01:40:40 and I was really worried about it at first.
01:40:43 And you know, maybe I should be worried about it,
01:40:45 but in general, people all over the world
01:40:47 are just so positive.
01:40:49 And so, you know.
01:40:51 And thoughtful and have a story that’s kind of self selected.
01:40:55 Right?
01:40:56 Yeah.
01:40:56 But I don’t like the fame.
01:40:58 The thing we just described comes with the fame.
01:41:00 It’s a beautiful thing.
01:41:01 You know, you’re worried that it’s getting.
01:41:03 It’s ephemeral.
01:41:04 It’ll, look Lex, it’ll turn on you in a heartbeat.
01:41:09 Yeah.
01:41:10 It’ll turn on you in a heartbeat.
01:41:11 And the other problem is I don’t,
01:41:14 I don’t like my audience being my audience.
01:41:16 I want to get closer to them.
01:41:18 I want to talk to them.
01:41:18 I want to find out what is this doing in your life?
01:41:21 My house fills up with art that people send me.
01:41:24 The lightest thing is an effects pedal
01:41:27 called something like, I don’t know,
01:41:28 bow tie overdrive from a guy in Mexico, right?
01:41:33 Yeah.
01:41:33 You play electric, by the way, in a tiny little tangent.
01:41:36 Do you play electric?
01:41:37 I have a Stratocaster, but it doesn’t have a strap
01:41:40 and I don’t know what to do with it and I have a bad amp.
01:41:42 So you should, you should, you should hook me up with the.
01:41:46 We’ll find it a home maybe.
01:41:48 Okay.
01:41:49 You’re starting to sense that this is too much.
01:41:52 No, I want to be, I want to be here.
01:41:54 I want to do the work very simply.
01:42:00 I don’t have an ability to fully explain myself.
01:42:03 I don’t want to claim that I don’t love the fact that how
01:42:06 much love do we get from these programs?
01:42:09 Like I, the generically people are incredibly generous.
01:42:16 You know, people have begged me, set up a Patreon account
01:42:19 and I haven’t been able to do it.
01:42:21 I should do it.
01:42:22 I’ve said to everybody, it’s a business.
01:42:24 It’s a business.
01:42:24 It’s a business, but like they’re so used to being defrauded.
01:42:28 When somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives, my,
01:42:31 my goal was to say, I’m going to keep talking to you about you.
01:42:34 You wonder why I started doing ads on my show was because I
01:42:37 wanted people to think from the get go, this is a business.
01:42:41 This is what I sound like when I’m selling, but you know, like
01:42:46 you see I’ve lost weight.
01:42:49 A lot of that is due to athletic greens, athletic greens, you
01:42:52 know, um, code, uh, what’s the, I don’t know what my promo code
01:42:57 is for athletic greens, probably athletic greens.com slash portal,
01:43:01 but doesn’t that portal, but you know, Fitbit who doesn’t
01:43:05 advertise has also been instrumental as well as a guy
01:43:08 named Steven Cates, who, you know, was a fan from the show,
01:43:12 found me on the street and just said, I’m a trainer.
01:43:14 I want to help train you.
01:43:15 And it’s got me on a, on a good, uh, good path.
01:43:18 So, you know, that’s one paid advertiser and two people on
01:43:21 I’m calling out just because there are, you know, two, two
01:43:24 outfits, Steven Cates and Fitbit that have changed my life.
01:43:28 I wanted people to say, you know, you don’t have to be
01:43:30 afraid of advertising.
01:43:31 If I do it in this way, this is powering your show, but the
01:43:37 whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy
01:43:40 feelings like, Oh wow.
01:43:41 I knew he was a shill.
01:43:44 He’s a grifter, you know?
01:43:44 Okay.
01:43:45 I didn’t love that.
01:43:46 I didn’t love the issue.
01:43:48 So I didn’t set up a Patreon.
01:43:50 The security issues for talking and being me are significant.
01:43:56 And I don’t have the kind of money to hire around the clock.
01:44:00 I mean, I, I desperately want to get to a level of wealth
01:44:04 where I don’t have to think about money.
01:44:07 I don’t think it’s, you know, some people want money because
01:44:09 they, they, they need it for status.
01:44:12 I think I can handle status if I want it doing this, I don’t
01:44:16 want the status necessarily.
01:44:18 And I don’t want, I’d want the status, but I don’t want the
01:44:21 fame that goes with it.
01:44:24 I want the money.
01:44:25 I don’t want to be seen as this is about money because it’s
01:44:28 about a substance and drink, you know, all of those things.
01:44:33 That’s part of, I haven’t solved these issues.
01:44:37 I’ve been feeling bad because people say, where’s the portal
01:44:39 work?
01:44:40 We’re desperate.
01:44:40 These are difficult times.
01:44:41 We have an election coming up and it’s just like, do you
01:44:45 think for a moment that I want to explain that I actually got
01:44:48 really uncomfortable being as well known as I was?
01:44:50 And then what is it that I want?
01:44:51 Because I want to be better known and less well known at
01:44:54 the same time.
01:44:55 It doesn’t, there’s nothing the audience can do.
01:44:56 I don’t want the audience to be the audience.
01:44:58 That doesn’t make sense to people.
01:44:59 I want it to be a business, but I don’t think people need to
01:45:02 fear a business of the businesses open about being a
01:45:04 business that, and then that’s all to the side, what you’re
01:45:09 seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly
01:45:13 meta violent period in our online existence, and I believe
01:45:20 that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are
01:45:23 completely screwed at the moment.
01:45:25 The leadership of these parties is unsalvageable, unworkable.
01:45:30 Everyone hears that from inside the two party system.
01:45:34 Oh, I get it.
01:45:34 He’s trying to subtract votes off of Biden.
01:45:36 Oh, I get it.
01:45:37 He’s trying to scuttle Trump.
01:45:39 Oh, I get it.
01:45:40 This is a play for his show because he’s trying to plug
01:45:42 in to discuss there’s a bill Hicks routine on marketing.
01:45:46 Have you ever seen this brilliant?
01:45:49 I recommend it to everyone where he comes out on stage and
01:45:53 he says, are there any people in marketing and sales in the
01:45:55 audience?
01:45:56 Woo.
01:45:56 Yeah.
01:45:57 It’s like, okay, great.
01:45:59 Can you do us all a favor and die?
01:46:01 And like, everybody laughs.
01:46:02 He’s like, no, I’m not laughing.
01:46:04 I’m seeing being serious.
01:46:05 So he’s talked about how marketing is horrible.
01:46:07 So you’re like, where’s this act going?
01:46:10 Then he gets to the point of it.
01:46:11 It’s like, oh, I know how you marketing people think bills
01:46:15 going after that, uh, resentment dollar.
01:46:17 That’s good dollar.
01:46:18 Let’s get that resentment anti marketing dollar.
01:46:20 Yeah.
01:46:20 It’s like, no, that’s not what I’m saying.
01:46:21 I really hate marketers.
01:46:23 Oh, that’s good.
01:46:23 It’s the authenticity dollar.
01:46:26 You can’t escape this kind of negative marketing thought.
01:46:31 And I guess that gets to the issue that I don’t want to be
01:46:36 destroyed in advance of this election. I don’t think it’s a
01:46:41 good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting
01:46:47 how completely ridiculous Donald Trump and Joe Biden are as
01:46:50 candidates for the president of the United States.
01:46:53 Full stop.
01:46:54 None of this makes any sense.
01:46:55 These moderators of these pseudo debates were in the wrong
01:46:59 format with the wrong people.
01:47:01 No part of this makes a wit of sense.
01:47:04 Can I try to push back several claims?
01:47:07 One is I don’t believe the systems as they stand now can
01:47:15 destroy their equine voice, the voice you’re a child.
01:47:20 I’m sorry to say that, but, well, let me, well, it’s also
01:47:24 possible. It’s entirely possible that you’re the child.
01:47:28 Okay.
01:47:29 Because a child would say you would call other people a child.
01:47:33 Yeah. Get in the first blow reveal the tell because the only
01:47:40 power they have is to attack you psychologically.
01:47:43 No.
01:47:44 Well, I believe that the army of people that love you is much
01:47:51 more powerful than mainstream media, than people that you
01:47:57 might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said,
01:47:59 which has tried to reduce you, like the marketing thinking.
01:48:05 I just believe there’s an army.
01:48:08 Maybe there’s a better term of people that see you for who
01:48:12 you are and a hungry, like I’m not disputing those things.
01:48:17 And what I’m saying, I would venture to say as your therapist
01:48:21 that you’re actually, uh, the battle is all in your mind.
01:48:28 All in your mind that you have found these demons in the
01:48:33 system, and they’re just a tiny minority and it’s all in your
01:48:39 mind. They cannot actually remove.
01:48:42 They’re not strong enough to remove the voice of Eric Weinstein
01:48:47 to silence the voice.
01:48:49 I love this.
01:48:51 This is some of the best fiction writing I’ve ever heard.
01:48:55 Let me tell you, I have relatives who’ve known me my entire
01:49:00 life, where one article in the New York Times, they will
01:49:04 believe that over me.
01:49:04 My contention is that it has no power except to affect your
01:49:10 psychology. What you have to do is the Rogan thing, which is
01:49:13 laugh. Just laugh.
01:49:15 I am laughing.
01:49:16 I know, but more.
01:49:18 I’m telling you something.
01:49:20 Yes.
01:49:20 Okay.
01:49:20 The way this works is through ruin.
01:49:23 Ruin can come to anyone.
01:49:27 There’s no one who cannot be ruined.
01:49:29 Every single person is signed up right now to be ruined by
01:49:35 the system.
01:49:35 Don’t you understand that you have more power than the system?
01:49:40 You can ruin the system.
01:49:42 Your Twitter account, the podcast.
01:49:45 I’m telling you about the Army.
01:49:47 I agree that my Twitter account, my pocket.
01:49:50 But what we’ve seen, for example, you saw what happened
01:49:53 to Brett’s Articles of Unity project.
01:49:54 Yes.
01:49:55 Okay.
01:49:56 What happened on the Twitter side?
01:49:59 What happened?
01:50:01 What happened?
01:50:03 Well, actually, say the word and say the word.
01:50:05 It was blocked or removed from Twitter.
01:50:07 Suspended.
01:50:08 Account suspended.
01:50:09 And I have a direct line to Jack.
01:50:14 Yeah.
01:50:14 Okay.
01:50:15 So I’m talking to the CEO who I am crazy enough to still
01:50:20 believe in.
01:50:20 Good.
01:50:21 I do, too.
01:50:22 I believe somehow there’s a very strange thing going on
01:50:25 with Jack Dorsey.
01:50:27 I cannot possibly reconcile the actions with the person I’ve…
01:50:32 That is a next level mind in there.
01:50:37 I don’t know it well enough to say that it’s all next level.
01:50:39 I’m not claiming he doesn’t have any blind spots.
01:50:41 Every smart person I know has blind spots.
01:50:43 I don’t know what he’s up against.
01:50:44 Blah, blah, blah.
01:50:46 There’s no way that the Jack Dorsey that I’ve talked to and
01:50:50 the Jack Dorsey that interacted over Articles of Unity can be
01:50:53 the same person.
01:50:55 He is constrained by that company in some way that
01:50:58 doesn’t make sense to me.
01:50:59 Either that or he’s the most duplicitous person on earth and
01:51:01 I’m not believing it.
01:51:02 I just don’t buy it.
01:51:03 Okay?
01:51:04 Yeah.
01:51:05 Something horrible is happening.
01:51:10 My claim is I can remove you functionally from the chessboard
01:51:14 in a tiny number of moves, no matter who you are, no matter
01:51:18 how virtuous or how much of a bastard you’ve been your entire
01:51:21 life, it doesn’t take more than three or four moves to
01:51:25 basically neuter you as a force.
01:51:27 Yeah.
01:51:28 And I disagree that if that’s possible, that means I’m not
01:51:31 very good at chess.
01:51:32 Like Unity 2020 was removed from Twitter because it’s not
01:51:36 good enough, not within the system.
01:51:39 Like the army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea
01:51:45 was too small.
01:51:46 Okay, but fear, uncertainty and doubt is the name of the
01:51:49 game, the coin of the realm.
01:51:51 Psychology though, it’s not real power.
01:51:53 It just affects the mind.
01:51:55 Okay, I have a reading assignment for you because you’re
01:51:57 Russian, you’ll really enjoy this.
01:52:01 As part of the great American tobacco settlement, the Tobacco
01:52:04 Institute had to disgorge its archives of all of its
01:52:08 strategies, all of its skullduggery and put it on the
01:52:11 web for all time so that we can all understand how the tobacco
01:52:15 companies got together and destroyed people, right?
01:52:19 You see tobacco destroys people.
01:52:22 You can see, you know, Scientology destroys people.
01:52:26 There are various vindictive organizations that will not
01:52:31 tolerate reality in opposition to them.
01:52:36 Let’s take them down.
01:52:38 Okay.
01:52:39 That’s what I’m trying to tell you is…
01:52:40 Okay, no.
01:52:41 So why aren’t you doing the podcast to return?
01:52:43 Because that’s one of the weapons of war.
01:52:49 Well, first of all, if you’re at war, I don’t want to
01:52:52 discuss strategy on a podcast, right?
01:52:57 But that’s your misunderstanding.
01:52:59 What did Montgomery say about Rommel?
01:53:01 But wasn’t his line, I read your book, you beautiful bastard.
01:53:06 It’s like, why are you using the tactics that you
01:53:07 already explained?
01:53:09 Okay.
01:53:10 So one of the things I’m doing is I’m not having a strategic
01:53:13 conversation with you and several hundred thousand of
01:53:16 our closest friends.
01:53:20 I pulled back because this is not the battle that I know
01:53:27 what I’m doing.
01:53:28 I do not feel passionately enough about defeating Donald
01:53:31 Trump to elect Joe Biden, even if that’s the way I’m going
01:53:34 to ultimately vote, right?
01:53:39 I don’t believe in the Biden Democratic Party.
01:53:42 I don’t believe in the Trump Republican Party.
01:53:45 So, yes, it’s an incredibly consequential election.
01:53:48 But to me, it’s like the Crips and the Bloods and the Latin
01:53:52 Kings fighting over the right to extort a business and the
01:53:56 business trying to figure out who it wants to do the extorting.
01:54:00 But don’t you think, listen, there’s very few people that
01:54:03 are as good with the English language as you.
01:54:05 Don’t you think it’s possible to draw a line in between that
01:54:12 finds how we find our common humanity that ensures a better
01:54:18 2021 without having to say like Donald Trump is evil or Joe
01:54:23 Biden is incompetent or any of that, just somehow draw a
01:54:27 beautiful line?
01:54:28 I am seeing people in so much pain.
01:54:30 This election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who
01:54:34 comments on it, Lex.
01:54:36 Maybe they’re not good enough.
01:54:38 They’re not good enough.
01:54:39 No, but the hope is…
01:54:41 Do you believe in me?
01:54:42 Yes.
01:54:43 You do?
01:54:44 Yes.
01:54:45 Listen to me very carefully.
01:54:46 My spider sense, my intuition that has allowed me to survive
01:54:51 in the space, I’ve been mouthing off since the 80s, tells me
01:54:56 this is a super dangerous time for smart people to be spending
01:55:01 the dry powder because the election doesn’t make sense.
01:55:06 Doesn’t mean that I don’t have a sense that one outcome would
01:55:09 be better than the other probably, but the variance on
01:55:12 that, I’m not even positive that I’m right.
01:55:16 These two options are so completely inappropriate to the
01:55:20 world of 2020.
01:55:22 What we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and
01:55:26 more silent generation people trying to sort out a highly
01:55:30 technical world being mediated through social media.
01:55:36 We need more exclusion.
01:55:37 We need more actual elites.
01:55:39 The people we’ve called the elites are not the elite.
01:55:42 They need to go.
01:55:43 Yeah.
01:55:44 We need excellence, competence.
01:55:45 We need people who can be trusted behind closed doors and we need
01:55:49 to close the doors so we can’t see what those people are doing.
01:55:55 Here’s the thing.
01:55:56 Imagine that you had a bunch of people who’d all seen action
01:55:59 in combat, had all volunteered to be part of the armed services,
01:56:03 had all come from backgrounds where they didn’t need to.
01:56:06 So you were convinced that these people had put their lives on
01:56:09 the line for their country, not for a payday.
01:56:12 Imagine you had 10 of these people with technical backgrounds,
01:56:15 men, women, black, white, Muslim, Jew, doesn’t matter.
01:56:22 I would trust those people and I’d close the door.
01:56:26 I don’t want to know what they talked about.
01:56:29 I don’t want transparency into all of their negotiations.
01:56:33 I want to know that they’re patriotic, that they see something in the world
01:56:36 bigger than themselves and their family fortunes.
01:56:40 I want to know that they’re courageous.
01:56:42 I want to know that they’ve got all of our well being and I’m willing
01:56:45 to roll the dice.
01:56:46 And if they screw us over, I’d rather go down like that.
01:56:49 Okay.
01:56:50 So I disagree with you there because there’s a difference in those
01:56:53 and Jocko because you’re not speaking to people with credentials.
01:56:59 No, I’m talking about self credentialed people.
01:57:02 I view Jocko as self credentialed.
01:57:04 But the biggest, the powerful thing about Jocko is he’s not only self credentialed,
01:57:08 but he’s been real with people.
01:57:12 The magical thing about Jocko isn’t his book, isn’t his life story is he’s been
01:57:17 talking on a podcast for a long, there’s something real that happens.
01:57:21 Okay.
01:57:22 So if you took everybody, if you took Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard and you took
01:57:28 Jocko Willing and maybe Jesse Ventura, right, you can take, you can take Bernie
01:57:35 Sanders.
01:57:36 Yeah.
01:57:37 Who’s, you know, a lone voice.
01:57:38 You take all of these people who’ve like really just risked, like why do we trust?
01:57:45 Why is Katherine Hepburn the best that Hollywood ever produced?
01:57:48 Because she told Hollywood to go fuck itself hard.
01:57:54 They gave her four Academy awards and she said, love you, sweeties.
01:57:58 I’m going to use them as the doorstop for the bathrooms in my house.
01:58:01 See that skill.
01:58:02 That’s, uh, that’s, that’s just, that’s what you were talking about.
01:58:05 Yeah.
01:58:06 Be Katherine Hepburn.
01:58:07 Audrey Hepburn is pretty amazing, but Katherine Hepburn is next level.
01:58:11 Right?
01:58:12 Well, you, I mean, that’s what you’re trying to say to me.
01:58:14 Yeah.
01:58:15 Okay.
01:58:16 I’m trying to figure it out, Lex.
01:58:17 Okay.
01:58:18 I don’t have the answer yet.
01:58:19 What I do know is that this election is chewing people up and I mean two separate things.
01:58:23 One that parties don’t have enough integrity that if you comment either for or against,
01:58:29 there’s a short sequence where you make a comment that’s nuanced.
01:58:33 You get referenced to something, right?
01:58:36 Like, you know, take this thing about, you know, find people on both sides.
01:58:41 That is non resolved after N years, whether the context should be reported or not.
01:58:49 We are in some situation in which Democrats and Republicans are primed to fight each other.
01:58:55 The way introducing two ants from two different ant colonies always produces a battle.
01:58:59 Yeah.
01:59:00 Okay.
01:59:01 I don’t want to be in that fray because those people are going to kill each other mindlessly
01:59:07 like robots.
01:59:08 And until the election is concluded, like I, do I think this is dire?
01:59:13 Yes.
01:59:14 Could it be make or break?
01:59:15 Absolutely.
01:59:16 I’m not saying that.
01:59:17 Do I know which way this goes?
01:59:18 I can make an excellent argument that we need to elect Joe Biden right now.
01:59:22 We’ve got a situation which can only be cured by voting for Joe Biden.
01:59:26 I can make another argument that we could have a situation that can only be cured by
01:59:31 defeating Joe Biden right now.
01:59:33 And all of the things that the modern democratic party represents.
01:59:37 Yeah.
01:59:38 I don’t have, you know, it’s, it’s not the lady and the tiger we’re choosing between
01:59:44 the tiger and the tiger.
01:59:45 It’s the Sumatran tiger versus the Siberian tiger, right?
01:59:48 I’m trying to think, well, which tiger can I, do I have a better chance against, um,
01:59:54 the key problem for us politically is that we have to divorce the concept of the center
02:00:00 and moderation from kleptocracy.
02:00:04 Every time we try to say something like we need more moderate solutions, we need more
02:00:08 pluralistic solution.
02:00:10 People will say, wow, you just want to hand us right back into the swamp, don’t you?
02:00:14 The swamp people cause the moderates and the swamp people are the same people, right?
02:00:20 So then we have these two crazy wings.
02:00:23 We can’t have crazy right wing people.
02:00:25 I don’t want any Tiki torch BS.
02:00:27 We can’t have crazy left wing.
02:00:29 Don’t attack my courthouse.
02:00:32 Really don’t attack my courthouse and we can’t have moderates.
02:00:35 It’s like, okay, how do we install our children and, and rape pillage and get these speaking
02:00:39 fees when we’re out of office and become, you know, cozy with the things when we’re
02:00:44 supposed to be regulating them and then, you know, become their lobbyists, you know, immediately
02:00:49 when we leave office, all of this stuff, we need an entirely different system.
02:00:54 And I can’t talk about that at the moment.
02:00:57 When I talk, people say, oh wow, so you’re going to sit this one out cause you’re a pussy
02:01:01 because you’re a coward.
02:01:02 Great to know Eric.
02:01:03 We thought better of you by click.
02:01:06 I don’t know what to do.
02:01:07 But are you thinking of what to do?
02:01:10 Yeah.
02:01:11 Oh, you better believe it.
02:01:13 Look, Brett, Brett had this idea of unity 2020 and I told him it was a wrong idea.
02:01:20 I didn’t tell him that unity 2024 was a wrong idea.
02:01:23 I didn’t tell him that unity 2028 is a wrong idea.
02:01:25 And if I were to make the case that he was right and I was wrong, cause he’s now shuttered
02:01:29 the thing, right?
02:01:31 I would say that the case to be made that he was correct was, is that by doing this
02:01:36 in 2020, we found out what we were up against.
02:01:39 It’s good to know that Twitter can turn this off at the drop of a hat.
02:01:43 Great to know.
02:01:45 It’s good to know as we learned that you cannot have meetings of vice of presidential candidates
02:01:53 in a primary that are not approved of by the party, right?
02:01:59 Like they’ve got this thing figured out so we don’t have any way in.
02:02:03 And now unity 2024 makes sense because unity 2020 was tried.
02:02:09 Okay.
02:02:10 I don’t know that we get to 2024 under all circumstances and some we do and some we don’t.
02:02:16 There’s, there’s a game theoretic thing that I’m not sure you’re accounting for, but you,
02:02:20 you probably are.
02:02:21 But let me just make an argument is Jack Dorsey very likely listens to your podcasts and wait,
02:02:32 this is the power of these words.
02:02:34 Something deep went wrong, but we can change it with the power of words.
02:02:41 Something went wrong at Twitter.
02:02:44 They have so much division on their platform.
02:02:46 That’s what I’m trying to say.
02:02:47 They’ve gotten, it’s not wrong.
02:02:48 They just don’t know they’re understaffed.
02:02:50 No, they have an insoluble problem.
02:02:53 Difficult to solve.
02:02:54 They have an insoluble problem.
02:02:55 This is where you and I disagree because, well, all right, I’d like to create a competitor.
02:03:00 So then, you know, give it to me, create the competitor, show me that you actually have
02:03:05 understood this because my guess is, is that most of the things that you’ll think about,
02:03:10 I mean, I can tell you things I’ve talked to Jack about, which I know would make Twitter
02:03:13 much better.
02:03:15 However, I, I think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet and you subtract
02:03:23 off all sorts of context and mutual self knowledge, the problem is us.
02:03:28 It’s not the platforms.
02:03:29 We’re thinking about a technological solution and I’m saying the problem is, is that we
02:03:34 are ultimately the product.
02:03:37 And I just disagree with that and there’s a lot of, that’s probably could save that
02:03:40 for tomorrow.
02:03:41 I look forward to spending summers in your villa when you, when you debut this product
02:03:47 and I would love to angel invest in it.
02:03:50 By the way, in terms of money, I’ll never have a villa.
02:03:54 Yeah.
02:03:55 No, I will always give away everything I own.
02:03:58 No, sorry.
02:04:01 Invest into like things like you mentioned, awesome things.
02:04:06 Invest fine, but a little bit of a vuncular advice.
02:04:12 Don’t pledge to be the person who disgorges themselves of security.
02:04:20 Money is freedom.
02:04:21 That’s what it is.
02:04:22 It’s a big hunking pile of freedom.
02:04:25 Okay.
02:04:26 You can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you if you don’t, you know, so you
02:04:30 can use it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money.
02:04:33 But generally speaking, Lex money is freedom and your voice is important.
02:04:39 At least retain the amount of money security you need to follow Joe’s advice.
02:04:46 What is the point of f you money if you don’t say f you, the number of people who have f
02:04:51 you money who don’t say f you indicates the number of people who chose the freedom of
02:04:56 their wealth to create a prison.
02:04:59 They built a prison with the freedom they had and they walked into it, locked the door.
02:05:03 I think it’s too difficult not to create it.
02:05:06 The reason I want to give away the money is because I just know my own psychology and
02:05:09 you create prisons.
02:05:11 Our human mind just creates those prisons that f you money is enough for basic shelter
02:05:19 and basic food.
02:05:20 That’s, that’s the optimal if you don’t have kids yet.
02:05:23 This is a, okay, this is the problem.
02:05:25 This is why I’m sitting.
02:05:26 So this is me, single Lex speaking, but future Lex, future Lex.
02:05:32 I’m talking to future Lex, single, single present Lex, please don’t listen.
02:05:38 Don’t be an ass.
02:05:39 You’re going to need some money and don’t make these pledges to say on a podcast.
02:05:44 I’m saying I want to save you from yourself.
02:05:47 You need money to do many of the beautiful things that we’re counting on you to do.
02:05:51 Don’t F it up.
02:05:56 Can I talk to you about Roger Penrose?
02:05:58 Sure.
02:05:59 You’ve talked to Roger on the portal, but also in between the lines and offline, just
02:06:05 everything you’ve said about Roger Penrose for people who don’t know.
02:06:09 He just recently, a few days ago, won the 2020 shared the 2020 Nobel prize for physics,
02:06:18 but it’s clear to me that he had like a deep personal impact on you, a connection with
02:06:24 you in terms of both your love of mathematics, just the way you see the world.
02:06:30 This is the Eddie Van Halen conversation.
02:06:32 This was clearly somebody who’s profound in your worldview.
02:06:36 Can you talk about Roger?
02:06:38 Can you talk about what it means that he won this highest of prizes just in general?
02:06:43 Let’s celebrate the man.
02:06:44 Yeah.
02:06:45 Okay.
02:06:46 So first of all, there are two other people who won this prize.
02:06:47 I’m sorry.
02:06:48 I just didn’t happen to know who they were before they won.
02:06:54 Roger is a very, it is not Roger in particular, but the class from which Roger comes that
02:07:02 is so important.
02:07:04 So I would put Roger in the class of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang, um, put Whitten in
02:07:14 there.
02:07:15 I mean, Whitten is a special case, but Whitten is weirdly the reverse of the Roger Penrose
02:07:24 story, right?
02:07:25 Because Whitten is the first physicist to win a mathematical Fields Medal, the highest
02:07:29 honor in mathematics.
02:07:32 Penrose is in some sense, a mathematician who’s now won the Nobel prize.
02:07:36 So it’s a perfect sort of a couplet.
02:07:41 Roger’s class means everything to me.
02:07:45 That’s the highest achievement of the human mind.
02:07:48 I would probably throw Bach in with Feynman and Dirac and company, right?
02:07:56 I think that he was so inventive.
02:07:59 It was very frustrating to watch this career.
02:08:01 It was a little bit frustrating to watch Feynman’s career.
02:08:06 Feynman was so good and had he been born slightly different and a slightly different time, I
02:08:14 believe his claim on physics would be far greater.
02:08:21 I feel like Penrose in some sense came up a very difficult path because you see Einstein
02:08:26 effectively solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the
02:08:30 beginning.
02:08:32 As a result, the children of Einstein are impoverished because there wasn’t as much
02:08:36 to pick off of the trees and sell at the market.
02:08:39 Whereas Bohr and Planck didn’t do nearly as good of a job with quantum theory.
02:08:44 So there’s lots to do in quantum theory.
02:08:47 I think that Roger affected me personally by a diagram that I saw in a paper of Herman
02:08:55 Gluck at the University of Pennsylvania.
02:08:58 It was the first picture I’d ever seen of the Hopf vibration sketched and that weirdly
02:09:04 I brought that to the Rogan program in order to sort of convey the wonder.
02:09:10 It was recapitulating my own journey.
02:09:14 I think I probably saw that at like age 16 or something and it just flipped my mind.
02:09:21 Roger is incredibly visual, he’s incredibly geometric, he’s incredibly sui generis, he
02:09:26 just does his own thing.
02:09:29 He’s got lots of bets.
02:09:31 None of them had really come through the way you would hope and I think they stretched
02:09:36 the rules to be blunt about it.
02:09:38 To give him the prize.
02:09:39 Yeah, I do.
02:09:40 You said this thing on Twitter which is beautiful that every once in a while comes a human being
02:09:46 that gives value to the prize versus the prize giving value to the human.
02:09:52 Two different kinds of prizes.
02:09:54 The reason that we care about the Nobel Prize isn’t because of Alfred Nobel.
02:09:59 It’s because it came along at the right time to reward Einstein, Dirac, Schrodinger, Feynman.
02:10:10 Most of the people who should have won, won.
02:10:15 Most of the awards are not good in the sense that they don’t really follow.
02:10:21 The prize is used to rewrite history, that’s the problem.
02:10:26 You should have a love hate relationship with it because on the one hand it does focus the
02:10:30 world on what really matters and on the other hand it distorts what really matters and both
02:10:35 of those functions take place simultaneously.
02:10:38 In this case, I think that they violated their own rules slightly so it wasn’t really clearly
02:10:44 a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion.
02:10:50 We better give this award to somebody of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize
02:10:56 is fully funded with prestige going forward.
02:10:59 That’s sort of my weird speculative guess as to what happened.
02:11:04 So Roger’s getting on in years and the person should be alive so I think they bent the rules
02:11:10 and I think they couldn’t have bent it for a better person and I hope they will not bend
02:11:14 the rules out of weakness but out of strength in the future.
02:11:18 It would be great to get Madame Wu and Emmy Nerder a posthumous prize along with Doug
02:11:26 Prasher, George Sudarshan and George Zweig as well as Ernst Stuckelberg Nobel Prizes.
02:11:35 There have been some terrible omissions, the first two being females who revolutionized
02:11:42 our view of the world and I take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people
02:11:50 from ethnic groups or genders or whatever in order to make it plural and inclusive.
02:11:55 If it’s not following the work and I feel very clear that in a few cases we know there
02:11:59 was a real problem with the Nobel committee because we have stunning accomplishments and
02:12:06 try to get through a day as a physicist with that Nerder’s theorem and try to imagine the
02:12:11 universe without Madame Wu’s discovery that left and right don’t appear to be symmetric.
02:12:16 I mean these are terrible omissions and they’re a huge blot on science for not being more
02:12:23 inclusive when it matters.
02:12:25 Yeah so just like you said the Nobel Prize is plagued by omissions as much as…
02:12:30 And distortions and dilutions.
02:12:31 For example, Dirac and Schrodinger were I believe given the prize in the same year.
02:12:35 There’s no reason that those two people needed to dilute each other.
02:12:39 The same thing with you know Dyson was an omission, Tominaga probably got included in
02:12:45 part because we had an opportunity to show that something had happened on both sides
02:12:50 of the Pacific after the war.
02:12:53 But I don’t think we needed to dilute Weinberg or Feynman or Schwinger.
02:13:00 It makes me somewhat sick.
02:13:01 All of these people are such important giants and it has to do with the field I think not
02:13:07 wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget
02:13:12 cuts and worldly pressures.
02:13:14 So I think it’s really important that we have absolute superstars because we produce superstars.
02:13:20 We acknowledge them, we don’t dilute them and that we bend the rules to make sure that
02:13:26 the prize stays funded with the prestige that comes from giving it to the Roger Penrose’s,
02:13:33 Albert Einstein’s and Paul Dirac’s of the world.
02:13:36 Can we talk a little bit about evil?
02:13:39 Sure.
02:13:41 I haven’t actually talked to you about this topic and it’s been sitting on my mind mostly
02:13:49 because everybody at MIT is quiet about it, which is Jeffrey Epstein.
02:13:56 I didn’t get a chance to experience what MIT was like at the time when Jeffrey Epstein
02:14:02 was part of this, but I’d love to try to understand how evil was allowed to flourish in a place
02:14:15 that I love.
02:14:18 Whether you think, maybe let me ask the question this way.
02:14:24 Was it the man evil or was the system evil or is evil too strong a word?
02:14:35 Because what I see is the presence of this particular human being in the eyes of many
02:14:44 destroyed the reputations of many really strong scientists and also weakened the ability,
02:14:55 like weakened the institution of MIT by making everybody quiet, like almost making them unable
02:15:04 to say anything interesting or difficult.
02:15:09 And what is that and what am I supposed to?
02:15:14 We don’t know.
02:15:15 Why is everyone quiet about Jeff?
02:15:18 We don’t know.
02:15:19 Obviously I want to scream about it too, right?
02:15:22 And I probably have said too much about Jeffrey Epstein.
02:15:26 Look, something horrible happened.
02:15:29 I don’t know what it is, but something horrible happened.
02:15:34 And you know, at the one thing that, okay, let’s just do this.
02:15:40 The first thing I need to do is I need to get rid of this woke crap about power differentials.
02:15:47 In general, you can talk about hypergamy and power differentials are Russell conjugates
02:15:54 of the same concept, just the way particular proportions and symmetries are mathematically
02:16:01 provable to be attractive in females to males.
02:16:08 Male attractiveness is largely determined by male competence and ability to amass power
02:16:14 and success and all these sorts of things.
02:16:18 The relationship between consenting adults is quite frankly not something I want to sort
02:16:25 out the relationship between the sexuality of adults and minors.
02:16:33 And particularly, you know, there’s the 17, 18 issue that’s very different than 12, 13.
02:16:46 We’re talking about really sick depravity with respect to what it appears that Jeffrey
02:16:52 Epstein was involved in at some level.
02:16:56 I believe this story is super complicated in part because I think one thing Jeffrey
02:17:01 Epstein was doing was providing money, encouragement, and support to scientists.
02:17:09 Another thing he was doing, I believe, was giving tax advice to very rich people.
02:17:15 I believe another thing he was doing was hooking very wealthy people up with young adult females.
02:17:26 Another thing he was doing, I think, was doing stuff with children that will curl your toes.
02:17:36 So there’s an entire spectrum of different stuff.
02:17:39 And at the moment, nobody can pull apart or deconflate anything because the woke thing
02:17:46 comes over it and says, I think it’s disgusting that a 43 year old billionaire would be partying
02:17:54 with a 23 year old.
02:17:58 I don’t want to adjudicate that.
02:18:00 I’m worried about 12 and 14 year olds that we’re not talking about.
02:18:05 I don’t think MIT was deep into pedophilia.
02:18:08 My guess is that that did not happen.
02:18:10 I don’t think that the scientists were the targets of the really sick depraved stuff.
02:18:18 It’s my guess.
02:18:19 My guess is that what you’re looking at was a government construct.
02:18:24 It may have been our government, it may have been a joint government project, maybe somebody
02:18:28 else’s government.
02:18:29 I don’t know.
02:18:31 I believe that in part, we don’t really understand Robert Maxwell.
02:18:37 Sorry, who’s Robert Maxwell?
02:18:39 Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was very active in scientific publishing.
02:18:44 I don’t know where peer review came from.
02:18:46 I would love to run down the relationship between peer review and Robert Maxwell.
02:18:50 I would love to run down the missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and the mysterious fortune
02:18:56 of Jeffrey Epstein because I don’t think Jeffrey Epstein ever ran a hedge fund.
02:19:00 I don’t think he was a money advisor the way people claimed.
02:19:04 There’s two things I want to talk about.
02:19:06 One is the shallow conversations of woke identity politics that you’re referring to seems to
02:19:14 be removing everyone’s ability, no, everyone’s willingness to talk about like, what the hell
02:19:22 is this person and how is he allowed?
02:19:25 Most importantly, how do we prevent it in the future?
02:19:30 From the individual perspective, the question for me is the same question I ask about 1930s
02:19:36 Nazi Germany.
02:19:37 I’ve been reading way too much probably or not enough about that period currently.
02:19:41 If I was in Germany at that time, what is the heroic action to take?
02:19:47 When I think about MIT with Jeffrey Epstein, what is the heroic action to take?
02:19:51 We’re not talking about virtue signaling action.
02:19:53 You wouldn’t know what to do.
02:19:54 I would not know what you’re up against, Lex.
02:19:57 You’re not hearing me.
02:19:58 The problem here is what was Jeffrey Epstein?
02:20:02 Well, that question might be the heroic action to take.
02:20:05 That’s all I’m trying to say.
02:20:06 I’m just trying to get my first question.
02:20:08 You have to map the silence with Jeffrey Epstein.
02:20:10 What you’re describing is a map of the silence at MIT.
02:20:16 Well, is there a map of the silence in Washington state around Jeffrey Epstein, the Bay Area,
02:20:24 New York City?
02:20:26 The amount of silence around Jeffrey Epstein should be telling you everything.
02:20:31 The number of dogs that don’t bark is like nothing we’ve ever seen.
02:20:36 You’re exactly correct, but I want to know what is it telling us?
02:20:40 Because what it’s telling me is not some kind of conspiracy, but more a disappointing weakness.
02:20:49 Not some kind of conspiracy?
02:20:50 It’s not some kind of conspiracy, but…
02:20:52 You’ve got to be kidding.
02:20:55 You’re so afraid of saying the word conspiracy that you don’t think it’s a conspiracy?
02:20:58 I personally, I just think it’s people who I thought were my heroes just being weak.
02:21:04 No.
02:21:06 Be of good cheer, sir.
02:21:08 A cheer?
02:21:09 Be of good cheer.
02:21:10 Be of good cheer.
02:21:11 Yeah.
02:21:12 You think that there’s a conspiracy?
02:21:13 I think there is a conspiracy.
02:21:15 That’d be a very impressive one.
02:21:18 That’s the scale of it.
02:21:20 I tend to believe that large scale can only be an emergent phenomena.
02:21:25 Really?
02:21:26 I find this so fascinating.
02:21:27 Yeah.
02:21:28 Because I always see you as like a logic and love drive your soul.
02:21:35 You’re very logical.
02:21:36 You’re relentless.
02:21:37 You’ve got a lot of love in your heart.
02:21:38 I believe that if you would review the video, where is it from?
02:21:41 Dubai or Abu Dhabi of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest?
02:21:47 You ever seen this thing?
02:21:48 No.
02:21:49 What happened?
02:21:50 It’s the assassination in 2010, 10 years ago, of Mahmoud Al Mabou, something like that,
02:21:57 in Dubai where I believe 26 separate individuals on multiple teams are shown converging coming
02:22:07 in from all over the world on false passports, pretending to be tennis players or business
02:22:15 people or vacationers.
02:22:19 All of these teams have different functions and they murder this guy in his hotel room.
02:22:27 The Dubai, I guess, chief of police or security officer was so angered that he put together
02:22:35 this amazing video that says, we can completely detail what you did.
02:22:39 We caught you on closed circuit TV.
02:22:42 We don’t know exactly who you are because your disguises and your false passports, but
02:22:46 yeah, 26 people converged to kill one.
02:22:51 No, I don’t believe you.
02:22:53 I don’t believe after COINTELPRO and Operation Paperclip and Operation Mockingbird.
02:23:02 I don’t know whether I should even bring up Rex 84.
02:23:07 To not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy.
02:23:11 So you have a sense that evil can be as competent or more competent.
02:23:18 First of all, when evil wants to operate at scale, it needs to make sure that people don’t
02:23:22 try to figure out evil.
02:23:25 When evil operates at scale, from first principles, you have to realize that evil must not want
02:23:32 it investigated.
02:23:35 The most efficient way to keep yourself from being investigated, if you are an evil institutional
02:23:42 player who needs to do this repeatedly, is to invest in a world in which no one can afford
02:23:47 to say the word conspiracy.
02:23:49 You’ll notice that there is a special radioactivity around the word conspiracy.
02:23:54 We have provable conspiracies.
02:23:56 We have admitted to conspiracies.
02:23:57 You have been invited to conspiracy.
02:24:00 There is no shortage.
02:24:01 Conspiracies are everywhere.
02:24:02 Some of them are mundane.
02:24:04 Some of them are like price fixing cartels, or trade groups, or generally speaking, conspiracies.
02:24:11 So the first thing you have to realize is that all of us are in a memetic complex where
02:24:19 you can be taken off the chessboard by saying, conspiracy theorists, get done.
02:24:23 It’s like a one line proof.
02:24:25 We don’t have to listen to Lex.
02:24:26 He said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show.
02:24:30 That is partially distorting our conversation.
02:24:32 If you want to ask me about Jeffrey Epstein, you have to agree with me that that is a logical
02:24:37 description of what you would have to have if you wanted to commit conspiracies is that
02:24:41 you have to make sure that people are dissuaded from investigating this.
02:24:46 But it’s a fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy theories
02:24:53 and the world without conspiracy theories to the shallow glance looks the same.
02:24:58 Well, my point.
02:25:00 There is responsible conspiracy theorize where you look at the history of unearthed conspiracies
02:25:08 and just like you would with any other topic, just think about how different the rules in
02:25:12 your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing where X can be anything, right?
02:25:20 It’s like if I say to you, um, I can say the statement that average weight is not the same
02:25:28 between widely separated populations.
02:25:31 You’d say, yeah, I’d say average height is not the same between widely separated populations.
02:25:37 You’d say, yeah.
02:25:38 Then I say, in fact, no continuous variable that has that shows variation should be expected
02:25:44 to be identical between widely separate.
02:25:46 Of course they’re like IQ, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, right?
02:25:52 So we have a violent reaction to specific topics.
02:25:56 So the first thing I want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into
02:26:02 everyone’s mind.
02:26:05 That’s really important to state.
02:26:06 Yeah, that’s, it’s very interesting that, and as a prerequisite, as you’re saying, that
02:26:13 would be the first step.
02:26:14 If you wanted to pull off a conspiracy in a competent way, that’s, you would have to
02:26:20 first convince the world.
02:26:21 I just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time, I highly recommend
02:26:27 it 1971 well, the film is entitled 1971 and it’s about the citizens committee to investigate
02:26:34 the FBI, which was a run by a student of Murray Gelman, a physicist and broke into FBI offices
02:26:43 in Pennsylvania to steal files, which allowed freedom of information requests that discovered
02:26:48 a huge conspiracy.
02:26:49 It was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy inside the federal government, a double conspiracy
02:26:55 story, which launched multiple conspiracies.
02:27:00 I think that the problem with modern Americans is that they are so timid that they don’t
02:27:05 even learn about the history of conspiracies that we have absolutely proven.
02:27:10 So with that done, Jeff Epstein, in my opinion, represented somebody’s construction.
02:27:19 I don’t think that scary to think about.
02:27:21 Yeah.
02:27:22 Well, what part of the story isn’t scary?
02:27:24 I in part did something which I imagine may get me destroyed because I was more worried
02:27:31 about being destroyed by somebody else I had a conversation with around Jeff Epstein, right?
02:27:37 So I’m just trying to like get, let it be known that I don’t know anything more than
02:27:41 I’ve already said.
02:27:43 Now, your friends at MIT, their problem is that Jeff Epstein showed up as the only person
02:27:51 capable of continuing US scientific tradition.
02:27:58 You see, the US scientific tradition is a little bit like the Russian.
02:28:04 It’s combative, okay?
02:28:09 And we’re a free society and we act like a free society.
02:28:12 We’re a rich society and we research like we’re a rich society.
02:28:15 That is historically, and then came the 1970s and William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece
02:28:21 Awards and the idea that we have to, we’re paying too much and these are welfare queens
02:28:25 and lab coats and blah, blah, blah, blah.
02:28:28 We need more transparency, more oversight.
02:28:31 Everything went to hell and the national culture of US science was lost.
02:28:37 The thing that produced all this prosperity and security and power was lost.
02:28:43 And then Jeff Epstein shows up and a tiny number of funders, maybe Fred Kavli, maybe
02:28:52 Yuri Milner, maybe who else would be in this category?
02:28:59 Peter Thiel to an extent, Howard Hughes would be the largest of these things, which has
02:29:05 different grant structures than the NIH, gave people a modicum of risk taking ability.
02:29:12 Okay, well, when Jeff Epstein showed up, everybody wanted to take risk in science.
02:29:20 And suddenly a charismatic billionaire says, hey, I can make that work for you.
02:29:24 Here’s $100,000, go research something crazy.
02:29:27 Well, that money was supposed to be provided by the federal government under the terms
02:29:34 of the endless frontier compact between the federal government and the universities and
02:29:39 the federal government and the taxpayers Welch.
02:29:42 Okay.
02:29:43 So that’s one place to lay the blame for Jeff Epstein as at the failure of the federal government
02:29:50 to honor its commitment.
02:29:53 Yeah.
02:29:54 Right.
02:29:55 So the universities became psychopathic.
02:29:57 It’s not like everybody doesn’t remember what we’re supposed to be doing to be moral, but
02:30:02 the point was there wasn’t enough money to be moral.
02:30:04 So it was time to, uh, to eye each other as a source of protein, as I like to say.
02:30:11 And in that process, Jeffrey Epstein said, Hey, come to my world.
02:30:17 We can do it like we used to do.
02:30:22 So in part, my point is, is that almost none of your colleagues at MIT have that kind of
02:30:28 religious commitment to science that they’re willing to go down with ship science.
02:30:35 The Galileo Galilei thing became very important to science because occasionally you just have
02:30:41 to say, look, this isn’t about me and you, there isn’t enough money in the world to buy
02:30:48 the kind of legacy I want to leave to this planet.
02:30:53 This is one of the great things about science, you know, potentially it’s worth dying for
02:30:56 yeah.
02:31:00 I’m glad you said it.
02:31:03 Science is one of the things that is best that’s worth dying for.
02:31:08 I mean, I’m not eager to martyr myself, but I’ve certainly risked my health, my fortune,
02:31:17 you know, I’ve, I’ve destroyed myself economically over science and, um, and my, my, my, my need
02:31:26 to oppose these sons of bitches in chaired professorships who are destroying our system
02:31:30 along with everyone else.
02:31:32 Let me, um, bring in grandmaster into this.
02:31:38 Oogway, master Oogway.
02:31:41 I think he’s a grandmaster.
02:31:45 That would make him a chess playing turtle.
02:31:46 Well, I’ve read some wikipedia and she was a master.
02:31:52 There’s apparently only one grandmaster and that’s anyway, is the phrase grandmaster ever
02:31:58 uttered in the script?
02:31:59 I don’t think so.
02:32:00 I don’t think so.
02:32:01 But there’s a story.
02:32:02 Oh, there’s, there’s off off script cannon.
02:32:05 I’m going to call Glenn burger right now and find out if any of this is true.
02:32:08 All right.
02:32:09 You’re not supposed to call up my journalistic integrity, um, but master Oogway, master Oogway
02:32:16 he says a couple of things I’d like to bring up with you.
02:32:20 So one as part of a longer quote recommends, uh, that you should, uh, find a battle worth
02:32:27 fighting.
02:32:31 We’ve talked about several battles just now.
02:32:35 What is the battle worth fighting for, for Eric Weinstein in the next few months, in
02:32:42 the next year?
02:32:43 There’s only one, well, it’s, it’s the Moses, it’s the Moses thing.
02:32:52 It’s time to go.
02:32:53 It’s time to leave.
02:32:54 This place is over to get off the planet.
02:32:57 I, yeah, I, I, I freak people out when I say that, but like, look at your world.
02:33:03 You just got introduced to the problem of a virus.
02:33:06 Wait, wait till it’s fusion devices and you understand what it means to have one interconnected
02:33:11 planet with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else.
02:33:17 You know?
02:33:18 So do you see the foray, your work in physics and maybe like the echoes of it in a ship
02:33:26 Elon?
02:33:28 Everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming if we don’t have one should
02:33:34 work on the plan that he, she thinks best, right?
02:33:41 So Elon wants to do rockets.
02:33:43 People misinterpret me.
02:33:45 I meta Eric says, I don’t think that’s a smart plan.
02:33:51 Regular Eric says all people who have hope should do that thing.
02:33:59 Yeah.
02:34:00 At least it’s Mars, man, at least it’s the moon and Mars and maybe Titan and whatever.
02:34:05 And I don’t think it’ll work and it doesn’t make sense and it looks silly, but that’s
02:34:08 exactly the kind of fight worth fighting.
02:34:09 But it’s, it’s the kind of fits for the same reason that I went on Brett’s unity, 2020
02:34:14 thing when I didn’t think it had a hope in hell and people are, you know, are making
02:34:17 fun of it.
02:34:18 It’s like, we got to do things that make, that make us feel dumb and silly and childish
02:34:22 that it possibly have a hope of working.
02:34:24 Okay.
02:34:25 So everybody should do something.
02:34:27 My version of this, I am the most hopeful about because I wouldn’t have chosen to do
02:34:31 if I thought that Daniel Schmack did burgers wisdom project was a better hope.
02:34:37 I do that.
02:34:39 It’s more down to earth in a certain way.
02:34:41 I just think that it’s more probable.
02:34:43 Look, we got from a powered flight with the Wright brothers and wind tunnels to sending
02:34:49 back images from the surface of Titan via Huygens Cassini in less than a century.
02:34:55 Okay.
02:34:56 So what we can do if we can change the laws of physics is something we can’t even conceive
02:35:02 of.
02:35:03 It may be that it buys us nothing and at least we’ll, we will know why we died on this planet
02:35:11 as a small aside.
02:35:13 I think this is not the right time to take the full journey, but I feel like you’ll guide
02:35:19 me like master way did.
02:35:22 And I’m the Kung Fu Panda.
02:35:24 They only have one conversation.
02:35:27 We’re on our, like, we didn’t, we didn’t, well, we’re, we’re, we’re Jews and they weren’t.
02:35:33 So we talked too much, but the guide doesn’t have to be with words.
02:35:37 You don’t think Poe was Jewish?
02:35:40 It’s debatable.
02:35:41 We’ll have to go back to the Wikipedia.
02:35:46 Is there, um, that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source code,
02:35:55 the source code of our universe.
02:35:58 Can you comment on where, since we last spoke, where your thinking has been, has roamed around
02:36:03 geometric unity around that work in physics in this fight?
02:36:08 I’m trying to figure out when to release it and how, I mean, I’ve released the video and
02:36:15 the video, quite honestly, I think it has a very bizarre reaction.
02:36:19 I think one of the things that I’ve learned from the video, cause the video is coming
02:36:23 up on half a million views on YouTube alone to say nothing of the, um, the audio, but
02:36:31 yeah, it produced a very strange reaction.
02:36:34 One of the things I don’t think that I properly understood is that most physicists don’t talk
02:36:41 in this geometric language.
02:36:46 I thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds, bundles,
02:36:52 differential forms, connections, curvature, tensors, et cetera.
02:36:57 And I, I saw a lot of the comments would say things like, I have a PhD in theoretical physics
02:37:02 and I’m not even familiar with all of these concepts.
02:37:05 And I think that was probably a distortion coming from living in Cambridge, Massachusetts
02:37:11 for almost 20 years.
02:37:14 So what’s the solution to that?
02:37:16 Well, I mean, I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to.
02:37:21 My problem is my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge, the same
02:37:31 people have these perverse incentives on them where they’ve invested in these programs that
02:37:35 didn’t work.
02:37:36 So they’re extremely hostile and kind of difficult to deal with.
02:37:41 The fact that I’m not a physicist, um, has its own set of issues, which is that effectively
02:37:47 it’s like the hermit kingdom.
02:37:48 They don’t get any visitors and they don’t necessarily want somebody, you know, rolling
02:37:55 up and saying, I know how to do physics.
02:37:56 So I’m, I’m always very clear.
02:37:58 I’m not a physicist.
02:38:01 That said, if I wait too long, I don’t know that theoretical physics is really going to
02:38:06 exist after the boomers because everyone in you, I think you had Wolfram on your program.
02:38:12 I don’t remember whether he said this to you or Brian Keating, but he said something like
02:38:16 everybody got discouraged.
02:38:17 It was too hard.
02:38:20 Can’t do that.
02:38:21 Guys.
02:38:22 We cannot do that.
02:38:23 There’s something about the renormalization revolution that innervated the physics community
02:38:27 because it taught them just because you can see in this energy regime doesn’t mean you
02:38:31 can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how, you know, coupling constants
02:38:36 run and what kind of a UV fixed points exist, blah, blah, blah.
02:38:41 Somehow that discouraged people from guessing from believing everything became an effective
02:38:46 theory.
02:38:47 The beauty of the effective theory wasn’t taken to be really the beauty of the universe,
02:38:51 just the beauty of an energy level.
02:38:53 So I think that renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened
02:38:58 in science.
02:38:59 And also its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic.
02:39:04 Well, the story I’m telling myself is that in part I’m waiting for them to get weaker.
02:39:10 But on the other hand, I don’t know that we have any time left.
02:39:12 And so are you also thinking about ways of, uh, you know, you know, the, the podcast medium
02:39:19 is revolutionary for public for discourse for what, I mean, I don’t even know the right
02:39:24 words for it.
02:39:25 Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for re energizing the physics community?
02:39:30 So basically for communicating, look, I have a fantasy, okay?
02:39:36 My fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem.
02:39:40 And it goes back to this thing that I read about in, in Fineman’s, um, books about Tartaglia.
02:39:46 They asked him this question, like, what’s the greatest thing that ever happened in math?
02:39:50 And he says, Tartaglia is solution of the cubic.
02:39:52 It’s just like the weirdest answer.
02:39:55 So you’re like, okay, I’ll bite.
02:39:58 Why is it Tartaglia solution of the cubic?
02:40:00 And he said, because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound
02:40:04 that the ancients had failed to do.
02:40:06 I was like, Oh, I got it.
02:40:09 It’s the thing that opens up new psychology that says maybe things are possible again.
02:40:14 It’s a new orchard, new orchard, new farmers, new people who can find fruit that they can
02:40:22 pick.
02:40:23 And once you have one person do that, very often you get many, like one of the things
02:40:27 that we were talking about with Eddie Van Halen.
02:40:29 The reason that he created a revolution and somebody like Roy Buchanan did not is that
02:40:35 you could follow Eddie Van Halen.
02:40:36 You couldn’t pioneer it.
02:40:38 And maybe you couldn’t play as well and as cleanly and as fast and as inventively, but
02:40:42 you could follow once you understand that there is a tapping principle.
02:40:47 It was just the beginning of something called percussive guitar.
02:40:53 My belief is that once we start innovating in the present, everything will come because
02:41:00 everything that around us is screwed up on that.
02:41:04 Let me with one last question, bring back master Oogway, the probably the most famous
02:41:10 quote of his, right, with yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, but today is a gift.
02:41:17 That is why it is called the present.
02:41:20 It’s very beautiful.
02:41:21 Although I would have gone with quit, don’t quit, noodles, don’t noodles.
02:41:27 I feel like people need to know way too much context for that to make sense.
02:41:33 It’s your audience.
02:41:34 To hell with context.
02:41:35 Yep.
02:41:36 They’ll figure it out.
02:41:37 Let me ask, what are you grateful for today?
02:41:41 What is your present?
02:41:44 We’ve talked about a lot of dark things, but what brings you joy to your heart that I can’t
02:41:52 believe I’m lucky enough to have this?
02:41:55 You know, Nyla and Zev, my wife, Pia, the fact that we’ve got our health, all the little
02:42:04 things, saying grace after meals.
02:42:08 You’re coming over for Friday night Shabbat dinner, so we’ll bench together and say grace.
02:42:13 It’s important to just, like this bottle of water in front of me, I made a point of just
02:42:23 thinking about how wonderful it is that there’s a quenching bottle that happens to be placed
02:42:27 in front of me because somebody cared.
02:42:30 That small thing made a difference to me.
02:42:37 I still have strength for the fight so far.
02:42:40 I think that’s something I’m grateful for.
02:42:43 I can’t believe that I’m not more beaten down after all of this nonsense.
02:42:51 I have the most interesting set of friends.
02:42:54 I really do.
02:42:56 I’m not that rich by monetary standards, but if there were friend billionaires, Forbes
02:43:01 would be all over my ass.
02:43:07 I just can’t believe who I can talk to, you know, at the drop of a hat.
02:43:12 And I’m really grateful.
02:43:22 I think this is the end of something profound, and it’s the beginning of whatever is next.
02:43:28 And whatever is next could be terminal.
02:43:30 Whatever is next could be amazing.
02:43:32 Whatever is next could be a return to the horrors of the early 20th century that doesn’t
02:43:37 manage to go totally catastrophic, but takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
02:43:45 I’m grateful to having half of my life in the rearview mirror.
02:43:50 Maybe it took place in a bubble, and maybe it was unsustainable.
02:43:54 But it was nice to be able to move around the world without a mask.
02:44:00 It was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world, even if it was from a cot in
02:44:05 a hostel in some country.
02:44:09 To fall in love.
02:44:10 Absolutely.
02:44:11 It was a good life.
02:44:15 Find the last Indian Jewish girl left.
02:44:17 Who knew?
02:44:19 You’re a lucky guy.
02:44:21 Well, let me just say…
02:44:23 Actually, there’s something I wanted to just say before you get to that.
02:44:26 I forgot to say something.
02:44:29 Falling in love with an intellectual collaborator is a special thing that not everybody gets
02:44:34 a chance to do.
02:44:36 I think when I met Pia, I fell deeply in love with her, all her normal characteristics.
02:44:44 Pia and I had an antagonistic relationship around geometry and economics.
02:44:50 And then weirdly, just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film they hate
02:44:55 each other, the two fields were fighting with each other, cats and dogs, and finally the
02:45:01 sexual tension clearly was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
02:45:04 And we came up with geometric marginalism, which is this other theory, not geometric
02:45:08 unity, which allowed me to inhabit space with somebody who I already knew intimately and
02:45:18 had fallen in love with, and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play and to
02:45:23 dance.
02:45:24 It’s sort of the intellectual version of the tango, one of the most romantic periods
02:45:29 of my life that doesn’t fall into most people’s experience.
02:45:32 So that was a chance to see something totally unexpected, haven’t really had it since
02:45:38 because she doesn’t want to revisit the material, but something I’m super grateful for that’s
02:45:42 very particular and unique.
02:45:45 But to flip the tables on you, for hundreds of thousands, I think millions of people,
02:45:53 I can speak, me and them are really grateful, one, that you exist, and two, sorry, for your
02:46:02 podcast and I do hope your voice in some form continues to reverberate, I think, at least
02:46:14 in the 2021s and beyond, even if it takes a brief pause.
02:46:19 We’re pausing at the moment.
02:46:21 We’ve recorded some for future episodes and I’m recording for you.
02:46:26 I really appreciate that.
02:46:28 But earnestness trades at a discount at the moment because it’s easy to make fun of it.
02:46:34 One of the things I like best about you is that you and I are both fairly earnest.
02:46:38 We may joke and jab, but honestly, there’s a project here and a world to win, as they
02:46:43 say.
02:46:45 The thing that I want my and your listeners to know is that I’m not stepping away from
02:46:52 the podcast because I don’t appreciate that people really want more.
02:47:01 This is hugely financially costly to me.
02:47:05 I want to make sure you guys are getting the best that I can do, and destroying myself
02:47:12 right in front of an election, I think Lex is incorrect.
02:47:16 I think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren’t any planes in
02:47:20 the sky that aren’t either colored red or colored blue is a big danger given how angry
02:47:27 I am at the system.
02:47:29 I don’t want to be removed from the chess board because if nobody’s going to talk about
02:47:32 Jeff Epstein, there need to be people.
02:47:33 If nobody’s going to talk about various things that we’ve talked about on these programs,
02:47:38 I want to make sure that I’m there.
02:47:39 Do I think that this is potentially an existential election?
02:47:42 Yes.
02:47:43 Am I positive that I know that my way to bet is the right way out?
02:47:45 No, I’m not.
02:47:47 I don’t know, people.
02:47:48 I just don’t know.
02:47:49 Where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms of how it is chewing
02:47:55 up smart people that I decided it’s really not about cowardice because it’s hard for
02:48:03 me to restrain myself.
02:48:04 I have so many reactions every day.
02:48:07 This is really about trying to plan for all of our futures to make sure that I’m around.
02:48:12 I had a huge concern that what happened to Brett’s Articles of Unity was going to happen
02:48:16 to Brett.
02:48:17 It was going to happen to the YouTube channels.
02:48:19 I want to make sure that we don’t have all of our eggs in one basket.
02:48:22 So if something goes wrong over there, that’s the whole idea of the intellectual dark web,
02:48:27 which is at some level a loose confederation.
02:48:31 It can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work.
02:48:35 It can dissolve so that there really isn’t anything.
02:48:40 The thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately, when the hit pieces come, they don’t come
02:48:46 for what it is that they’re angry at you about.
02:48:48 They come for where they can get you.
02:48:51 It’s very important that right in front of an election, the desire of the old system
02:48:59 to defend itself through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects of the
02:49:06 new America.
02:49:07 We have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions keeping individuals
02:49:14 with podcasts and the ability to reach millions through Substack out of their domain.
02:49:20 I don’t surrender this domain to them.
02:49:22 They have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us, and I believe that they could remove
02:49:26 you or me in an instant.
02:49:28 By the end of today, if they wanted us off the chessboard, we would be off the chessboard.
02:49:32 I know that’s not your perspective.
02:49:34 My goal is to stay here as long as possible to make sure that you have enough of a counterbalancing
02:49:41 set of ideas and to let and help other podcasters start.
02:49:48 My hope is that that works, but long heroism, short martyrdom is a good motto for anyone,
02:49:56 and I try to remember the short martyrdom part of that.
02:50:01 First of all, beautifully put.
02:50:03 Second of all, a way to end the conversation and the disagreement, which is how you hook
02:50:08 them for the next conversation to be continued.
02:50:11 And Lex says …
02:50:12 Eric, it’s a huge honor.
02:50:15 Thank you once again.
02:50:16 Lex, really appreciate it every time we get together.
02:50:19 Thanks, buddy.
02:50:20 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein, and thank you to our
02:50:24 sponsors.
02:50:25 Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure
02:50:30 and readability.
02:50:31 Sunbasket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety to my culinary life.
02:50:37 SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I’ve ever come across.
02:50:43 I don’t like looking at numbers, but someone should.
02:50:46 It helps you make good decisions.
02:50:48 And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I’ve used for many years to protect my privacy on the
02:50:54 internet.
02:50:55 Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
02:51:00 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast,
02:51:06 go on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman.
02:51:12 And now, let me leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen in the song titled, Hallelujah.
02:51:18 Well, maybe there’s a God above, but all I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot
02:51:24 somebody who outdrew you.
02:51:27 And it’s not a cry that you hear at night, it’s not somebody who’s seen the light,
02:51:32 it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.
02:51:37 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.