Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics #163

Transcript

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

00:00:03 his fourth time on the podcast.

00:00:05 Both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind,

00:00:10 and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being

00:00:13 who I am fortunate to call a friend.

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00:00:32 As a side note, let me ask

00:00:34 that whenever we touch difficult topics in this

00:00:36 or other conversations, that you listen with an open mind

00:00:40 and forgive me or the guest for a misstep

00:00:43 in an imperfectly thought out statement.

00:00:46 To have any chance at truth,

00:00:48 I think we have to take risks

00:00:50 and make mistakes in conversation

00:00:52 and then learn from those mistakes.

00:00:54 Please try not to close your mind and heart to others

00:00:57 because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea.

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

00:01:03 or just people in general are good,

00:01:06 but not perfect and far from it,

00:01:08 but always striving to add a bit more love into the world

00:01:11 in whatever way we know how.

00:01:14 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

00:01:17 review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,

00:01:20 support it on Patreon,

00:01:21 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

00:01:24 And now here’s my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

00:01:29 You often talk about getting off this planet

00:01:32 and I think you don’t often talk

00:01:35 about extra terrestrial life, intelligent life out there.

00:01:41 Do you wonder about this kind of thing,

00:01:42 about intelligent civilizations out there?

00:01:44 I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way.

00:01:50 In a certain sense, I do find that speculating

00:01:53 about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens

00:01:55 is kind of a recreation

00:01:57 for when things aren’t going very well.

00:02:00 At least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives.

00:02:03 So I worry about, for example,

00:02:06 the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion.

00:02:09 You can’t quite believe enough to go to church

00:02:11 or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend,

00:02:14 so then you just take up an interest in simulation theory

00:02:17 because that’s something like what you do

00:02:19 for your job coding.

00:02:21 I do think that in some sense,

00:02:23 the issue of aliens is a really interesting one,

00:02:26 but has been spoiled by too much

00:02:28 sort of recreational escapism.

00:02:32 The key question that I find is let’s assume

00:02:36 that it is possible to look out at the night sky

00:02:40 and see all of these distant worlds and then go visit them.

00:02:43 If that is possible, it’s almost certainly possible

00:02:46 through some as yet unknown or not accepted theory

00:02:52 of physics beyond Einstein.

00:02:55 And I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way, but probably is.

00:03:00 If that theory exists, there would be a percentage

00:03:04 of the worlds that have life

00:03:05 in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way

00:03:07 that would have encountered the ability to escape

00:03:11 soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom

00:03:17 at a minimum and whatever they have

00:03:19 that is probably analogous to the cell on that world.

00:03:24 So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing

00:03:29 that arises, probably not carbon based,

00:03:32 probably doesn’t have DNA,

00:03:33 but that something that fits the pattern

00:03:37 of Darwinian theory, which is descent with variation,

00:03:43 differential success.

00:03:45 And thereby constantly improving and so on

00:03:47 that through time, there’ll be a trajectory

00:03:50 where there’ll be something increasingly complex

00:03:53 and fascinating and beautiful like us humans, but much more.

00:03:56 That can also off gas whatever entropy it creates

00:03:59 to give an illusion that you’re defeating thermodynamics.

00:04:03 So whatever these things are probably has an analog

00:04:05 of the biolipid layer so that cells can get rid

00:04:08 of the chaos on one side of the barrier

00:04:11 and keep order on the other.

00:04:12 Whatever these things are that create life,

00:04:15 assuming that there is a theory to be found

00:04:17 that allows that civilization to diversify,

00:04:22 we would have to imagine that such a civilization

00:04:26 might have taken an interest in its concept

00:04:29 of the universe and have come here.

00:04:31 They would come here, they would have a deep understanding

00:04:36 of the physics of the universe sufficient

00:04:38 to have arrived here.

00:04:40 Well, there’s two questions,

00:04:41 whether they could arrive physically

00:04:43 and whether their information could be sent here

00:04:47 and whether they could gain information from us.

00:04:50 It’s possible that they would have a way

00:04:53 of looking into our world without actually reaching it.

00:04:57 I don’t know.

00:04:58 But yes, if my hope, which is that we can escape this world,

00:05:04 can be realized, if that’s feasible,

00:05:07 then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true

00:05:10 and that somebody else should be here.

00:05:15 First of all, I wanna say this.

00:05:17 My purpose when I come on to your show

00:05:19 and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you.

00:05:24 I can sit inside all of those.

00:05:26 It’s to give you better audio and video

00:05:27 because I think we’ve been on an incredible role.

00:05:29 I really love what you do.

00:05:31 And so I am trying to honor you by being as disagreeable

00:05:35 about frame breaking as possible.

00:05:36 I think some of your listeners don’t understand

00:05:38 that it’s actually a sign of respect

00:05:40 as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic,

00:05:43 which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames

00:05:46 and that these are sort of offerings

00:05:48 to get the conversation started.

00:05:49 So let me try to break that frame

00:05:51 and give you something different.

00:05:52 Beautiful.

00:05:53 I think what’s going on here is that I can prove effectively

00:06:00 that we’re not thinking about this in very deep terms.

00:06:03 As soon as I say we’ve gotta get off this planet,

00:06:05 the number of people who assume

00:06:07 that I’m talking about faster than light travel is very high

00:06:12 and faster than light travel assumes some sort

00:06:15 of Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken

00:06:20 by some small adjustment.

00:06:22 And I think that that’s fascinating.

00:06:24 It shows me that our failure to imagine

00:06:27 what could be being said is profound.

00:06:30 We don’t have an idea of all of the different ways

00:06:35 in which we might be able to visit distant worlds.

00:06:40 All we think about is, okay,

00:06:42 it must be Einsteinian space times

00:06:45 and then some means of exceeding the speed limit.

00:06:48 And it’s just, it’s fascinating to me

00:06:50 that we don’t really have, we’ve lost the ability

00:06:55 to just realize we don’t know the framework

00:06:59 and what does it even mean?

00:07:01 So one of the things I think about a lot

00:07:03 is worlds with more than one temporal dimension.

00:07:06 It’s very hard to think about

00:07:08 more than one temporal dimension.

00:07:10 So that’s a really strong mental exercise

00:07:14 of breaking the framework in which we think

00:07:17 because most of the frameworks

00:07:18 would have a single temporal dimension, right?

00:07:20 Well, first of all, most of the frameworks

00:07:22 in which we think would have no temporal dimension

00:07:25 would have pure, like in mathematics,

00:07:27 the differential geometry that Riemann came up with

00:07:30 in the 1800s.

00:07:32 We don’t usually talk about

00:07:35 what we would call split signature metrics

00:07:37 or Lorentzian signature.

00:07:39 In fact, if it weren’t for relativity,

00:07:41 this would be the most obscure topic out there.

00:07:45 Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature

00:07:48 and then there’s this one freakish case

00:07:50 of relativity theory in physics

00:07:52 that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions.

00:07:56 Fascinating.

00:07:57 So it’s usually momentary and just looking at space.

00:08:01 Yes, we have these three kinds of equations

00:08:05 that are very important to us.

00:08:06 We have elliptic, hyperbolic and parabolic, right?

00:08:11 And so the idea is if I’m chewing gum

00:08:15 after eating garlic bread, when I open my mouth

00:08:20 and I’ve got chewing gum between my lips,

00:08:23 maybe it’s gonna form an elliptic object

00:08:27 called a minimal surface.

00:08:29 Then when I pop that and blow through it,

00:08:31 you’re gonna hear a noise that’s gonna travel to you

00:08:33 by a wave equation, which is gonna be hyperbolic.

00:08:36 But then the garlic breath is gonna diffuse towards you

00:08:38 and you’re eventually gonna be very upset with me

00:08:41 according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic.

00:08:44 So those are the three basic paradigms

00:08:46 for most of the work that we do.

00:08:48 And a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is elliptic,

00:08:52 whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case.

00:08:54 And I don’t even know what to do

00:08:55 about more than one temporal dimension

00:08:57 because I think almost no one studies that.

00:08:59 I can’t believe you just captured much of modern physics

00:09:04 in the example of chewing gum.

00:09:05 Well, I have an off color one, which I chose not to share,

00:09:08 but hopefully the kids at home can imagine.

00:09:11 Okay, so, okay, that is the place where we come from.

00:09:16 Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility

00:09:19 of breaking the frameworks with two

00:09:22 versus zero temporal dimensions,

00:09:25 how do we even begin to think about that?

00:09:27 Well, let’s think about it as you and I getting together

00:09:29 in New York City, okay?

00:09:31 So if you tell me, Eric, I wanna meet you in New York City,

00:09:36 go to the corner of, I don’t know, 34th Street

00:09:41 and Third Avenue, and you’ll find a building

00:09:43 on the Northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor, right?

00:09:48 So when we have Third Avenue, that’s one coordinate,

00:09:51 34th Street, that’s the second coordinate,

00:09:53 and go up to the 17th.

00:09:55 And what time is it?

00:09:56 Oh, 12 noon.

00:09:58 All right, well, now imagine that we traded the ability

00:10:01 to get up to a particular height in a building

00:10:03 and it’s all flat land,

00:10:05 but I’m gonna give you two temporal coordinates.

00:10:07 So meet me at 5 p.m. and 12 noon

00:10:11 at the corner of 34th and Third.

00:10:13 That gets to be too mind blowing.

00:10:15 I’ve got two separate watches.

00:10:17 And presumably that’s just specifying a single point

00:10:20 in those two different dimensions,

00:10:22 but then being able to travel along those dimensions.

00:10:25 Let me see your right hand.

00:10:28 You have no watch on that.

00:10:30 No.

00:10:31 Okay, I’m very concerned, Lex,

00:10:32 that you’re going through life without a wristwatch.

00:10:36 That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch.

00:10:39 I want you to wear it.

00:10:40 This guy is funnier than basically any human on Earth.

00:10:45 Lex, that has been in my family for months.

00:10:49 It’s a Fitbit.

00:10:51 Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman

00:10:53 is now in a position to live in two spatial

00:10:57 and two temporal dimensions unlike the rest of us.

00:11:00 I clearly am only fit for four spatial dimensions.

00:11:04 So I’m frozen, whereas you can double move.

00:11:07 I can double move, which is funny

00:11:09 because this is set in Austin time.

00:11:12 So it’s 4 p.m. and this is set in Los Angeles time.

00:11:16 Well, but that’s just with an affine shift in mod 12.

00:11:18 But my point is, wouldn’t that be interesting

00:11:22 if there were two separate time scales

00:11:23 and you had to coordinate both of those,

00:11:25 but you didn’t have to worry about what floor

00:11:27 of the building because everything was on the ground floor.

00:11:30 That is the confusion that we’re having.

00:11:33 And if you do one more show, right,

00:11:36 then they’re gonna put a watch on your ankle

00:11:38 and you’re only gonna have one spatial dimension

00:11:40 that you can move around.

00:11:41 But my claim is that all of these are actually sectors

00:11:45 of my theory in case we’re interested in that,

00:11:48 which is geometric unity.

00:11:50 There is a two, two sector and a three, one and a one, three

00:11:53 and a zero, four and a four, zero.

00:11:55 And all of these sectors have some physical reality.

00:11:58 We happen to live in a one, three sector.

00:12:01 But that’s the kind of thinking that we don’t do.

00:12:04 When I say we have to get off this planet,

00:12:06 people imagine, oh, okay, it’s just Einstein

00:12:08 plus some ability to break the law.

00:12:10 By the way, even though you did this for humor’s sake,

00:12:14 I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin who.

00:12:19 Am I gonna get whacked?

00:12:20 No, not quite.

00:12:23 But he was given a Super Bowl ring to look at

00:12:27 and he, instead of just looking at it,

00:12:29 put it on his finger and walked away with it.

00:12:32 Rubbercraft?

00:12:33 Rubbercraft, that’s right.

00:12:34 So in the same way, I will, if you don’t mind,

00:12:38 walk away with this Fitbit

00:12:39 and taking the entirety of your life story with it

00:12:42 because there’s all these steps on it.

00:12:43 Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.

00:12:45 And where have I been?

00:12:49 Exactly.

00:12:50 Right, that’s what we’re talking about.

00:12:52 We’re talking about, you wanna get into aliens,

00:12:53 let’s have an interesting alien conversation.

00:12:55 Let’s stop having the typical free will conversation,

00:12:58 the typical alien conversation,

00:13:00 the typical AGI morality conversation.

00:13:02 It’s like, we have to recognize that we’re amusing ourselves

00:13:05 because we’re not making progress.

00:13:07 Time to have better versions of all these conversations.

00:13:10 Is there some version of the alien conversation

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

00:13:15 Well, I think so.

00:13:16 I mean, the key question would be,

00:13:18 we’ve had the Pentagon release multiple videos

00:13:21 of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us.

00:13:25 I just think it’s also really fascinating

00:13:26 to talk about the fact that those of us

00:13:29 who were trained to call BS on all of this stuff

00:13:33 just had the rug pulled out from under us

00:13:35 by the Pentagon choosing to do this.

00:13:36 And you know what the effect of that is?

00:13:38 You’ve opened the door for every stupid theory known to man.

00:13:44 My aunt saw a ghost.

00:13:46 Okay, now we’re gonna have to listen to,

00:13:48 well, hey, the Pentagon used to deny it.

00:13:51 Then it turned out there were UFOs, dude.

00:13:53 Whoever is in charge of lying to the public,

00:13:58 they need a cost function that incorporates

00:14:01 the damage and trust because I held this line

00:14:04 that this was all garbage and all BS.

00:14:07 Now I don’t know what to think.

00:14:09 There’s a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion,

00:14:11 the breaking of frameworks that involves

00:14:13 the release of videos from the Pentagon,

00:14:15 which is almost like another dimension

00:14:18 that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information

00:14:21 is a kind of dimension along which we’re traveling

00:14:24 constantly that is messing with my head to think about

00:14:29 because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that

00:14:35 into your study of the nature of reality

00:14:38 is like the constant shifting of the notation,

00:14:43 the tools we use to communicate that reality.

00:14:45 And so what am I supposed to think about these videos?

00:14:48 Is it a complete distraction?

00:14:51 Is it a kind of cosmic joke?

00:14:53 I don’t know, but you know what?

00:14:54 I’m tired of these people,

00:14:55 just completely tired of these people.

00:14:57 The people on the Pentagon side

00:14:59 or the people who are interpreting this stuff

00:15:00 on the Pentagon side?

00:15:01 I’m tired of the authorities playing games

00:15:05 with what we can know.

00:15:08 The fact that you and I don’t,

00:15:09 do you have a security clearance?

00:15:11 Some level of it for,

00:15:13 because I was funded for DARPA for a while.

00:15:15 I don’t have a security clearance.

00:15:17 You know, I am going to release whatever theory I have.

00:15:21 And my guess is that there is zero interest

00:15:23 from our own government.

00:15:26 And so the Chinese will find out about it at the same time,

00:15:29 our government does,

00:15:30 because Lord knows what they do in these buildings.

00:15:33 I watch crazy people walk in and out

00:15:36 of the intelligence community, walk in and out of DARPA.

00:15:39 And I think, wow, you’re talking to that person?

00:15:43 That’s really fascinating to me.

00:15:45 We don’t seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.

00:15:48 Complete lack of transparency.

00:15:50 Do you think it’s possible there’s,

00:15:52 the government is in possession

00:15:54 of something deeply fundamental

00:15:57 to our understanding of the world

00:15:58 that they’re not releasing?

00:16:00 So this is one of the things is,

00:16:02 this is one of the famous distractions

00:16:05 that people play with, the narrative.

00:16:06 Assume that that were true.

00:16:08 Of alien life forms and spacecraft in possession,

00:16:12 that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft.

00:16:15 Assume that were true.

00:16:17 I don’t think the government really exists at the moment.

00:16:21 I believe, and this is not an idea that was original to me.

00:16:24 There was a guy named Michael Teitelbaum

00:16:26 who used to be at the Sloan Foundation.

00:16:28 And at some point I pointed out that the US government

00:16:31 had completely contradictory objectives

00:16:33 when it came to the military and science.

00:16:36 And one branch said this, one branch said that.

00:16:38 I said, I don’t understand which is true.

00:16:40 What does the government want?

00:16:41 He said, do you think there’s a government?

00:16:43 And I said, what do you mean?

00:16:45 He said, what makes you think that the people

00:16:47 in those two offices have ever coordinated?

00:16:51 What is it that allows each office

00:16:54 to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office?

00:16:57 And that’s when I first started to understand

00:16:59 that there are periods where the government coheres,

00:17:02 and then there are periods where the coherence just decays.

00:17:04 And I think that that’s been going on since 1945.

00:17:07 That there have been a few places

00:17:09 where there’s been increased coherence,

00:17:10 but in general everything is just getting

00:17:12 less and less coherent.

00:17:13 And that what war did was focus us on the need

00:17:17 to have a government of people, a mission,

00:17:20 capacity, technology, commitment, ideology.

00:17:23 And then as soon as that was gone,

00:17:27 different people, those who’d been through World War II

00:17:30 had one set of beliefs, those born in the 1950s

00:17:34 or late 40s by the time they got to Woodstock,

00:17:38 they didn’t buy any of that.

00:17:39 So coherence is the complete opposite

00:17:42 of bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy.

00:17:48 So coherence is efficient, functional government.

00:17:52 Because when you say there’s no government,

00:17:54 meaning there’s no emergent function

00:17:58 from a collection of individuals.

00:18:00 It’s just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices

00:18:03 without any kind of efficient communication

00:18:05 with each other on a single mission.

00:18:07 And so a government that is truly at the epitome

00:18:12 of what a government is supposed to be

00:18:14 is when a bunch of people working together.

00:18:16 What are we about?

00:18:17 Are we about freedom?

00:18:17 Are we about growth?

00:18:19 Are we about decency and fairness?

00:18:22 Are we about the absence of a national culture

00:18:24 so that we can all just do our own thing?

00:18:26 I’ve called this thing the USA and the United States

00:18:29 have absolutely nothing.

00:18:31 These are all different visions for our country.

00:18:35 So it’s possible that there’s a alien spacecraft somewhere

00:18:39 and there’s like 20 people that know about it.

00:18:42 And then they’re kind of like,

00:18:44 as you communicate further and further into the offices,

00:18:47 that information dissipates,

00:18:48 it gets distorted in some kind of way.

00:18:50 And then it’s completely lost the power,

00:18:52 the possibility of that information is lost.

00:18:55 We bought a house and I had this idea

00:18:57 that I wanted to find out what all the switches did.

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

00:19:03 doesn’t keep updating its plans.

00:19:05 As people do modifications,

00:19:07 they just do the modifications

00:19:08 and they don’t actually record

00:19:10 why they were doing what they were doing

00:19:11 or what things lead to.

00:19:12 So there are all sorts of bizarre,

00:19:14 like there’s a switch in my house that says privacy.

00:19:17 I don’t know what privacy is.

00:19:20 Does it turn on an electromagnetic field?

00:19:22 Does some lead shielding go over the house?

00:19:27 That’s what we have.

00:19:28 We have a system in which the people

00:19:30 who’ve inherited these structures have no idea

00:19:32 why their grandparents built them.

00:19:34 I’d be funny if there’s a freedom of speech switch

00:19:37 that you could also control.

00:19:38 And there’d be a perfect metaphor.

00:19:39 Well, that’s different because what they figured out is,

00:19:42 is that if they can just make sure

00:19:44 that we don’t have any public options for communication,

00:19:48 then hey, everything that we say to each other

00:19:52 goes through a private company,

00:19:53 private companies can do whatever they want.

00:19:55 And this is like one of the greatest moves

00:19:57 that we didn’t really notice.

00:20:00 Electronic and digital speech

00:20:01 makes every other kind of speech irrelevant.

00:20:04 And because there is no public option, guess what?

00:20:08 There’s always somebody named Sundar or Jack or Mark

00:20:12 who controls whether or not you can speak

00:20:15 and what it appears to be that is being said

00:20:17 and whose stuff is weighted more highly than others.

00:20:20 It’s an absolute nightmare.

00:20:22 And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite,

00:20:26 Lord knows what is going on.

00:20:28 People are so busy making money

00:20:30 that they are not actually upholding any of the values.

00:20:34 So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally against,

00:20:36 it has this kind of libertarian, free, progressive sheen

00:20:42 to it when it goes to Burning Man.

00:20:44 And then it quickly just imposes rules

00:20:46 on all of the rest of us as to what we could say

00:20:48 to each other if we’re not part of the inner elite.

00:20:51 So what do you think the ideal

00:20:53 of the freedom of speech means?

00:20:55 Well, this is very interesting.

00:20:57 I keep getting lectured on social media

00:20:59 by people who have no idea how much power

00:21:01 the Supreme Court has to abstract things.

00:21:04 Right now, you have the concept of the letter of the law

00:21:07 and the spirit of the law.

00:21:09 And the spirit of the law would have to say

00:21:12 that our speech that matters is free,

00:21:14 at least at the level of ideas.

00:21:16 I don’t claim that I have the right

00:21:17 to endanger your life with speech

00:21:19 or to reveal your private information.

00:21:22 So I really am not opining about directed speech

00:21:25 intended to smear you.

00:21:27 And that’s a different kettle of fish.

00:21:30 And maybe I have some rights to do that,

00:21:31 but I don’t think that they’re infinite.

00:21:34 What I am saying is that the freedom of speech for ideas

00:21:41 is essential that the court abstract it

00:21:43 and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter,

00:21:48 Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are

00:21:52 because it really matters which abstraction you use.

00:21:56 The case that I really like is search and seizure.

00:21:59 If I have private data that I entered in my house

00:22:02 that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house,

00:22:07 but I view is the abstraction

00:22:09 that it’s only the perimeter of my house

00:22:12 that I have the right to protect,

00:22:13 or does my password extend the perimeter of my house

00:22:18 to the data on the server

00:22:20 that is located outside of my house?

00:22:22 These are choices for the court, and the court is supposed

00:22:26 to pretend that they can divine the true intent

00:22:29 of the framers.

00:22:30 But all of the sort of, and I’ve taken to calling this

00:22:33 the problem of internet hyenas,

00:22:35 people with readymade answers and LOLs,

00:22:37 and you’re such a moron.

00:22:39 These folks love to remind you, it’s a private company,

00:22:42 dude, it can do whatever it wants.

00:22:44 No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are.

00:22:48 And just the way, for example,

00:22:50 the Griswold decision found that there was a penumbra

00:22:54 because there was too little in the Constitution,

00:22:56 therefore there were all sorts of things implied

00:22:58 that couldn’t be in the document.

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

00:23:04 that says Jack cannot do it if he wants.

00:23:09 It’s really, so you say the courts,

00:23:11 but it’s also us, people who think about the world,

00:23:15 it’s you. No, no, no.

00:23:16 It’s the courts.

00:23:17 But the courts don’t do this.

00:23:19 We’re toast.

00:23:20 But we can still think about it.

00:23:22 I mean, I’ll…

00:23:23 Sure, but I don’t feel like going down the drain.

00:23:25 Here’s what I’m thinking about,

00:23:26 because it’s tricky how far it should extend.

00:23:29 I mean, that’s an ongoing conversation.

00:23:31 Don’t you think the interpretation of the law…

00:23:34 I think I’m trying to say something very simple,

00:23:36 and it’s just not gonna be popular for a while.

00:23:41 Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication.

00:23:46 Print or shouting in a public park.

00:23:48 And so I can go to a public park

00:23:51 and I can shout if I get a permit.

00:23:53 Even there, I think it was in the late 1980s in Atlanta,

00:23:56 we came up with free speech zones

00:23:58 where you can’t protest at a convention.

00:23:59 You bet you can go to a park 23 miles out

00:24:02 and they’ll fence off a little area

00:24:04 where you can have your free speech.

00:24:07 No, speech is dangerous.

00:24:09 Ideas are dangerous.

00:24:10 We are a country about danger and risk.

00:24:13 And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals

00:24:17 trying to reveal their private stuff

00:24:19 and all that kind of…

00:24:20 That is very different.

00:24:21 So forget a lot of that stuff.

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

00:24:28 and people will die as a result of free speech.

00:24:31 The idea that one life is too much is preposterous.

00:24:35 Like why did we send…

00:24:36 If one life is preposterous,

00:24:38 why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy?

00:24:39 I just don’t get this.

00:24:41 So one thing that I was clearly bothered by,

00:24:45 and maybe you can be my therapist as well.

00:24:49 I thought you were mine.

00:24:50 This is a little bit of a miscommunication

00:24:53 on both of our parts then.

00:24:57 Because who’s paying who for this?

00:25:00 I was really bothered by Amazon banning Parler from AWS

00:25:06 because my assumption was that the infrastructure…

00:25:11 I drew a distinction between AWS,

00:25:14 the infrastructure on which competing platforms

00:25:18 could be created is different than the actual platforms.

00:25:24 So the standard of the ideal of freedom of speech,

00:25:28 I, in my mind, in a shallow way perhaps,

00:25:31 applied differently to AWS than I did to Twitter.

00:25:36 It felt that we’ve created a more dangerous world,

00:25:41 that freedoms were violated by banning Parler from AWS,

00:25:46 which I saw as the computing infrastructure

00:25:48 which enables the competition of tools,

00:25:50 the competition of frameworks of communication.

00:25:54 What do you think about this?

00:25:56 First of all, let me give you the internet hyena answer.

00:26:00 I don’t understand, dude, just build your own Amazon.

00:26:03 Yeah. Right?

00:26:04 Yes. Well, so that’s a very shallow statement,

00:26:07 but it’s also one that has some legitimacy.

00:26:10 We can’t completely dismiss it

00:26:12 because there’s levels to this game.

00:26:16 Yes and no, but if you really wanted to chase that down,

00:26:19 one of the great things about a person to person conversation

00:26:22 as opposed to let’s have 30 of our closest friends,

00:26:25 whenever we have a conversation

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

00:26:29 It’s like passing light through a prism.

00:26:31 Every person says something interesting.

00:26:34 And as a result, it’s always muddled.

00:26:36 Nothing ever resolves.

00:26:38 Well, one of my conversational techniques you mentioned,

00:26:42 you pushed back is first this childlike naivety

00:26:46 and curiosity, but also.

00:26:49 Real or simulated?

00:26:50 Real, I’m afraid.

00:26:51 I would say 80% real.

00:26:53 All right.

00:26:54 So in this paradigm, how could you not see this coming?

00:26:58 I mean, I did a show with Ashley Matthews,

00:27:01 who’s the woman behind Riley Reid.

00:27:03 And specifically about this, it was about the idea

00:27:06 that if I move away from politics and go towards sex,

00:27:10 I know that there’s always a move to use the infrastructure

00:27:14 to shut down sex workers.

00:27:18 And in this case, we had Operation Choke Point

00:27:21 under the Obama administration.

00:27:24 We have a positive passion for people

00:27:28 who want to solve problems,

00:27:30 that they don’t like this company,

00:27:31 they don’t like that company,

00:27:32 payday loans would be another one.

00:27:35 And so you have legal companies

00:27:37 that are harassed by our financial system

00:27:39 that you can’t, as Riley Reid,

00:27:44 Ashley couldn’t get a Mailchimp account according to her,

00:27:47 if I understand her correctly.

00:27:49 And this idea that you charge these people higher rates

00:27:53 because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards,

00:27:56 even if their chargebacks are low.

00:27:59 Yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment.

00:28:02 There’s something about everybody who shows up at Davos,

00:28:07 they get drunk in the Swiss Alps,

00:28:09 and then they come back home and they coordinate,

00:28:12 and they coordinate things like Build Back Better.

00:28:15 We don’t really understand what Build Back Better is,

00:28:17 but my guess is that Build Back Better

00:28:19 has to do with extremism in America.

00:28:21 How do we shut down the Republican Party

00:28:24 as the source of extremism?

00:28:26 Now, I do think the Republican Party

00:28:28 got very extreme under Trump.

00:28:30 And I do believe that that was responsive

00:28:32 to how extreme the Democratic Party got under Clinton first

00:28:38 and then Obama and then Hillary.

00:28:42 And in all of these circumstances,

00:28:44 it’s amazing how much we want

00:28:46 to wield these things as weapons.

00:28:48 Well, our extremism is fine

00:28:50 because we pretend that Antifa doesn’t exist

00:28:53 and we don’t report what goes on in Portland,

00:28:55 but your extremism, my God, that’s disgusting.

00:28:59 This is the completely ridiculous place that we’re in.

00:29:02 And by the way, our friends in part

00:29:07 are coked up on tech money,

00:29:08 and they don’t appear to hold the courage

00:29:12 of their convictions at a political level

00:29:14 because it’s not in keeping with shareholder value.

00:29:18 At some level, shareholder value is the ultimate shield

00:29:21 with which everyone can cloak themselves.

00:29:24 Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter,

00:29:29 and I’m not sure it was a good financial decision

00:29:32 for Twitter, right?

00:29:35 Perhaps you can correct me if I’m wrong.

00:29:37 Well, are you thinking locally,

00:29:38 or are you thinking if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump,

00:29:43 what is the odds that the full force

00:29:45 of the antitrust division might find them?

00:29:47 I don’t know.

00:29:48 Oh, I see, I see.

00:29:49 So there’s a complicated thing.

00:29:51 Well, look, these guys are all having a discussion

00:29:55 in very practical terms.

00:29:56 You can imagine the sorts of things

00:29:58 and imagine the sorts of conversation.

00:30:01 Jack, Mark, Zunder, we’re really glad you’re all here.

00:30:03 We’re all trying to sing from the same hymnal

00:30:06 and row in the same direction.

00:30:08 We understand free speech.

00:30:09 We’re completely committed to it,

00:30:11 but we have to draw a line with extremism, guys.

00:30:13 We just need to make sure that we’re all on the same page.

00:30:17 Well, they use the term violence, too,

00:30:19 and they, I think, over apply it.

00:30:21 So basically, anybody…

00:30:23 I’m telling you, I say dumb things

00:30:30 to incentivize thoughtful conversation.

00:30:34 Well, whatever these things are, there is no trace.

00:30:38 Like, how old are you, Lex?

00:30:39 You’re in your mid 30s?

00:30:41 Yeah, to late 40s.

00:30:43 Mid, late 20s to late 40s, somewhere in there.

00:30:46 That’s the demographic, yes.

00:30:47 I do think that partially what’s happened

00:30:49 is that your group has never seen functional institutions.

00:30:52 These institutions have been so compromised for so long.

00:30:56 You’ve probably never seen an adult.

00:30:59 Sometimes I think Elon looks like an adult.

00:31:02 I know that he has a wild lifestyle,

00:31:05 but I also see it looking like an adult.

00:31:07 What does an adult look like exactly?

00:31:09 Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things, speaks carefully,

00:31:13 thinks about the future beyond their own lifespan.

00:31:17 Somebody who has a pretty good idea of how to get things done,

00:31:21 isn’t wildly caught up in punitive actions,

00:31:23 is more focused on breaking new ground

00:31:26 than playing rent seeking games.

00:31:29 I mean, I really had a positive…

00:31:31 I was so completely jazzed when Elon Musk ended up

00:31:34 as the world’s richest person.

00:31:36 He was like, well, that’s interesting, back to work.

00:31:39 It’s just like, that’s what an adult would do.

00:31:43 And it just made, you know, weirdly,

00:31:45 I said something about, isn’t it amazing

00:31:47 that the world’s richest person knows what a Lagrangian is?

00:31:50 And he made a terrible Lagrange joke about potentials.

00:31:54 But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately,

00:31:57 Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult.

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

00:32:02 will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is

00:32:05 for pumping his stock price,

00:32:06 talking his book and all this stuff.

00:32:08 Shut up.

00:32:09 Just looking at the world seriously and really saying,

00:32:12 you’re saying that the people who are running tech companies

00:32:15 or running the mediums on which we can exercise

00:32:21 the ideal of free speech are not adults.

00:32:24 I think not.

00:32:25 I think, first of all, a lot of them

00:32:26 are Silicon Valley utopian businessmen,

00:32:30 where you talk a utopian line and you use it.

00:32:33 You’ve heard my take, which is that the idealism

00:32:37 of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts.

00:32:41 And I believe that in many ways,

00:32:42 the idealism of Silicon Valley about connecting the world,

00:32:45 the world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,

00:32:47 is really about the software eating the world

00:32:51 as Mark Andreessen likes to say,

00:32:53 that there were all these legacy properties

00:32:55 and by simply being a bad tech version

00:32:58 of something that previously existed like a newspaper,

00:33:03 you could immediately start to dwarf that

00:33:05 by aggregating newspapers and their digital versions

00:33:08 because digital is so much more powerful.

00:33:10 As a result, yes, we have lots of man children

00:33:15 wandering around what once was the Bay Area

00:33:18 and is now Austin and Miami and other places,

00:33:22 maybe Singapore, that all of these people,

00:33:27 these are friends of ours and they’re brilliant

00:33:29 with respect to a certain amount of stuff,

00:33:32 but none of them can get off the drip.

00:33:34 It’s amazing that none of them have FU money.

00:33:37 We’ve got billionaires who don’t have FU money.

00:33:39 Okay, I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey

00:33:43 was that there was an incitement of violence

00:33:45 and not just Jack Dorsey,

00:33:47 but everybody that was banning people.

00:33:50 And then this word violence was used

00:33:53 as a kind of just like extremism and so on

00:33:56 to without much reason behind it.

00:33:59 You think it’s impossible for Jack Dorsey

00:34:01 or anybody else to be, as you said, an adult,

00:34:04 a grownup and reason.

00:34:06 Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grownup.

00:34:07 It seems like he is.

00:34:08 Yeah, but he’s under pressures.

00:34:11 As you’ve discussed,

00:34:13 it seems that he’s been on the verge

00:34:15 of almost being quite serious and transparent

00:34:18 and real with people.

00:34:19 I don’t know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went.

00:34:23 And I worry that that must be something behind the scenes

00:34:27 that I can’t see.

00:34:29 From my perspective, what I think is the stress,

00:34:32 the burden of that when people are screaming at you

00:34:37 is overwhelming.

00:34:38 No, Jack is a Zen monk.

00:34:39 He really is.

00:34:41 Yeah.

00:34:42 Jack is an incredibly impressive person intellectually,

00:34:47 morally, spiritually, at least for a couple of meetings.

00:34:52 I don’t know him very well,

00:34:54 but I’m very impressed by the person I met

00:34:57 and I don’t know where that person is.

00:34:59 And that terrifies me.

00:35:02 But do you think somebody could step up in that way?

00:35:04 No.

00:35:05 So does a human being have the capacity to be transparent

00:35:11 about the reasoning behind the banning?

00:35:14 Or do you think all banning of people

00:35:19 from mediums of communication is eventually destructive

00:35:24 or it’s impossible for human beings

00:35:25 to reason with ourselves about it?

00:35:27 Well, let’s see what the problem is.

00:35:30 So my phone has been on airplane mode.

00:35:33 I’m gonna unlock it.

00:35:34 And I’m gonna take a picture of Lex Fridman.

00:35:38 Now, if I can, I’m gonna tweet that picture out.

00:35:43 Great.

00:35:44 But here’s the weird part about it.

00:35:45 Yeah.

00:35:46 That picture sitting with Lex today.

00:35:55 This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage is made.

00:35:58 Okay.

00:35:59 In so doing, I have just sent a picture of you

00:36:07 and a tiny piece of text all over the planet

00:36:10 that has arrived at, if statistics tell the truth,

00:36:15 just under half a million different accounts.

00:36:19 And then more from sharing and so on.

00:36:22 Well, and then some of those accounts are dead.

00:36:23 We don’t really know how many places it went.

00:36:26 But the key issue with that tweet

00:36:28 is that that is a nonlocal phenomenon.

00:36:33 Yes.

00:36:34 So I just broadcasted to an entire planet.

00:36:39 Somebody in Uganda is reading that

00:36:41 at the same time as somebody in Uruguay.

00:36:45 There is no known solution to have so many people

00:36:50 with the ability to communicate nonlocally

00:36:54 because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech

00:36:58 inside of the constitution.

00:36:59 Friction, locality, there were all sorts

00:37:01 of other aspects to speech.

00:37:04 So if you think about speech as a bundle.

00:37:08 I like this.

00:37:10 Then it got unbundled.

00:37:12 And some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on

00:37:17 to retard the impact of speech aren’t present.

00:37:22 And we don’t have the courage to say,

00:37:23 I wonder if the first amendment really applies

00:37:26 in the modern era in the same way,

00:37:28 or we have to work through an abstraction.

00:37:30 Either we probably have to amend the constitution

00:37:33 or we have to abstract it properly.

00:37:35 And that issue is not something we’re facing up to.

00:37:40 I watch us constantly look backwards.

00:37:46 We don’t seem to try to come up with new ideas

00:37:48 and new theories.

00:37:49 Nobody really imagines that we’re going to be able

00:37:52 to wisely amend the constitution anymore

00:37:54 in the inside of the United States.

00:37:56 Many people abroad will say,

00:37:57 why are these guys talking about the US?

00:37:59 It’s a US centric program.

00:38:01 Well, it’s because nobody knows where this program lives.

00:38:05 The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be

00:38:06 in a physical place together is also bizarre.

00:38:10 It could be anywhere.

00:38:11 It doesn’t really matter that it happens to be here.

00:38:13 So the difference between logical and between physical,

00:38:16 local, nonlocal, frictional, nonfrictional,

00:38:18 it’s the same thing with firearms.

00:38:21 Nobody imagined that the Gatling gun

00:38:25 was gonna be present when you had to reload a musket.

00:38:29 And that’s fascinating to think about.

00:38:33 I mean, you’re exactly right that the nature

00:38:37 of this particular freedom that seems so foundational

00:38:39 to this nation, to what made this nation great

00:38:44 and perhaps much of the world that is great,

00:38:46 made it great, is changing completely.

00:38:49 Can we try to reason through how the ideal freedom

00:38:52 of speech is to be changed?

00:38:54 I mean, I guess I’m struggling.

00:38:57 It feels really wrong, perhaps because I wasn’t

00:39:00 paying attention to it.

00:39:01 It feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump from Twitter,

00:39:06 to ban not just the president.

00:39:08 That’s really wrong to me.

00:39:10 But this particular human for being divisive.

00:39:15 But then when there’s an incitement of violence,

00:39:20 that is an overused claim.

00:39:23 But perhaps there was actual brewing

00:39:29 of local violence happening.

00:39:31 So one of the things I know was happening on Parler

00:39:34 is people were scheduling meetings together

00:39:39 in physical space.

00:39:40 So you’re now going back from this dynamic, social,

00:39:46 large scale, people from Uganda, people from all

00:39:48 over the world being able to communicate.

00:39:51 You’re now mapping that into now back meeting

00:39:54 in the physical space that is similar

00:39:57 to what the founding of this nation was.

00:39:58 The violence would be digital

00:40:00 if ransomware suddenly was unleashed.

00:40:04 True.

00:40:05 The key issue is the abstractions.

00:40:07 So what was freedom of speech as a bundle?

00:40:10 And now it’s…

00:40:12 And then how do we abstract the bundle

00:40:14 into the digital era?

00:40:16 Do you think we just need to raise the question

00:40:18 and talk about it?

00:40:19 Do you have ideas?

00:40:20 Well, sure I have ideas.

00:40:21 But the key point is that I’m not even welcome

00:40:24 in mainstream media.

00:40:26 I’ve never seen you on mainstream media.

00:40:28 Do you do mainstream media?

00:40:29 So we exist in part of an alternate universe

00:40:32 because the mainstream media is trying to have

00:40:35 a coherent story, which I’ve called

00:40:37 the gated institutional narrative.

00:40:39 And the institutions pretend that,

00:40:41 they plug their fingers in their ears

00:40:43 and pretend that nothing exists outside

00:40:46 of MSNBC talking to CNN about what was

00:40:49 in the New York Times as covered by the Washington Post.

00:40:52 And so that’s effectively like a professional

00:40:54 wrestling promotion where they, you know,

00:40:57 the Undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan

00:40:59 and Rowdy Roddy Piper.

00:41:01 Okay, well, that’s very different than MMA.

00:41:05 You’ve recently been on Glenn Beck’s program.

00:41:08 Yeah.

00:41:09 And there was this kind of, one of the things

00:41:12 you’ve talked about is being able to have

00:41:15 this conversation, I don’t know if you would put it

00:41:19 as a type of conversation that was happening

00:41:21 outside the mainstream media, but a conversation

00:41:23 that reaches across different world views.

00:41:27 You’re right.

00:41:28 Being a nuanced, or just like a respectful conversation

00:41:33 that’s grounded in mutual.

00:41:35 But we can’t have the reality because the main model

00:41:37 is the center, both left and right,

00:41:42 is in the process of stealing all the wealth

00:41:44 that we built up.

00:41:46 And they’ve organized the extremes into two LARPing teams

00:41:50 that I’ve called Magistan and Wokistan.

00:41:53 And then you have everybody who isn’t part

00:41:55 of that complex, all seven of us.

00:41:58 The number of us who are able to earn a living

00:42:00 looking at all of these mad people playing this game.

00:42:05 There’s a phrase inside finance when the investment banks

00:42:09 are trying to look at price action.

00:42:12 And somebody says, this doesn’t make any sense.

00:42:14 And somebody will say, it’s just the locals

00:42:16 stealing from each other.

00:42:17 And that’s really what we have.

00:42:20 We’ve got the leaders of Magistan and Wokistan,

00:42:23 championing these two teams is sponsored by the center

00:42:27 because it’s a distraction while they steal all the silver

00:42:29 and cut the paintings out of the frames.

00:42:31 That’s what you and I are looking at.

00:42:33 So when you ask me, do you have any ideas

00:42:35 about the abstraction for free speech?

00:42:39 I’ve never met Mark Zuckerberg.

00:42:41 I’ve never met Sundar Pichai.

00:42:43 I never met Larry Page.

00:42:45 I was once in a room with Sergey Brin.

00:42:47 I’ve never spoken to Elon Musk.

00:42:50 I hang out with Peter Thiel,

00:42:52 but we have a very deep relationship,

00:42:54 but I don’t really speak to that many other people

00:42:58 at sort of at this level.

00:43:00 We’re not having any kind of smart conversation

00:43:04 at a national level.

00:43:05 In fact, it’s almost as if we’ve destroyed every sandbox

00:43:11 in which we could play together.

00:43:13 There’s no place that we actually talk

00:43:15 except long form podcasting.

00:43:18 And by the way, they’ve found,

00:43:20 you see what’s going on with like Alex Stamos

00:43:23 and the Hoover Institution.

00:43:26 There’s a loophole left.

00:43:28 Long form podcasting allows people to speak

00:43:31 at levels above daytime CNN.

00:43:34 It’s like, well, why do you think

00:43:35 they’re not watching daytime CNN?

00:43:39 But that’s just silly journalism.

00:43:42 They currently have no power to displace podcasting.

00:43:45 That’s why it’s so powerful, RSS feed.

00:43:47 I mean, that’s why the big challenge with Joe Rogan

00:43:50 and Spotify is like, there’s this dance that’s fascinating

00:43:53 to see is Joe Rogan is not part of the system

00:43:57 and then he’s also uncancellable

00:44:00 and there’s this tension that’s happening.

00:44:03 It’s fascinating.

00:44:04 Well, think about what happened to Howard Stern though.

00:44:05 Howard Stern became much less relevant.

00:44:08 So if they can’t control Joe by bringing him in house,

00:44:13 the key question is, is he going to continue,

00:44:17 like Joe says this thing about FU money.

00:44:22 Joe’s one of the only people with FU money

00:44:24 who’s actually said FU.

00:44:28 I don’t understand this.

00:44:30 I don’t have FU money.

00:44:32 What exactly is, can we break apart FU money?

00:44:36 Because I always thought I’ve been fortunate enough

00:44:41 to always have FU money in the sense

00:44:45 that my standards were so low that a basic salary

00:44:48 in the United States.

00:44:49 Well, this is the stoic point,

00:44:50 which is if you can live on rice and beans,

00:44:53 you’re uncancellable because you’re always rich

00:44:54 relative to your needs.

00:44:56 Isn’t that FU fundamental, FU money?

00:44:57 Why do you say that tech billionaires don’t have FU money?

00:45:01 When you need to hire private security

00:45:03 to protect your family,

00:45:05 how do you protect your two children?

00:45:07 I don’t have those yet.

00:45:08 Bingo.

00:45:09 Yeah.

00:45:10 My point is that FU money insulates everything

00:45:14 that you care about.

00:45:15 It’s not just about you.

00:45:17 So you’re saying as the level of responsibility grows,

00:45:20 the amount of money required for FU.

00:45:24 We have a war going on.

00:45:26 The war is on academic freedom.

00:45:28 Academic freedom used to be present in the system

00:45:31 as a, in terms of the idea, we trust our elite.

00:45:35 Now we have an idea like, you wanna be the elite.

00:45:39 You want a Lord above us.

00:45:40 First of all, there’s like a populist, anti elitist thing.

00:45:43 Then there’s the idea

00:45:44 that we’re gonna defer tenure for forever.

00:45:48 Then we’re gonna tell people, stay in your lane.

00:45:50 Your tenure is only good

00:45:51 for your own particular tiny micro subject.

00:45:54 Then we’re gonna also control your grants

00:45:56 and we’ll be able to load up your teaching load.

00:45:59 If we don’t like who you are,

00:46:00 we’ll make your life absolutely impossible.

00:46:03 We lost academic freedom

00:46:06 and we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster.

00:46:10 And then we lost funding

00:46:12 so that people were confident

00:46:14 that they would have the ability to do research

00:46:17 no matter what they said.

00:46:20 And as a result, what you find is,

00:46:21 is a world in which there’s no ability

00:46:24 to get people to say, no, I’m not gonna sign

00:46:26 your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath.

00:46:30 I won’t sign any loyalty oath.

00:46:32 Get the hell out of my office.

00:46:34 FU.

00:46:36 FU, and you’re connecting money to that, but.

00:46:39 Well, my point is, is that academic freedom

00:46:41 is the, the whole idea behind it

00:46:45 was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire

00:46:48 on a much smaller salary.

00:46:50 Right.

00:46:50 Okay.

00:46:53 We’ve lost that.

00:46:54 Yeah, the only reason in part

00:46:56 that I wanted to go into academic,

00:47:00 academics as a profession,

00:47:02 as opposed to wanting to do physical

00:47:04 or mathematical research.

00:47:07 The great prize was freedom.

00:47:09 And Ralph Gomery of the Sloan Foundation,

00:47:12 previously of IBM research pointed it out.

00:47:14 He says, if you lose freedom,

00:47:17 you lose the only thing we had to offer top minds.

00:47:20 Top minds value their intellectual freedom

00:47:23 and their physical and economic security

00:47:26 at a different level than other human beings.

00:47:29 And so people say, you know,

00:47:32 I don’t understand, dude,

00:47:33 and you have the ability to do X, Y, and Z.

00:47:35 What’s the problem?

00:47:36 It’s like, well, I value my ability

00:47:37 to raise the middle finger as an American,

00:47:41 practically above everything else.

00:47:44 I want to talk to you about freedom here

00:47:46 in the context of something you’ve mentioned,

00:47:49 which is one way to take away freedom

00:47:52 is to put a human being into a cage

00:47:55 to create constraints.

00:47:57 The other one that worries me

00:47:58 is something that I think you’ve spoken to

00:48:00 to Twitter a little bit on Twitter,

00:48:03 is we bleed freedom by kind of slowly

00:48:12 scaring you into not doing,

00:48:16 not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities

00:48:19 you can as freedom.

00:48:20 So like when you ban Donald Trump,

00:48:24 when you ban Parler,

00:48:27 you give a little doubt in the minds of millions,

00:48:30 like me, a person who’s a tech person,

00:48:33 who’s an entrepreneur,

00:48:35 there’s a little,

00:48:36 that’s what I’m afraid of when I look in the mirror,

00:48:38 is there now a little doubt in there

00:48:41 that limits the amount of options I will try?

00:48:43 How certain are you that the COVID virus

00:48:47 didn’t come from the Wuhan lab

00:48:49 and is biosafety level four?

00:48:52 We both know that we’re both supposed to robotically say

00:48:57 the idea that the COVID virus came from a lab

00:48:59 is a discredited conspiracy theory.

00:49:01 There is no evidence that suggests that this is true.

00:49:03 The World Health Organization and the CDC

00:49:05 have both opined this to say otherwise

00:49:08 would be incredibly irresponsible.

00:49:09 And the threat of that is the thing

00:49:11 that ultimately limits the freedoms we feel.

00:49:16 I should be tweeting about Jeff Epstein all the time.

00:49:20 And you’re afraid.

00:49:22 It’s also boring.

00:49:23 I mean, I said it in the public.

00:49:25 Many times.

00:49:26 Why is it we don’t ask where the records are

00:49:28 from Villard House?

00:49:29 Where are the financial records?

00:49:30 Where are the SEC filings?

00:49:32 Where are the questions on the record

00:49:35 to the intelligence agencies?

00:49:39 Was he known to be part of the intelligence community?

00:49:42 So we’re not interested in asking questions.

00:49:46 Like, am I gonna die as a result of asking the question,

00:49:51 was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community

00:49:53 of any nation?

00:49:54 Is there a reason we’re not asking

00:49:56 about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund

00:49:58 that he didn’t run?

00:49:59 It’s just like the Wuhan lab.

00:50:02 Okay, how do we get to the core of the Jeffrey Epstein,

00:50:05 the truth behind Jeffrey Epstein in a sense?

00:50:08 I mean, there’s some things that are just like

00:50:10 useless conspiracy theories around it,

00:50:12 even if they’re true.

00:50:13 There’s some things that get to say it.

00:50:14 I hate to say it.

00:50:15 You’re not gonna like it.

00:50:17 Look at the 1971 media Pennsylvania break in

00:50:20 of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI.

00:50:24 Those kids, and by the way, they weren’t all kids,

00:50:27 did what had to be done.

00:50:31 They broke in, they broke the law.

00:50:33 It was an incredible act of civil disobedience.

00:50:37 And God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her,

00:50:40 she was going to take to her grave,

00:50:42 that she’d been part of this,

00:50:43 like the coolest thing of all time.

00:50:45 They didn’t say anything for forever.

00:50:47 So civil disobedience, I mean, you have to.

00:50:50 We are founded on civil disobedience.

00:50:52 Civil disobedience is incredibly,

00:50:55 you screw it up and you’re just a vandal.

00:50:59 You screw it up, you’re a hooligan.

00:51:01 Yeah.

00:51:02 Those cats were so disciplined.

00:51:06 It’s an art form.

00:51:07 It was an art form and they risked everything.

00:51:09 They were willing to pay with their freedom.

00:51:14 Those are the sorts of people who earned the right

00:51:17 by putting themselves at risk.

00:51:18 I would not do this.

00:51:20 I am not volunteering to break into anything.

00:51:24 I think it was William Davidon who was a student

00:51:28 of Murray Gellman and a physics professor at Haverford

00:51:32 who corralled these people and led this effort.

00:51:36 And right now, what we need is somebody to blow the lid

00:51:40 off of what is controlling everything.

00:51:43 We have, I’m happy to hear that it’s a system

00:51:47 of incentive structures,

00:51:48 that it’s a system of selective pressures.

00:51:50 I’m happy to find out that it’s emergent.

00:51:52 I’m happy to find that it’s partially directed

00:51:54 by our own intelligence community.

00:51:56 I’m happy to hear that, in fact, we’ve been penetrated

00:52:00 by North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia.

00:52:04 But I need to know why people aren’t,

00:52:07 like the firebombing of the courthouse in Portland, Oregon

00:52:09 has no explanation.

00:52:12 And somehow this is normal.

00:52:14 This is not normal to any human being.

00:52:17 We have video that people don’t believe.

00:52:19 And I come back to the shaggy defense of it wasn’t me.

00:52:24 You know, so it’s like, you remember that song?

00:52:30 Shaggy, yeah, it wasn’t me caught you banging

00:52:33 in the shower on the counter.

00:52:35 Yeah, exactly, it wasn’t me.

00:52:36 It wasn’t me.

00:52:37 He says, but his friend says,

00:52:39 well, your strategy makes no sense at all.

00:52:41 Well, this is what MSNBC is doing.

00:52:46 You dropped it from the graphic, it wasn’t me.

00:52:48 It wasn’t me.

00:52:49 You came up with another Yang, it wasn’t me.

00:52:52 I will never see MSNBC the same again.

00:52:55 So you’ve spoken about him before.

00:52:57 I think it’d be nice to maybe honor him

00:53:00 to break it apart a little bit.

00:53:02 Aaron Schwartz.

00:53:03 Yeah.

00:53:04 Why was he a special human being in this ilk

00:53:08 of what we’re talking about now, civil disobedience?

00:53:11 How do we honor him now moving forward as human beings

00:53:15 who are willing to take risks in this world?

00:53:19 Well, I don’t know.

00:53:20 I mean, are you inspired by Aaron Schwartz?

00:53:23 I am.

00:53:24 How do you feel about JSTOR?

00:53:25 Let’s talk about JSTOR first.

00:53:27 So let’s say what JSTOR is all about, right?

00:53:30 We the taxpayer pay for research.

00:53:36 And then the people who do the research

00:53:41 do all the work for a bunch of companies

00:53:43 who then charge us $30 an article

00:53:47 to read what it is that we already paid for.

00:53:48 And if we don’t cite these articles,

00:53:51 we’re told that we’re in violation.

00:53:53 Okay.

00:53:55 I almost never call for civil disobedience

00:53:58 because I don’t really want to, but fuck JSTOR,

00:54:03 fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer.

00:54:05 Who the fuck are these people?

00:54:07 Yeah.

00:54:08 Get the smart people need to take the greedy people

00:54:15 behind the woodshed and explain to them what science is.

00:54:19 I have a very old fashioned idea that’s so out of favor

00:54:23 that I will immediately be seen as a knuckle dragger.

00:54:26 Yeah.

00:54:27 I believe in the great woman theory of history

00:54:29 and the great man theory of history.

00:54:31 Emmy Nerder is fantastic as an example.

00:54:34 As an example, and I believe in editors over peer reviewers.

00:54:41 And I believe that wrong things should be allowed

00:54:43 into the literature.

00:54:45 And I believe that the gatekeeping should go towards zero

00:54:48 because the costs associated with distribution

00:54:52 are very, very slight.

00:54:53 I believe that we should be looking

00:54:57 at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly

00:55:01 into your competitor’s clutches,

00:55:02 particularly if you’re a young person being reviewed

00:55:05 by an older person.

00:55:07 Are you familiar with the Duat de Senor?

00:55:11 Are you familiar with the legend of the Magnaia?

00:55:15 No, the Magnaia is the Miller’s daughter

00:55:18 and the largest food fight in the entire universe,

00:55:21 I believe is held, I think in Italy,

00:55:25 it’s called the Battle of the Oranges.

00:55:27 And it celebrates the Miller’s daughter

00:55:31 who had fallen in love with her beloved.

00:55:34 And when it came time for them to marry,

00:55:38 the virginal Magnaia was in fact told

00:55:41 that the Lord of the land had the right

00:55:46 to have the first night with the bride.

00:55:48 Well, the Magnaia had a different idea.

00:55:51 So she seemed to consent to this perhaps mythical right,

00:55:56 also called the Prima Note, the first night.

00:55:59 And by legend, she concealed a dagger underneath her robes.

00:56:05 And when it came time for the hated Lord of the Manor

00:56:08 to extract this right, she pulled the knife out

00:56:13 and killed him.

00:56:14 And I think it also echoes a little bit

00:56:16 of particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones.

00:56:20 But that inspired both men and women.

00:56:23 And the Magnaia is the legendary hero.

00:56:26 So right now, what we need to do is we need

00:56:30 to resist the Prima Note, the right of first look, right?

00:56:36 F you, you don’t have the right of first look.

00:56:38 I don’t wanna send something blindly to my competitors.

00:56:40 I don’t wanna subject myself to you naming

00:56:42 what work I’ve done.

00:56:45 Why are you in my story?

00:56:48 That’s my question, get out of my story.

00:56:50 If I do work and then you have an idea,

00:56:52 oh, well, it’s the Matthew principle.

00:56:54 To him who has much more will be given.

00:56:57 I’ve gone to the National Academy of Sciences

00:56:59 and talked about these things.

00:57:00 And it’s funny, I’ve been laughed at by the older people

00:57:03 who think, well, Eric, you know science proceeds

00:57:07 funeral by funeral, that’s Planck.

00:57:09 You know the Matthew principle,

00:57:11 you know the Matilda principle,

00:57:12 the things done by women are attributed to men.

00:57:14 That these are not new.

00:57:16 And you guys just live like this?

00:57:17 Yeah, so the Revolutionary Act now is to resist

00:57:20 all of these things that are not new.

00:57:23 So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz.

00:57:25 Aaron Schwartz was the Magnaia.

00:57:27 One of the things you’ve done very beautifully

00:57:29 is to communicate love.

00:57:31 And I think about some of our conversations.

00:57:35 And you got me to talk a little bit about

00:57:37 my own experiences in 02138 and 39.

00:57:45 We are the product of our trauma.

00:57:48 And what people don’t understand is that very often

00:57:51 when you see people taking countermeasures

00:57:54 against what appear to be imaginary forces,

00:57:57 they’re really actually replaying things

00:57:59 that really happened to them.

00:58:02 And having been through this system and watching

00:58:05 all of the ways in which it completely rewrites

00:58:08 the lives of the people who I am counting on

00:58:10 to cure our diseases, build our new industries,

00:58:12 keep us safe from our foes,

00:58:15 the amount of pressure the system is putting

00:58:18 on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable.

00:58:23 And so my goal is to empower somebody

00:58:26 like an Aaron Schwartz in memory

00:58:29 and to talk about a Jeffrey Epstein situation.

00:58:32 Do you know that the first person outside of me

00:58:36 to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein?

00:58:42 How did he know I was working on this?

00:58:44 I don’t know.

00:58:46 So your ideas that formed geometric unity

00:58:49 was something that his eyes have seen?

00:58:51 I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein

00:58:55 as one of the only people who could help me.

00:58:59 No, no, no, listen to this.

00:59:00 Yeah, how does this connect?

00:59:01 Okay, well, first of all, my old synagogue,

00:59:06 my old shul was the conservative minion at Harvard Hillel.

00:59:11 And I believe it’s called Rosovsky Hall

00:59:14 after Henry Rosovsky in the economics department,

00:59:17 who was a Japan scholar, if I’m correct.

00:59:20 And he became provost or dean of Harvard.

00:59:25 I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein’s money.

00:59:29 And I wondered in part whether the Jewish students

00:59:32 at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck

00:59:35 of Harvard Hillel.

00:59:37 So that was something I found very curious,

00:59:39 but I don’t know much about it.

00:59:41 I also found that Jeffrey Epstein hanging around

00:59:43 scientists, I don’t think that either you or Joe exactly,

00:59:46 I mean, got me correct in your last interchange.

00:59:51 For the record, for people who haven’t listened

00:59:53 to Joe Rogan program, Joe has claimed that Eric Weinstein

00:59:55 was the only person who has gotten laid.

00:59:57 Paid.

00:59:58 Oh, paid.

01:00:00 And you said you also got paid as a young man, right?

01:00:04 I believe the word was laid, but allegedly.

01:00:07 My hearing isn’t so good at age 55.

01:00:09 All right, leaving that aside.

01:00:11 Leaving that aside, what was Jeffrey Epstein doing

01:00:16 hanging around all of these scientists?

01:00:18 I don’t think that was the same program

01:00:22 that was about compromising political leaders

01:00:24 and business people and entertainment figures.

01:00:27 I think these are two different programs

01:00:29 that were being run through one individual.

01:00:31 And Joe seemed to think that I didn’t think he was smooth.

01:00:35 I thought he was glib.

01:00:38 I think what Joe is really trying to get at is that

01:00:39 I found his mysticism meretricious.

01:00:43 He had an ability to deflect every conversation

01:00:48 that might go towards revealing

01:00:50 that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

01:00:51 Every time you started to get close to something

01:00:54 where the rubber hit the road,

01:00:55 the rubber wouldn’t hit the road.

01:00:58 And yet, can you help me untangle the fact

01:01:02 that you thought deeply about the physics

01:01:07 of the nature of our universe

01:01:10 and Jeffrey Epstein was interested?

01:01:13 How did he know?

01:01:14 I wasn’t really talking about this stuff until,

01:01:18 even my close friends didn’t really know what I was up to.

01:01:22 And yet you’re saying he did not have

01:01:25 sufficient brilliance to understand

01:01:27 when the rubber hit the road.

01:01:28 So why did he have sufficient interest and curiosity?

01:01:33 I’ll tell you what I thought.

01:01:34 I had been waiting to find out,

01:01:36 does my government even know I exist?

01:01:39 Do you have an answer to that question?

01:01:40 I have, a couple times the government

01:01:44 has reached out to me.

01:01:46 In general, there is zero interest in me,

01:01:49 like less than zero interest.

01:01:52 I find that fascinating.

01:01:54 As far as you know, right?

01:01:56 Well, that’s what I’m trying to say.

01:01:57 The question about not being able to see

01:01:59 through a half silvered mirror,

01:02:01 you don’t know what’s going on

01:02:03 behind the half silvered mirror.

01:02:04 To you, it’s all you see is your reflection.

01:02:09 But your intuition still holds,

01:02:10 like this is where I’ve mentioned that I,

01:02:13 this is where I’ll say naive dumb things,

01:02:16 but I still hold on to this intuition that Jeff,

01:02:20 I’m not confident in this,

01:02:21 but I lean towards that direction

01:02:25 that Jeffrey Epstein is the source of evil,

01:02:27 not something that’s underlying him.

01:02:29 You have a bias.

01:02:31 It’s different than mine.

01:02:32 Our Bayesian priors are tutored

01:02:35 by different life experiences.

01:02:37 If I was mostly concerned, like Sam Harris is concerned,

01:02:42 that people fill their heads with nonsense,

01:02:45 I would have a very strong sense

01:02:47 that people need order in the world,

01:02:49 that they take mysterious situations,

01:02:51 they build entire castles in the air,

01:02:53 and then they go move in if they really get crazy.

01:02:56 The old saying is that neurotics build castles in the air

01:03:01 and psychotics move in.

01:03:02 Coming from a progressive family,

01:03:05 we had a different experience.

01:03:06 It’s really weird when the government

01:03:07 is actually out to get you,

01:03:09 when they actually send a spy,

01:03:11 when they actually engage in disinformation campaigns,

01:03:14 when they smear you.

01:03:15 And if you’ve ever had that brought to bear on your family,

01:03:19 you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country,

01:03:22 which is different than having a,

01:03:25 wow, do people believe crazy stuff

01:03:27 because they watch too much TV.

01:03:29 And both of these things have some merit to them,

01:03:32 but it’s a question of regulated expression.

01:03:34 When do you want to express more Sam Harris

01:03:36 and when do you want to express more Howard Zinn?

01:03:39 And you can express both, correct?

01:03:41 The one human being can express both?

01:03:42 Sure, but there’s a trade off between them.

01:03:44 In other words, most people like the Michael Shermers

01:03:47 of the world are gonna tilt very strongly

01:03:49 to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

01:03:52 So you’re gonna have that kind of energy.

01:03:54 And then somebody else is gonna say,

01:03:55 how many times do I have to get hit on,

01:03:58 how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb

01:03:59 before I realize that there’s a problem?

01:04:02 So my feeling about this is yes,

01:04:04 people see patterns in clouds.

01:04:06 They see faces and scripture and all sorts of things,

01:04:09 and it’s just random cloud patterns.

01:04:10 And it’s also the case that there’s tremendous pressure

01:04:13 not to see conspiracies when conspiracies

01:04:16 are relatively more common than the people

01:04:18 who shout conspiracy theory will claim.

01:04:21 So both of these things are true.

01:04:22 And you have to ask, when do you express your inner Zinn

01:04:25 and when your inner Harris?

01:04:26 And those are different.

01:04:27 I want to find them out.

01:04:28 The difference in you and I biases aside

01:04:31 is you’ve actually met Jeffrey Epstein.

01:04:33 And I’m listening to reverberations years later

01:04:40 of stories and narratives throughout the story.

01:04:42 Luckily, I only met him once.

01:04:44 And I think I had one or perhaps two phone conversations

01:04:49 with him other than the one meeting.

01:04:51 You can learn a lot in just a few words, right,

01:04:54 from a human being.

01:04:55 Well, that’s true, but I think that the bigger issue

01:04:57 was I saw something that I don’t hear much remarked upon,

01:05:01 which is Jeffrey Epstein is all that there is.

01:05:05 In other words, there’s the National Science Foundation,

01:05:08 National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes.

01:05:11 There’s all this stuff that kind of has the same feel to it,

01:05:16 a little bit of variation and difference,

01:05:18 Department of Energy.

01:05:20 If you fall outside of that, there’s just Jeffrey Epstein.

01:05:23 That’s what you’re told.

01:05:25 Yes.

01:05:26 That’s not quite true.

01:05:26 There’s Kavli, maybe Jim Simons is now in the game.

01:05:30 Peter Thiel has done some stuff.

01:05:32 You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try.

01:05:35 So there is other money running around, Templeton.

01:05:39 But very strongly, there was a belief

01:05:41 that if you’re doing something really innovative

01:05:44 and the system can’t fund it because we become pussies,

01:05:48 Jeffrey Epstein’s your guy.

01:05:49 So there’s like this funnel

01:05:51 that you’re supposed to go through.

01:05:53 That’s right.

01:05:54 And the idea is that you get called

01:05:55 the great man’s house and the sort of lubricious version

01:06:02 of Ralph Lauren takes you in and asks you bizarre questions.

01:06:07 And maybe he has an island, maybe he has a plane.

01:06:10 And when you’re starved, somebody showing you a feast

01:06:17 or when you’re dehydrated in a death’s door

01:06:20 and somebody says, oh, I have a well, that’s what it is.

01:06:27 And so the thought is, wow, can somebody get some effing

01:06:32 money into the science system so that we don’t have

01:06:34 super creeps trying to learn all of our secrets

01:06:38 ahead of time?

01:06:39 WTF, what is your problem with transparency

01:06:42 and taxpayer dollars?

01:06:43 Just all of you, you wouldn’t have a country.

01:06:46 You’d be speaking German.

01:06:47 So essentially you believe that human beings

01:06:51 would not be able to, when the money is lacking

01:06:54 in the system, like in research.

01:06:55 We produce public goods.

01:06:57 You and I are meant to produce public goods.

01:07:00 Now I sell Athletic Greens and I sell Theragun

01:07:03 and I sell Unagi scooters and Chili Pad.

01:07:07 Can I be honest, I love these products,

01:07:09 but I didn’t get into this game for the purpose of selling.

01:07:14 I’m trying to figure out how do you have an FU lifestyle?

01:07:19 But you know something Lex, I don’t know why you built

01:07:22 this channel, it’s kind of a mystery.

01:07:24 I don’t know why.

01:07:26 I’ll tell you why I built my channel.

01:07:28 It’s gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time in an alley.

01:07:32 I got rolled multiple times and my point is I didn’t want

01:07:37 to become a celebrity, I didn’t want to become well known,

01:07:41 but it’s a lot harder to roll somebody who’s getting,

01:07:47 I think I’m, I don’t know if this is mistaken,

01:07:49 but I think I’m the math PhD with the largest number

01:07:52 of followers on Twitter.

01:07:54 And there was nothing you could do before.

01:07:58 I mean again, to put a little responsibility on you,

01:08:01 so you’ve created something really special

01:08:03 for the distribution of your own ideas.

01:08:06 I mean, but because it’s not necessarily currently scalable,

01:08:11 you also, perhaps you and I have the responsibility

01:08:15 of giving other people also a chance to spread their ideas.

01:08:19 I mean Joe Rogan did this very effectively

01:08:21 for a bunch of people that.

01:08:23 That’s why they’re angry at him because he’s a gatekeeper

01:08:26 and he let all sorts of people through that gate

01:08:29 from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones.

01:08:32 To Jordan Peterson to, I mean, even first of all, to you.

01:08:38 To Abby Martin.

01:08:39 To Abby Martin.

01:08:40 To Barry Weiss.

01:08:42 Yeah.

01:08:43 That’s the problem.

01:08:45 Well, but you have not successfully built up a thing

01:08:48 that allows that to carry that forward.

01:08:50 Oh no, no, no, no.

01:08:52 We are all vulnerable to reputational attack

01:08:56 because what happens, you see, the problem, Lex,

01:08:59 is that you are now an institution at some level.

01:09:02 You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag.

01:09:08 The last suit you’ll ever need.

01:09:10 And you have the reach of something like CNN

01:09:16 to people who matter.

01:09:19 Okay.

01:09:20 So now the question is, how do we control something

01:09:23 that doesn’t have a board, doesn’t have shareholders,

01:09:25 doesn’t have to make SEC filings, FCC.

01:09:28 So the best answer they have is,

01:09:32 well, we just have to destroy reputations.

01:09:36 All it takes is for us to take something

01:09:38 that gets said or done or alleged.

01:09:41 And I think it’s incredibly important.

01:09:43 One of the things people don’t understand is that

01:09:46 I’m going to fight general reputational attacks.

01:09:49 Not because some people don’t deserve

01:09:51 to have their reputations dragged through the mud,

01:09:55 but because it’s too powerful of a tool

01:09:58 to hand it to CNN, MSNBC, Princeton, Harvard,

01:10:02 the State Department.

01:10:04 Yes.

01:10:05 But some of it is also.

01:10:07 J.P. Morgan.

01:10:09 Muhammad Ali style, being good enough at

01:10:15 doing everything you need to do

01:10:17 without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks.

01:10:21 Not being afraid, but not giving enough meat.

01:10:25 I don’t see why the people who have good ideas

01:10:28 have to lead lives that are that clean.

01:10:30 If you can do it.

01:10:31 You can be messy, yeah.

01:10:32 You should be able to be messy.

01:10:34 Otherwise, we’re suppressing too many people.

01:10:37 Too many, too brilliant minds.

01:10:39 Yeah.

01:10:39 Can you believe Elon Musk smoked a blunt?

01:10:42 I still, people tell me this.

01:10:45 Okay, I have discussions about Elon and people,

01:10:49 the Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist,

01:10:54 who’s talking about a Muammuah

01:10:56 that it might be alien technology.

01:10:58 He told me his, this outside the box thinker.

01:11:04 Yeah.

01:11:05 When speaking to me about Elon said,

01:11:10 called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed.

01:11:13 The blunt.

01:11:14 I love it.

01:11:15 In a dismissive way.

01:11:16 Like this guy’s crazy because he smoked some weed.

01:11:20 I was looking at him.

01:11:21 I was like, why?

01:11:23 Wow.

01:11:24 Wow.

01:11:25 I think you should be able to have

01:11:27 consensual drug filled orgies.

01:11:30 Fuck perfect lives.

01:11:32 Yeah, you should be allowed to be messy.

01:11:34 Yeah, right.

01:11:35 I take back my statement.

01:11:36 I’m just saying.

01:11:37 Respectability is the unique prison

01:11:40 where all of the gates are open

01:11:43 and the inmates beg to stay inside.

01:11:46 It’s time to end their prison of respectability

01:11:49 because it’s too effective of a means of sidelining

01:11:53 and silencing people.

01:11:54 Including it is better that we have bad people

01:11:58 in our system than this idea of no platforming people

01:12:04 who are beyond the pale because it’s such a simple technique.

01:12:08 So how do we, what’s the heroic action here on the?

01:12:11 Well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program.

01:12:15 By the way, she was absolutely delightful as a guest.

01:12:20 She was, she is polite in the extreme,

01:12:23 far more polite than I am.

01:12:26 And I had her right after Roger Penrose as a guest

01:12:29 because I wanted to highlight this program can go anywhere.

01:12:32 We can talk to anyone.

01:12:33 What about social media?

01:12:34 You’ve started highlighting people being banned

01:12:37 on social media.

01:12:38 How do we fight this?

01:12:40 Like if you get banned from social media,

01:12:42 so you’re saying nobody will stand up to me.

01:12:44 Well, just figure out what your incentive structure

01:12:46 is before.

01:12:47 Assume that I get banned on social media

01:12:49 because somebody wants to make sure

01:12:51 that my message doesn’t interfere

01:12:53 with the dominant narrative.

01:12:55 Okay.

01:12:58 What will happen, by the way,

01:12:59 I’m very glad to be able to explain this on your show

01:13:02 because that video will presumably be archived

01:13:05 and they can’t easily make you take it down.

01:13:08 Okay.

01:13:09 So what’s gonna happen is,

01:13:11 is that there’ll be a whole bunch

01:13:12 of very low quality bot like accounts

01:13:16 that dog you every time you talk about me.

01:13:19 Right, dude, it’s getting old, getting boring.

01:13:22 We already heard you.

01:13:23 Dude, that was like, let it go.

01:13:25 Not a good look.

01:13:27 Not a good look is one of my favorites.

01:13:29 But what about the high profile ones?

01:13:30 Well, then you’ll get a few high profile ones

01:13:32 and some of the high profile ones command armies.

01:13:37 Right.

01:13:37 Like at some point I had 10,000 people

01:13:40 using exactly the same templated tweet, tweeting at me.

01:13:43 It was just actually, it got to the point

01:13:45 where it was funny because everybody said,

01:13:48 did you hear that in a hipster coffee shop?

01:13:49 And I was like,

01:13:50 why are you all suddenly talking about hipster coffee?

01:13:52 Just hilarious.

01:13:56 Those things will cause you to think better of it.

01:13:58 You’ll start to see your follower count go down

01:14:01 because it’s easy to give you a bunch of bot like follows

01:14:04 and then just pull them.

01:14:06 So I think that’s pretty well known how,

01:14:09 and then maybe your account will be suspended

01:14:11 and it can’t be revoked and et cetera, et cetera.

01:14:14 And then three days later, you’ll be told it was an error.

01:14:17 So let me push back.

01:14:18 I just don’t see not defending you.

01:14:20 Like, okay, so what are the things you would do

01:14:23 that given that I can actually talk to you offline,

01:14:27 that would make me not defend you?

01:14:33 Well, first of all, I can’t, I mean, I can imagine some,

01:14:37 but all of us have things.

01:14:39 If somebody says, do you hear what your boy,

01:14:41 Lex said about you?

01:14:43 What did Lex say about me?

01:14:45 Oh, he said you were flawed, dude.

01:14:48 Oh, shit.

01:14:51 They so distressed

01:14:53 because none of us wanna stand behind flawed people.

01:14:57 That’s why you have everybody rushing to say,

01:14:58 I neither condemn nor condone.

01:15:00 I know I don’t condemn nor, what is that?

01:15:02 We’re all trying to say.

01:15:03 By the way, for the record,

01:15:04 I said that Eric is smarter than me

01:15:07 in a brilliant human being, but flawed like all humans are.

01:15:10 My point is I’ve now come up with a new policy,

01:15:14 which is I don’t care what my friends have done.

01:15:17 I am not disavowing my friends,

01:15:20 not because they didn’t do the wrong thing.

01:15:22 Maybe they did do the wrong thing.

01:15:23 I don’t know.

01:15:25 What’s the value of friendship if that’s not that?

01:15:28 Like, for example, we’ve had the situation

01:15:29 with Brian Callan.

01:15:30 Brian Callan was featured recently in the Los Angeles Times.

01:15:34 I know nothing about the allegations.

01:15:36 I can’t, I didn’t even know Brian at the time, right?

01:15:39 I’ve known him for roughly the time I’ve been in Los Angeles,

01:15:42 maybe a year and a half during that period of time.

01:15:44 I’ve never seen anything wrong.

01:15:47 Now I’m in a situation, well, what do you think he did?

01:15:50 Do you think he didn’t?

01:15:50 It’s like, you know what?

01:15:52 I don’t know, but I do know this.

01:15:54 Everyone’s entitled to have friends

01:15:56 because we can’t afford isolated people.

01:16:00 And if your friends do the wrong thing,

01:16:02 they’re still your friends.

01:16:04 And if they do terrible, terrible things,

01:16:06 you bring that up with them privately.

01:16:08 And it’s not my responsibility to disavow in public.

01:16:12 We’ve had the situation that I don’t like

01:16:15 where particular people that I’ve been close to,

01:16:19 I’m put under tremendous pressure to disavow them.

01:16:21 What do you think now about your buddy?

01:16:24 I like Dave Rubin, all that kind of stuff.

01:16:26 Here’s the thing, my friends are my friends.

01:16:28 I don’t disavow my friends.

01:16:30 We all need to make a statement

01:16:34 that we will not be brought under pressure

01:16:36 to disavow our friends, our family members,

01:16:40 because mass murderers are dangerous

01:16:46 the more isolated they become.

01:16:48 It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people.

01:16:52 Yes.

01:16:53 And it’s dangerous, and so.

01:16:54 And it sends a signal to everybody else

01:16:56 to fit in, to be more cynical about the human.

01:17:00 So my feeling, if I find out you’ve been selling heroin

01:17:04 to elementary school students,

01:17:06 you’re still my friend, and I will not be disavowing you.

01:17:09 And if I have a problem with you selling heroin

01:17:11 to elementary school students during school hours,

01:17:15 I will bring it up with you privately,

01:17:18 because we don’t need to hear my voice

01:17:21 added to that condemnation.

01:17:23 Are there things that you could do

01:17:25 that would cause me to say, actually, F this guy?

01:17:27 Yeah, above and beyond that.

01:17:29 But simply doing the wrong thing,

01:17:32 I think we’ve gone down a terrible path.

01:17:34 I think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing

01:17:37 we could have in a heavily armed society.

01:17:40 So I deeply agree with you on Brian Callan

01:17:43 and on all these people that, quote, unquote, got canceled.

01:17:47 And I’m not saying that they,

01:17:49 I don’t know the truth value, because we can’t.

01:17:52 And even if I did know the truth value,

01:17:53 I’m not setting up an incentive structure

01:17:56 for the personal destruction

01:17:59 as a means of letting institutions combat

01:18:02 the fact that individuals are the last thing that can say,

01:18:05 none of you guys make any sense.

01:18:08 I don’t treat these things like,

01:18:09 I had a conversation where Kevin Spacey

01:18:12 was at the dinner table when I came down from a hotel room.

01:18:15 And I had a very long conversation with Kevin Spacey.

01:18:18 I will not detail, because I don’t do that,

01:18:21 as to what we discussed.

01:18:23 But we talked very specifically about him being canceled.

01:18:27 And I don’t think that the world has heard that story

01:18:30 in part because there’s a very strong sense

01:18:33 that he has to be outgrouped.

01:18:35 And as a result, I mean, do we want,

01:18:41 do we want to disavow the space program

01:18:42 because it touched Werner von Braun?

01:18:44 Do we want to disavow quantum mechanics

01:18:46 because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg passed through it?

01:18:49 Is Ehrenfest’s theorem false because he murdered his child?

01:18:53 I mean, at what point do we recognize

01:18:55 that we are the problem?

01:18:57 Humans are humans.

01:18:58 And there is no perfect,

01:19:01 there is no perfect group of people,

01:19:03 even all of the most oppressed people,

01:19:04 the supposed victims of the world,

01:19:06 who we now have fetishized into thinking

01:19:08 that they’re all oracles

01:19:09 because their lived experience informs us

01:19:12 and their pain is more salient than everyone else’s pain.

01:19:16 Those people aren’t necessarily great people.

01:19:19 It’s like none of us, we can’t do this in this fashion.

01:19:24 So when we sit down to have a conversation

01:19:27 across the table from somebody,

01:19:29 you should be willing to,

01:19:32 like you should not have NPR in your mind.

01:19:33 You should be willing to take the full risk

01:19:36 and to see the good in the person

01:19:40 with limited information

01:19:41 and to do your best to understand that person.

01:19:44 Everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget.

01:19:48 I don’t believe this is of institutions, okay?

01:19:51 Everybody is entitled

01:19:52 to a certain amount of screwing up in life.

01:19:55 You’re entitled to a mendacity budget.

01:19:57 You’re entitled to an aggression budget.

01:20:00 The idea of getting rid of everybody,

01:20:03 you know, people haven’t even blown through their budgets

01:20:06 and we’re already.

01:20:07 Yeah, I think about, for example, one person,

01:20:11 I’d be curious to get your thoughts about Alex Jones.

01:20:14 Let’s not talk about Alex Jones for a second.

01:20:16 Let’s talk about the National Enquirer.

01:20:18 Is everything the National Enquirer says false?

01:20:22 No.

01:20:23 No.

01:20:25 Okay, do you remember the John Edwards story?

01:20:28 Did you cheat on his wife?

01:20:30 Sorry.

01:20:30 He had a child from an extramarital affair.

01:20:33 Yes.

01:20:34 I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story.

01:20:39 And then what does the New York Times do?

01:20:41 The New York Times, I think, is allowed to report

01:20:43 that the National Enquirer is making a claim.

01:20:46 That way they don’t have to substantiate the story.

01:20:49 So why is the New York Times talking to Mike Cernovich

01:20:53 or using the National Enquirer as a source?

01:20:56 Are they using Alex Jones as a source?

01:20:59 Here’s the big problem that we’re having.

01:21:02 Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody

01:21:05 and other people are entitled to talk to no one?

01:21:08 I don’t really understand this.

01:21:09 This is an indulgence system.

01:21:10 This is how the Catholic church used to do things.

01:21:13 It’s hard to fight the system because the reason

01:21:15 you don’t talk to Alex Jones is because the platforms

01:21:17 on which we do the communication will deplatform.

01:21:21 I’m not platform.

01:21:23 I used to do NPR and I used to do the NewsHour

01:21:27 and I used to provide stories

01:21:29 to Washington Post, New York Times.

01:21:32 That has gone away.

01:21:33 They’ve circled the wagons closer and closer

01:21:36 and more of us are unacceptable.

01:21:38 And right now I have no question that they’re going

01:21:41 through anybody who has a platform trying to say,

01:21:45 okay, what do we have against that person

01:21:46 in case we need to shut that down?

01:21:48 We have to make a different decision, Lex,

01:21:51 and the different decision is that it doesn’t matter

01:21:54 how many times Joe said the N word.

01:21:58 It doesn’t matter that somebody else,

01:22:04 with mathematical theorems, if the worst person

01:22:06 in the world proves a mathematical theorem

01:22:08 like the Unabomber, we can’t undo the theorem.

01:22:12 And I point out Charles Manson’s song,

01:22:15 Look at Your Game Girl is an amazing song.

01:22:18 It’s a really good song.

01:22:19 I don’t think it’s one of the greatest songs ever,

01:22:22 but it happens that he wasn’t a no talent.

01:22:25 And I don’t know how Hitler was as an artist.

01:22:29 Fiction, not bad.

01:22:30 Okay, we’ve got to get past this.

01:22:33 We’ve got to get past this idea

01:22:35 that we’re going to purge ourselves of our badness

01:22:37 and we’re just going to, this is like,

01:22:40 I’ve likened it to teenage girls in cutting.

01:22:42 We’re just, all we’re doing is destroying ourselves

01:22:46 in search of perfection.

01:22:47 And the answer is no, we’re not perfect.

01:22:49 We’re flawed, we’re screwed up.

01:22:52 And we’ve always been this way.

01:22:53 And we’re not going to silence everyone

01:22:55 who you can point a laser beam at

01:22:57 and say, well, that person, look at how bad that person is.

01:23:00 If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye.

01:23:03 We might as well just, let’s learn Chinese.

01:23:07 But there is an art to having those messy conversations,

01:23:10 whether with Alex or anybody else.

01:23:13 Okay, let’s talk about Alex.

01:23:15 There’s particular stuff that Alex does

01:23:16 that’s absolutely nauseating.

01:23:19 And there’s other stuff that he’s doing that’s funny.

01:23:20 The methodology of the way he carries.

01:23:23 And sometimes he’s talking about the truth.

01:23:25 And sometimes he’s talking about a conspiracy.

01:23:27 His variance is incredibly high.

01:23:30 The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O. Keefe

01:23:33 or the National Enquirer or anything you don’t like

01:23:36 is to say, great, go long short.

01:23:40 Well, if you invest in a mutual fund,

01:23:43 all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long.

01:23:46 But if you invest in a hedge fund,

01:23:48 you do something called relative value trade.

01:23:51 It’s like, well, you long tech or short tech?

01:23:54 Well, actually I’m long Microsoft and I’m short Google.

01:23:59 Why is that?

01:24:00 Oh, because I believe Google got way too much attention

01:24:03 and that Microsoft has been unfairly maligned.

01:24:06 And so this is really a play on legacy tech

01:24:08 over more modern tech, okay?

01:24:12 Which part of Alex Jones are you long

01:24:14 and which part are you short?

01:24:15 One of the things that should be a requirement

01:24:17 for being a reporter is like,

01:24:18 what did Donald Trump do that was good?

01:24:21 Right. Nothing.

01:24:22 Okay, then you’re not a reporter.

01:24:25 What did Hitler do that was good?

01:24:29 The Rosenstrasse of protest.

01:24:34 Non Jewish women campaign for their Jewish men

01:24:37 to be returned home to them

01:24:39 from certain death almost in death camps.

01:24:43 It should have been that there were no death camps.

01:24:45 It should have been that everybody was returned home.

01:24:48 But you know what?

01:24:50 The fact that the women of the Rosenstrasse protest,

01:24:53 I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about this.

01:24:56 Some of the baddest ass chicks in the world

01:24:59 got their husbands returned to them.

01:25:03 Kolokavod.

01:25:05 And not, I’m not celebrating Hitler.

01:25:08 Hitler’s the worst of the worst.

01:25:11 But God damn it, this idea that we can just say

01:25:15 everything that person does is a lie.

01:25:17 Everything that person does is evil.

01:25:20 This reflects a simplicity of mind

01:25:23 that humanity cannot afford.

01:25:26 Is Google evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf?

01:25:30 Is Amazon evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf?

01:25:32 If you find out that Mein Kampf

01:25:34 rests on somebody’s bookshelves,

01:25:35 do you have any idea what it means?

01:25:38 If you find out that a scholar use the N word,

01:25:41 should that person lose their job?

01:25:43 Come on.

01:25:44 Grow the hell up.

01:25:47 I guess our responsibility to lead by example in that,

01:25:50 because you have to acknowledge that the fact,

01:25:53 like the current public discourse.

01:25:55 Have somebody on your podcast who you’re worried about.

01:26:01 But do it in a principled fashion.

01:26:03 I mean, in other words, I’m not here to whitewash everything.

01:26:08 On the other hand, if somebody makes some allegations,

01:26:14 I don’t know that I’m obligated

01:26:16 to treat every set of allegations as if,

01:26:19 no, how do you defend yourself against, no.

01:26:21 Allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.

01:26:24 Well, my standard, I don’t know,

01:26:27 maybe you could speak to it is,

01:26:29 I don’t care, like in the case of Alex Jones, for example,

01:26:31 I don’t, I’m willing to have a conversation

01:26:35 with Alex Jones and people like him.

01:26:37 If I know he’s not going to try to manipulate me.

01:26:40 Assume that he is gonna try to manipulate you.

01:26:42 I can’t, then we’re not going to be two humans.

01:26:45 Okay, but Lex, I want you to think well of me.

01:26:48 I put on a jacket, I don’t usually wear a jacket, okay?

01:26:52 Thank you, Eric.

01:26:53 All right, I’m trying to manipulate you.

01:26:55 There’s an entire field, no, there’s an entire field

01:26:59 that says that speech may be best thought of

01:27:01 as an attempt to manipulate each other.

01:27:05 This is too simplistic.

01:27:06 Everything that we keep talking through.

01:27:08 Yes.

01:27:10 You know better than this.

01:27:11 I disagree, I think there is ways,

01:27:15 there’s, of course, it’s a gray area,

01:27:18 but there is a threshold where your intent

01:27:21 with which you come to a meeting, to an interaction,

01:27:25 is one that is not one that’s grounded

01:27:29 in like a respect for a common humanity,

01:27:32 like a love for each other, is deeply messy.

01:27:34 If somebody is doing really bad stuff,

01:27:36 I expect you to try to keep them

01:27:38 from doing really bad stuff.

01:27:40 But just keep in mind that when I was a younger man,

01:27:45 I saw an amazing anti pornography documentary,

01:27:50 and it was called Rate It X,

01:27:52 and I don’t know where it went,

01:27:55 but the conceit of it was we’re going to get

01:27:57 some pornographers in front of a camera

01:28:00 because they want to talk,

01:28:02 and we’re going to ask them about what they do

01:28:03 for a living and why it’s okay.

01:28:07 No commentary.

01:28:13 Okay.

01:28:13 You could potentially,

01:28:16 if you really think Alex Jones is the worst,

01:28:18 and again, I’m not intimately familiar with him,

01:28:21 you could decide to just let him talk.

01:28:25 Just let him talk.

01:28:29 Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people.

01:28:33 I’ve spoken to Stefan Molyneux.

01:28:35 Stefan Molyneux makes many good points,

01:28:38 makes many bad points,

01:28:39 and he makes many good points in bad ways,

01:28:42 and I worry about it,

01:28:43 and I don’t feel that it’s not my obligation

01:28:46 to make sure that Stefan Molyneux

01:28:48 has a voice on the portal.

01:28:51 But I did stand up and say I didn’t want him banned

01:28:55 from social media,

01:28:57 and I do think that a lot of the people

01:28:59 who are being banned from social media

01:29:00 were worried that they’re right

01:29:02 rather than that they’re wrong.

01:29:03 I certainly don’t really think that I’m worried

01:29:07 in some sense that some of the really wrong people

01:29:10 are wrong, but if you look at, for example, Curtis Yarvin,

01:29:13 there’s a tremendous amount of interest.

01:29:15 Is Eric going to speak to Curtis Yarvin?

01:29:17 Curtis Yarvin says many interesting things,

01:29:20 and he says many horrible, stupid things, very provocative.

01:29:23 And I haven’t invited him onto the portal,

01:29:28 but I haven’t said I will never invite him onto the portal.

01:29:32 We are all in a difficult position.

01:29:35 That’s what I’m saying.

01:29:35 You’re making it kind of,

01:29:37 I think it’s a much more difficult task

01:29:39 and burden to carry as people who have conversations

01:29:43 because Curtis Yarvin is a good example.

01:29:46 How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis’s work

01:29:50 to really understand?

01:29:51 We should talk about the problem of Curtis Yarvin,

01:29:53 I think it’s probably illustrative.

01:29:55 There’s this big question is why does somebody

01:29:57 who says such stupid ass things listen to

01:30:00 by so many people?

01:30:01 Very smart people, people who are part of our daily lives

01:30:04 discuss Curtis Yarvin in hushed tones.

01:30:07 Now, it’s a good question.

01:30:09 My belief is that Curtis Yarvin has made a number

01:30:12 of very interesting, provocative points,

01:30:15 and they associate Curtis Yarvin as the person

01:30:18 who has made these points,

01:30:20 and they treat the completely asinine stuff

01:30:23 that he says that’s super dangerous as,

01:30:26 well, that’s Curtis, right?

01:30:29 Right, they give him the credit for,

01:30:31 he’s a kind of like, sorry to use the term,

01:30:34 first principles deep thinker about the way the world,

01:30:37 in some space about the world.

01:30:40 But as a result, we don’t actually know

01:30:43 why Curtis Yarvin is knocking around

01:30:45 so many Silicon Valley luminaries lives.

01:30:51 See, you said that he said a lot of asinine stupid stuff,

01:30:54 and that’s the sense I got from a few things I’ve read,

01:30:56 not just about, this is not just like Wikipedia stuff,

01:31:00 is he’s a little, like I’ve said before,

01:31:03 he seems to be careless.

01:31:05 I don’t think he’s, no, no, no, it’s like Jim Watson.

01:31:09 Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things

01:31:12 in order to prove that he’s free.

01:31:14 It’s not a question of careless.

01:31:15 He enjoys the freedom to say these things.

01:31:20 And the key point is, is that there’s,

01:31:22 I expect something more of Curtis.

01:31:25 I expect that if somebody is insightful

01:31:27 about all sorts of things up to that point,

01:31:32 that they’re going to have enough care.

01:31:33 Now, I, for example, make this point repeatedly

01:31:35 that vaccines are not 100% safe.

01:31:38 Most people who have an idea that anybody

01:31:41 who’s an anti vaxxer should be silenced are in a position

01:31:44 where they probably don’t say vaccines are 100% safe,

01:31:48 but you keep finding that statement over and over again,

01:31:50 like believe all women, vaccines are 100% safe,

01:31:53 climate science is settled science.

01:31:55 Whatever this Mont and Bailey is,

01:31:57 where you make extraordinarily vapid blanket claims,

01:32:02 and then you retreat into something,

01:32:04 well, defund the, we don’t want no more police,

01:32:07 actually just means we want the police to not take

01:32:11 on mental health duties.

01:32:14 We’ve come up with an incredibly disingenuous society.

01:32:17 And what I’m claiming is, is that I might talk

01:32:21 to Curtis Yarvin, but I have really very little interest

01:32:25 to talk to a guy who seems to be kind of giddy

01:32:28 about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves.

01:32:31 It’s like, why do I want to do that on the portal?

01:32:34 One, first of all, because just as you said,

01:32:37 that’s not Curtis’s main thing.

01:32:39 He has a lot of ideas and what I’ve read of him,

01:32:43 which is not a huge amount, is he’s very thoughtful

01:32:48 about the way this world works.

01:32:50 And on top of that, he’s an important historical figure

01:32:54 in the birth and the development of the alt right,

01:32:57 or what would be called the alt right.

01:32:59 Or the new reactionary.

01:33:00 Yeah, and there’s,

01:33:01 so he’s just an important intellectual.

01:33:05 And so it makes sense to talk to him.

01:33:07 The question is, how much work do you put in?

01:33:10 Well, this is the issue of fugu.

01:33:12 I’m not a chef that necessarily can serve that fugu.

01:33:18 So you have a puffer fish, you can eat the puffer fish.

01:33:21 You can get kind of a tingly sensation on your tongue

01:33:25 if you get a little bit of the poison organ.

01:33:27 But my point is, I don’t know how to serve Curtis Yarvin

01:33:30 so that, in fact, I’m not worried about what happens.

01:33:34 And I believe that if somebody else was a student

01:33:37 of the new reactionary movement,

01:33:39 that person might be in a better position

01:33:41 to host Curtis Yarvin.

01:33:42 So somebody, that’s a really good example,

01:33:44 somebody I think you’ve spoken with that’s an intermediary,

01:33:49 that’s a powerful one, is Michael Malice.

01:33:50 And he’s spoken with Curtis Yarvin.

01:33:52 And Michael wrote a book about.

01:33:55 By the way, Michael somewhat changed my mind

01:33:57 about Michael Malice.

01:33:58 I’m glad he did.

01:33:59 I think, I would call him a friend,

01:34:02 and I think he’s underneath it all

01:34:06 a really kind human being.

01:34:08 And I think your skepticism about him was initially

01:34:11 from a surface level of, what did you call him,

01:34:13 hyenas, the trolls, and so on.

01:34:15 I’m not happy about his.

01:34:19 It’s been so long since I’ve seen good trolls.

01:34:23 Yes.

01:34:24 So.

01:34:24 He needs a higher quality of trolling.

01:34:28 But he aspires to that.

01:34:30 I mean, disagree or not,

01:34:33 I really enjoy how much care he puts

01:34:38 into the work he does, like on North Korea

01:34:40 and the study of the world,

01:34:42 and how much privately, but also in public,

01:34:45 love he has for people, especially those who are powerless.

01:34:50 Just a genuine admiration for them.

01:34:55 I think Curtis actually.

01:34:57 Does too.

01:34:58 I don’t know.

01:34:59 I mean, you have to appreciate,

01:34:59 the first time I met Curtis, he introduced me,

01:35:02 he says, I’m the most right wing person you’ve ever met.

01:35:05 I was just like, well,

01:35:06 this is a conversation that’s already over.

01:35:09 It’s theatrical in a way that’s not conducted

01:35:12 to actually having a real human connection.

01:35:14 It turned me off because it was like,

01:35:18 you need to be the most right wing person.

01:35:19 And so it’s like, I’m a troll, I’m a troll.

01:35:22 Okay, why are we doing this?

01:35:24 But what I’m trying to get at is different.

01:35:25 I’m trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend of yours.

01:35:29 If you found out something terrible,

01:35:31 you should still be a friend.

01:35:32 You should still continue to be his friend.

01:35:34 And in Michael Malice’s case,

01:35:36 it’s very likely that we’ll find out something terrible.

01:35:38 Curtis is an acquaintance of mine

01:35:40 because he hangs around with some people that I know.

01:35:42 I did not get it.

01:35:44 I’ve started to understand why the people in my life,

01:35:48 some of them are Curtis Yarvin fans.

01:35:51 Many of them disregard the stupid stuff.

01:35:54 But my feeling is that too much poison organ,

01:35:58 not enough fish.

01:35:59 I don’t know how to serve that.

01:36:00 It’s too intermingled.

01:36:01 I’m not your chef.

01:36:02 Speaking for defending your friends,

01:36:04 staying with your friends,

01:36:06 and bringing the old band together again,

01:36:10 you coined the term IDW, Intellectual Dark Web.

01:36:15 I like it.

01:36:16 It represents a certain group of people

01:36:19 that are struggling with,

01:36:22 that are almost like challenged the norms

01:36:26 of social and political discourse

01:36:29 from all different angles.

01:36:31 What do you think is the state of the IDW?

01:36:33 What do you think is its future?

01:36:35 Is it still a useful?

01:36:39 Well, it never exists.

01:36:40 Is it a protocol?

01:36:41 Is it a collection of people featured in an article?

01:36:44 What I learned very clearly

01:36:46 is that there’s a tremendous desire in the internet age

01:36:49 to pin people down.

01:36:50 Well, what do you say?

01:36:50 Who’s in it?

01:36:51 What are the criteria?

01:36:53 It’s like, I understand.

01:36:55 You wanna play the demarcation game

01:36:57 and you wanna make everything that is demarcated

01:36:59 instantly null and void.

01:37:01 No, thank you.

01:37:02 So I resisted saying who was in it.

01:37:06 I resisted saying what it was.

01:37:07 I resisted saying that Barry Weiss’s article

01:37:10 was the definitive thing.

01:37:14 They chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs

01:37:17 that we couldn’t get out of.

01:37:18 I did not want those photographs taken.

01:37:20 They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer

01:37:23 needed to take them all at twilight.

01:37:25 I don’t know, some such thing.

01:37:27 I didn’t even necessarily wanna do the article.

01:37:29 Barry convinced me that it was the right thing to do.

01:37:32 Undoubtedly Barry was right.

01:37:33 I was wrong.

01:37:35 But the key point is nothing can grow in this environment.

01:37:40 There’s a reason we’re not building.

01:37:43 It does not appear that we found a way

01:37:46 to grow anything organic and good and decent

01:37:49 that we need right now.

01:37:50 And that’s kind of the key issue.

01:37:52 Who’s the we?

01:37:53 Do you mean us as a society?

01:37:55 Those of us who wish to have a future

01:37:57 for our great grandchildren.

01:37:59 Let’s take the subset of people who are worried

01:38:02 about things long after their demise.

01:38:06 But do you think it’s useful to have a term like the IDW

01:38:09 to capture some set of people,

01:38:13 some set of ideas

01:38:17 or maybe principles that capture what I think the IDW,

01:38:21 okay, you can say it’s not supposed to mean,

01:38:23 it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean anything,

01:38:25 but to the public, to me, okay, I’ll just speak to me,

01:38:29 it represented something.

01:38:30 Yeah.

01:38:31 It represented, I think I just said this to you,

01:38:34 in my first attempt to interview the great Eric Weinstein,

01:38:39 I said that, I spoke this about you,

01:38:42 but IDW in general is trying to point out the elephant

01:38:44 in the room or that the emperor has no clothes.

01:38:46 The set of people that do that in their own way.

01:38:49 If there are multiple elephants in the room,

01:38:52 the point is that the IDW was more interested

01:38:54 in seeing the totality of elephants

01:38:56 and trying to figure out how do we move forward

01:38:59 as opposed to saying I can spot the other guy’s elephant

01:39:01 in the room, but I can’t see my own.

01:39:03 And in large measure,

01:39:05 we didn’t represent an institutional base.

01:39:09 And therefore it wasn’t maximally important

01:39:12 that we look at our own hypocrisy

01:39:13 because we weren’t on the institutional spectrum.

01:39:18 This is where friendship comes into play

01:39:20 with the different figures

01:39:21 that are loosely associated with IDW

01:39:24 is you were somehow responsible for the exact thing

01:39:32 that you said, did you hear what, I don’t know,

01:39:35 I forget, oh, what Sam Harris said about IDW.

01:39:39 Yeah.

01:39:40 That kind of thing is.

01:39:41 I chuckled.

01:39:42 Lovingly or chuckle like, oh.

01:39:46 I was angry at some people who had said things

01:39:49 that caused Sam to say what Sam said

01:39:51 about turning his imaginary club membership into the IDW.

01:39:55 People said very silly things.

01:39:58 And I think that there is just this confusion

01:40:01 that integrity means calling out your friends

01:40:06 in front of the world.

01:40:08 And I’ve been pretty clear about this.

01:40:12 I try to choose my friends carefully.

01:40:13 And if you would like to recuse me

01:40:16 because I’m not a source of reliable information,

01:40:18 people that I know and love the most,

01:40:22 maybe that’s reasonable for you.

01:40:23 Maybe you prefer somebody who was willing

01:40:25 to throw a friend under the bus

01:40:27 at the first sign of trouble.

01:40:29 By all means, exit my feed.

01:40:31 You don’t have to subscribe to me.

01:40:33 If that’s your concept of integrity,

01:40:36 you’re barking up the wrong tree.

01:40:38 What I will say is that I knew these people well enough

01:40:41 to know that they’re all flawed.

01:40:44 Thank you for the callback.

01:40:46 But the issue is that I love people who are flawed.

01:40:52 And I love people who have to earn a living,

01:40:55 even if you call them a grifter.

01:40:57 And I love people who like the fact

01:41:01 that Donald Trump didn’t get us into new wars,

01:41:03 even if you call them alt right.

01:41:05 I love the fact that some people believe

01:41:09 in structural oppression and wanna fight it,

01:41:12 even if they’re not woke,

01:41:14 because they don’t believe that structural oppression

01:41:16 is hiding everywhere.

01:41:19 I care and love different people in different ways.

01:41:21 And I think that the overarching thing, Lex,

01:41:24 that we’re not getting at is that

01:41:26 we were sold a bill of goods

01:41:28 that you can go through life like an ELISA program

01:41:33 with pre programmed responses.

01:41:35 Well, it’s what about ism, it’s both sides ism,

01:41:39 it’s alt right, it’s the loony left, it’s campus madness.

01:41:44 It’s like, okay, why don’t you just empty

01:41:46 the entire goddamn magazine?

01:41:51 All of those pre recorded snips.

01:41:57 Now that you’ve done all of that,

01:42:00 now we can have a conversation.

01:42:02 Your son put it really well, which is we should,

01:42:07 in all things, resist labels.

01:42:09 But we can’t deal without labels, we have to generalize.

01:42:15 But we also have to keep in mind

01:42:17 that just in the way in science,

01:42:19 you deal with an effective theory

01:42:20 that isn’t a fundamental one.

01:42:23 In science, most of our theories,

01:42:25 we consider to be effective theories.

01:42:27 If I generalize about Europe, about women,

01:42:32 about Christians, those things have to be understood

01:42:38 to mean something and not to have their definitions

01:42:42 extend so broadly that they mean nothing at all,

01:42:46 nor that they’re so rigid that they’re claims

01:42:51 that clearly won’t bear scrutiny.

01:42:55 Lex, what do you really wanna talk about?

01:42:56 That’s always my question to you.

01:42:58 That always gets me, maybe you are the therapist.

01:43:02 But you and I could talk about anything.

01:43:04 People love, up until now at least,

01:43:07 people have loved listening

01:43:08 to the two of us in conversation.

01:43:10 And my feeling is is that we’re not talking

01:43:13 about neural nets, and we’re not talking

01:43:17 about geometric unity, and we’re not talking

01:43:20 about where distributed computing might go.

01:43:23 And I don’t think that we’re really focused

01:43:25 on some of the most exciting things

01:43:29 we could do to transform education.

01:43:30 We’re still caught in this world of other people

01:43:34 that we don’t belong in.

01:43:36 I don’t belong in the world as it’s been created.

01:43:38 I’m trying to build a new world,

01:43:39 and I’m astounded that the people

01:43:44 with the independent means to help build that world

01:43:46 are so demotivated that they don’t wanna

01:43:49 build new structures.

01:43:52 And the people who do wanna build new structures

01:43:54 seem to be wild eyed.

01:43:56 Wild eyed, what do you mean by wild eyed?

01:43:58 They’re not, they’re not.

01:43:59 I guarantee you that I will get some message

01:44:01 in my DMs that says, hey, Eric.

01:44:03 You know, I’m a third year chemistry student

01:44:06 at South Dakota State, and I’ve got a great idea.

01:44:11 I just need funding.

01:44:12 I wanna build.

01:44:13 They don’t have the means.

01:44:14 So the people who have the means have become.

01:44:16 Or the sophistication, it’s like you’re looking

01:44:19 for somebody who’s proven themselves a few times

01:44:22 to say, you know, I’ve got $4 billion behind me

01:44:26 that’s soft circled.

01:44:27 I wanna figure out what a new university would be

01:44:30 and what it would take to protect academic freedom

01:44:33 and who we would hire

01:44:34 and what are the different characteristics

01:44:36 because I can clearly see that everything

01:44:37 following the current model is falling apart.

01:44:40 Nobody in my understanding is saying that.

01:44:43 Nobody is saying let’s take that

01:44:47 which is functioning independently

01:44:51 and make it less vulnerable.

01:44:53 Let’s boost those signals.

01:44:55 And a critical component as money, you think?

01:44:58 It’s not only that, but it’s also a kind of

01:45:01 these people are mobbed up hands off.

01:45:04 Let’s imagine for the moment that Sundar Pichai,

01:45:08 Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg

01:45:12 founded a university come social media entity.

01:45:17 And they said, the purpose of this is to make sure

01:45:20 that academic freedom will not perish from this earth

01:45:23 because it’s necessary to keep us from all going crazy.

01:45:26 And we are going to lock ourselves out.

01:45:29 We’ve come up with this governance system.

01:45:32 And the idea is that these people will be assigned

01:45:35 the difficult task of making sure that society

01:45:38 doesn’t go crazy in any particular direction.

01:45:40 That we have a fact based, reality based,

01:45:43 feasibility based, understaffed,

01:45:46 theory based understanding.

01:45:48 We can try to figure out where our real opportunities are.

01:45:53 It feels like everybody with the ability

01:45:56 to do something like that,

01:45:58 and with the brains and experience and the resources,

01:46:02 would rather sit in the current system

01:46:06 and hope to figure out where they can flee to

01:46:08 if the whole thing comes apart.

01:46:10 Well, yeah, and maybe to push back in a little bit,

01:46:12 I agree with you, but you know,

01:46:14 it feels like some people are trying that.

01:46:17 So for example, Google purchased DeepMind.

01:46:21 DeepMind is a company that kind of represents

01:46:23 a lot of radical ideas.

01:46:25 They’ve become acceptable, actually.

01:46:27 AGI, artificial general intelligence,

01:46:30 used to be really radical of a thing to talk about.

01:46:35 And DeepMind and OpenAI are two places

01:46:38 which has made it more acceptable.

01:46:39 I know you can now start to criticize,

01:46:43 well, they’re really, now that it’s become acceptable,

01:46:46 they’re not taking the further step

01:46:48 of being more and more radical.

01:46:49 But you know, that wasn’t an attempt by Google

01:46:51 to say that let’s try some wild stuff.

01:46:57 Sort of like Boston Dynamics.

01:46:59 Sort of like Boston Dynamics.

01:47:01 Boston Dynamics is a really good example

01:47:04 of trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose whatsoever

01:47:09 except to try out their ideas.

01:47:13 Well, the idea is that innovation is like dessert.

01:47:16 You can have dessert after you solve the problem

01:47:20 of the main course, and the main course

01:47:22 is a bunch of insoluble problems.

01:47:24 So the idea is we can get into innovation

01:47:27 once we perfect ourselves.

01:47:29 And you’re saying that we need to make innovation

01:47:32 the main meal.

01:47:33 Well, I’m saying that there really is structural oppression.

01:47:37 I mean, if you train a deep learning system

01:47:44 on exclusively white faces, it’s gonna get confused.

01:47:47 So let’s not disagree that there are real issues

01:47:51 around this.

01:47:52 In fact, that’s an issue of innovation and data.

01:47:55 Your data should be responsive.

01:47:57 On the other hand, there are things

01:47:59 we can’t do anything about that are actually fundamental.

01:48:04 And those things may have to do with the fact

01:48:08 that some of us taste cilantro as soap,

01:48:13 and some of us don’t.

01:48:14 Like there are differences between people,

01:48:16 and some of them are in the hardware,

01:48:18 some of them are in the firmware,

01:48:19 some of them are in the software that is the human mind.

01:48:23 And this completely simplistic idea

01:48:27 that every failure of an organization

01:48:32 to promote each person

01:48:34 who has particular intersexual characteristics,

01:48:38 we cannot hold progress hostage to that.

01:48:42 And you’ve talked about, perhaps we’ll save this

01:48:45 for another time because it’s such a fascinating conversation.

01:48:47 You talked about this with Glenn Beck,

01:48:51 is the whole sort of stagnation of growth

01:48:53 and all that kind of stuff.

01:48:54 Your idea is that in as much as the current situation

01:48:59 is a kind of Ponzi scheme,

01:49:01 the current situation in the United States

01:49:03 is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise

01:49:06 of constant unending innovation,

01:49:10 we need to fund the true innovators

01:49:17 and encourage them and empower them

01:49:21 and sort of culturally say that this is what

01:49:23 this country is about is the brilliant minds.

01:49:27 We’re gonna kill each other if we don’t grow.

01:49:31 Growth is like an immune system

01:49:34 and you always have pathogens present,

01:49:36 but if you don’t have growth present,

01:49:37 you can’t fight the pathogens in your society.

01:49:40 And right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere.

01:49:43 So if we don’t get growth into our system fairly quickly,

01:49:46 we are in really seriously bad shape.

01:49:50 So it’s very important that if I had a horrible person

01:49:54 who was capable of building something

01:49:56 that would give us all a certain amount

01:49:59 of what I’ve called financial beta

01:50:00 to some new technology where we all benefit,

01:50:03 let’s say quantum computing comes in

01:50:05 and everybody, the dry cleaner

01:50:07 has a quantum computing angle, right?

01:50:09 Yes. Okay.

01:50:11 That’s necessary to keep this system that we built going.

01:50:15 We can try to redesign the system,

01:50:17 but our system expects growth

01:50:19 and we’ve started it for growth

01:50:21 and the madness that we’re seeing

01:50:23 is the failure of our immune system

01:50:24 to be able to handle the pathogens

01:50:26 that have always been present.

01:50:28 So people can say, well, this was always there.

01:50:30 Yes, it was.

01:50:31 What’s changed was your immune system.

01:50:34 We have got to make sure that one,

01:50:37 we understand why diversity

01:50:39 is potentially really important.

01:50:42 We have mined certain communities to death.

01:50:45 You and I are Ashkenazi Jews.

01:50:47 Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews

01:50:49 are good at technical stuff.

01:50:52 We know that the Chinese are good at technical stuff.

01:50:54 The Indians have many people

01:50:56 who are good at technical stuff as the Japanese.

01:50:58 So I also believe that we have communities

01:51:02 where if you think about the Pareto idea

01:51:05 of diminishing returns,

01:51:06 if you’ve never mined a community,

01:51:09 many of the people you’re gonna get at the beginning

01:51:11 are gonna be amazing because that community,

01:51:13 it’s like, did you drill for more oil in Texas?

01:51:16 Texas is pretty thoroughly picked over.

01:51:19 Do you find someplace that’s completely insane?

01:51:23 Maybe there’s oil there, who knows?

01:51:24 And in particular, I would like to displace our reliance

01:51:30 on our military competitors in Asia

01:51:32 in our scientific laboratories with women,

01:51:35 with African Americans, with Latinos,

01:51:38 people who are in different categories

01:51:40 than we have traditionally sourced.

01:51:42 And I would like to get them the money

01:51:44 that the market would normally give these fields

01:51:48 were we not using visas in place of payment, right?

01:51:52 Now, I have a crazy idea,

01:51:57 which is that I play, you and I both play music,

01:51:59 and I find the analytic work that I do

01:52:02 when I’m trying to figure out chord progressions

01:52:04 and symmetries and tritones, all these sorts of things

01:52:06 to be very similar to the work that I do

01:52:08 when I do physics or math.

01:52:10 I believe that one of the things that is true

01:52:13 is that the analytic contributions of African Americans

01:52:17 to music are probably fungible to science.

01:52:20 I don’t know that that’s true.

01:52:23 It’s true I haven’t done controlled research,

01:52:26 but I believe that it is very important

01:52:28 to let the People’s Republic of China know

01:52:31 that they are not staffing our laboratories anymore,

01:52:34 and that we need to look to our own people.

01:52:36 And in particular, we are going to get a huge benefit

01:52:39 for making sure that women, Black Americans, Latinos

01:52:45 are in a position to take over some of these things

01:52:49 because many of these communities have been underutilized.

01:52:52 Now, I don’t know if that’s an insane idea.

01:52:55 I want to hear somebody tell me why it’s an insane idea,

01:52:58 but I believe that part of what we need to do

01:53:00 is we need to recognize that there are security issues,

01:53:03 there are geopolitical issues with the funding of science,

01:53:07 and that what we’ve done is we’ve starved our world

01:53:10 for innovation, and if we don’t get back

01:53:12 to the business of innovation,

01:53:13 we should be doing diversity and inclusion

01:53:15 out of greed rather than guilt.

01:53:18 Now, part of the problem with this

01:53:20 is that a lot of the energy behind diversity and inclusion

01:53:23 is based on guilt and accusation.

01:53:26 And what I want is I want to kick ass,

01:53:30 and my hope is that diminishing returns favors

01:53:33 mining the communities that have not been traditionally mined

01:53:37 in order to extract output from those communities,

01:53:41 unless there’s a flaw in that plan.

01:53:43 If there’s a flaw, somebody needs to tell me.

01:53:45 If there isn’t a flaw, we need to get greedy

01:53:48 about innovation rather than guilty about innovation.

01:53:51 That’s really brilliantly put.

01:53:53 My biggest problem with what I see

01:53:55 is it exactly speaks to that in the discussion of diversity.

01:53:59 It’s used, when it’s grounded in guilt,

01:54:02 it’s then used as a hammer to shame people

01:54:05 that don’t care about diversity enough.

01:54:06 F that shit, okay?

01:54:10 So my point is I’m excited about the idea

01:54:13 of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field theory.

01:54:15 I’m excited about the idea of Art Tatum

01:54:19 trying to figure out what the neural nets

01:54:24 figured out about protein folding.

01:54:26 I have some idea of the level of intellect

01:54:29 of people who have not found their way into STEM subjects

01:54:32 in incredibly technically demanding areas.

01:54:35 And if there’s a flaw in that theory,

01:54:37 I want somebody to present the flaw.

01:54:40 But right now, my belief is that

01:54:43 these things are merit based.

01:54:45 And if you really believe in structural oppression,

01:54:48 you do not want an affirmative action program.

01:54:51 You wanna make sure that people have huge amounts

01:54:53 of resources to get themselves into position.

01:54:56 I wanna push out,

01:54:58 I just tried this on this Clubhouse application.

01:55:01 I wanna push out Klein bottles as a secret sign

01:55:04 inside of rap videos in hip hop, right?

01:55:07 I want people to have an idea

01:55:09 that there’s an amazing world.

01:55:10 And I wanna get the people who,

01:55:12 hopefully I’m trying to lure into science and engineering.

01:55:16 I want to get them paid.

01:55:18 I don’t want them as the cheap substitutes

01:55:20 for the fleeing white males who’ve learned

01:55:25 that they can’t make any money in science and engineering.

01:55:29 So the problem is that we need to take over the ship Lex.

01:55:34 And it doesn’t need to be you and me

01:55:36 because quite honestly, I have no desire to administer.

01:55:38 I don’t wanna be the chief executive officer of anything.

01:55:41 What I do want is I want the baby boomers

01:55:44 who’ve made this mess and can’t see it to be gone.

01:55:48 They had almost all of our universities

01:55:51 and I want fresh blood, fresh resources.

01:55:56 I want academic freedom and I want greed for our country

01:56:00 and for the future to determine diversity inclusion

01:56:03 as opposed to shame and guilt,

01:56:05 which is destroying our fabric.

01:56:06 That’s as good of a diversity statement as I’ve ever heard.

01:56:13 This is a U turn, but somebody commented on the tweet

01:56:17 you sent that as one of the top comments,

01:56:20 they definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency.

01:56:24 So it’s a U turn, but not really.

01:56:27 Since you’re an economist, since you’re deep,

01:56:29 not an economist.

01:56:31 I mean, I pretend to be an economist,

01:56:33 hoping that the economists will take issue

01:56:36 that I’m not an economist so that I can advance

01:56:39 gauge theoretic and field theoretic economics,

01:56:41 which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge

01:56:45 was a major innovation

01:56:46 that happened approximately 25 years ago.

01:56:49 I don’t think that economists understand

01:56:51 what a price index is that measures inflation,

01:56:53 nor do I think economists understand what a growth index

01:56:58 or a product, a quantity index is that measures GDP.

01:57:04 I think that they don’t even understand the basics

01:57:07 of price and quantity index construction.

01:57:10 And therefore they can’t possibly review

01:57:16 field theoretic economics.

01:57:17 They can’t review gauge theoretic economics.

01:57:19 They’re intellectually not in a position

01:57:21 to manage their own field.

01:57:23 You talked about that there’s a stagnation

01:57:25 in growth currently.

01:57:26 I looked at, from my microeconomics,

01:57:29 macroeconomics in college perspective,

01:57:31 GDP doesn’t seem to capture the productivity,

01:57:36 the full, the spectrum of what I think is

01:57:40 as a functioning successful society.

01:57:43 What do you think is broken about GDP?

01:57:46 What does it need to include?

01:57:49 These indices, like what?

01:57:51 Let me explain what they don’t understand to begin with.

01:57:53 Sure.

01:57:54 Imagine that all prices and all quantities of output

01:58:02 are the same at the end of the year

01:58:04 as they are at the beginning.

01:58:06 And you ask what happened during that year?

01:58:09 Was there inflation?

01:58:11 They meandered over the course of the year,

01:58:12 but miraculously they all came back to exactly their values.

01:58:17 The amount produced at the end of the year

01:58:20 is the same as at the beginning in every single quantity.

01:58:24 Typically the claim would be that the price index

01:58:26 should be 1.0 and that the quantity index should be 1.0.

01:58:30 That’s clearly wrong.

01:58:32 Why?

01:58:34 Well, it’s much easier to see with,

01:58:37 it speaks to a fundamental confusion that economists have.

01:58:41 They don’t understand that the economy is curved

01:58:44 and not flat.

01:58:46 In a curved economy, everything should be path dependence,

01:58:50 but they view path dependence as a problem

01:58:53 because they are effectively the flat earth society

01:58:55 of market analysis.

01:58:57 They don’t understand that what they’ve called,

01:58:59 and they’ve actually called it the cycling problem,

01:59:02 is exactly what they need to understand

01:59:04 to advance their field.

01:59:06 So I’ll give you a very simple example, okay?

01:59:09 Let’s imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund

01:59:13 and Ted and Alice in another.

01:59:15 In both cases, the females, that is, Alice and Carol,

01:59:20 are the chief investment officers,

01:59:23 and Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers

01:59:26 in charge of trying to get money into the fund

01:59:29 and trying to get people not to, in fact,

01:59:34 remove their money from the funds, okay?

01:59:38 If you, in fact, had a hedge fund

01:59:43 with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,

01:59:47 and both hedge funds were invested in assets

01:59:51 whose prices came back to the same levels

01:59:53 and whose exposures were in the same quantities,

02:00:00 and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds,

02:00:02 would you compensate them the same necessarily?

02:00:06 What if, for example, Carol was killing it

02:00:11 in terms of investments?

02:00:12 Every time she bought some sort of security,

02:00:16 the price of that security went up, okay?

02:00:20 But Bob was the worst marketing officer,

02:00:25 and as chief marketing officer,

02:00:26 there were tons of redemptions

02:00:28 because Bob was constantly drunk,

02:00:30 Bob was making off color comments.

02:00:33 Now, as a result, at the end of the year,

02:00:36 the fund hasn’t grown in size

02:00:38 because even though Carol was crushing it

02:00:40 in terms of the investments,

02:00:43 Bob was screwing up everything

02:00:45 and the redemptions were legendary,

02:00:47 so people were making money

02:00:48 and still pulling it out of the fund.

02:00:51 In the other fund, Alice can’t seem to buy a base hit

02:00:57 every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets,

02:01:00 but Ted’s amazing marketing skills allowed the fund

02:01:05 to get all sorts of new subscriptions

02:01:07 and halted the redemptions as people hoped

02:01:09 that the fund would get its act together, okay.

02:01:14 Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated,

02:01:25 and quantity indices should be how Bob and Ted

02:01:30 are compensated, so even though both funds

02:01:34 had closed loops that come back to the original states,

02:01:38 what happened during the period that they were active

02:01:41 tells you how people are supposed to be compensated.

02:01:47 Now, we know that whatever the increase

02:01:49 in the price index is, is compensated by a decrease

02:01:53 in the quantity index or conversely,

02:01:56 because prices and quantities

02:01:58 return to their original values.

02:02:00 You could have another fund where nothing much happened,

02:02:02 there were no redemptions, no subscriptions,

02:02:04 the fund remained in cash the whole time.

02:02:08 So in that third fund, you know,

02:02:10 let’s call that Tristan and Isolde, right?

02:02:13 That fund should have no bonuses paid

02:02:17 because nobody did anything,

02:02:18 but nobody should be fired either.

02:02:20 Now, the fact that the economists don’t even understand

02:02:24 that this is what their price and quantity indices

02:02:26 were intended to do, that they don’t understand

02:02:29 that you can actually give what would be called

02:02:31 ordinal agents the freedom to change their preferences

02:02:35 and still have something defined as a

02:02:38 CONUS cost of living adjustment.

02:02:41 They don’t even understand the mathematics of their field.

02:02:43 So the indices need to be able to capture

02:02:46 some kind of dynamics that…

02:02:48 We have had indices that capture these dynamics

02:02:51 due to the work of Francois de Vizier since 1925.

02:02:55 But the economists have not even understood

02:02:57 what de Vizier’s index truly represent.

02:02:59 What do you miss with such crude indices then?

02:03:04 Well, you miss the fact that you’re supposed

02:03:06 to have a field theoretic subject.

02:03:09 The representative consumer should actually

02:03:11 be a probability distribution on the space

02:03:13 of all possible consumers weighted by the probability

02:03:16 of getting any particular pull from the distribution.

02:03:19 We should not have a single gauge of inflation.

02:03:23 What is that in 1973 dollars?

02:03:25 Any more than you should be able to say

02:03:28 it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on earth yesterday.

02:03:31 So when we get to the cryptocurrency,

02:03:34 what I’m going to say is that

02:03:37 because we didn’t found economic theory

02:03:39 on the proper marginal revolution,

02:03:41 because we missed the major opportunity,

02:03:44 which is that the differential calculus of markets

02:03:47 is gauge theory.

02:03:48 It’s not ordinary differential calculus.

02:03:53 We found that out in finance

02:03:55 that it was stochastic differential calculus.

02:03:58 We have the wrong version of the differential calculus

02:04:00 underneath all of modern economic theory.

02:04:03 And part of what I’ve been pushing for in cryptocurrencies

02:04:06 is the idea that we should be understanding

02:04:09 that gold is a gauge theory,

02:04:11 just as modern economic theory

02:04:13 is supposed to be a gauge theory.

02:04:15 And that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies

02:04:18 and more importantly distributed computing

02:04:22 from the problem of this unwanted global aspect,

02:04:25 which is the blockchain.

02:04:26 The thing that is most celebrated in some sense

02:04:29 about Bitcoin is in fact the reason

02:04:31 that I’m least enthusiastic about it.

02:04:33 I’m hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi did.

02:04:38 But it’s an intermediate step towards trying to figure out

02:04:40 what should digital gold actually be?

02:04:43 If physical gold is a collection of up quarks

02:04:49 and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons

02:04:52 held together, the quarks by gluons

02:04:55 with electrons orbiting and held together by photons

02:04:57 with the occasional weak interaction beta decay,

02:05:01 all of those are gauge theories.

02:05:02 So gold is actually coming from gauge theory

02:05:06 and markets are coming from gauge theory.

02:05:08 And the opportunity to do locally enforced conservation laws,

02:05:12 which effectively is what a Bitcoin transaction is,

02:05:15 should theoretically be founded on a different principle

02:05:19 that is not the blockchain.

02:05:21 It should be a gauge theoretic concept

02:05:23 in which effectively the tokens are excitations

02:05:27 on a network of computer nodes.

02:05:30 And the fact that, let’s imagine that this is some token.

02:05:35 By moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship,

02:05:39 effectively I pushed that glass as a gauge theory

02:05:43 towards your region of the table.

02:05:45 We should be recognizing the gauge theory

02:05:47 is the correct differential calculus for the 21st century.

02:05:51 In fact, it should have been there in the 20th century.

02:05:53 You’re saying it captures these individual dynamics,

02:05:57 much richer.

02:05:58 Why should my giving you a token have to be,

02:06:01 why should we alert the global community

02:06:05 in this token that that occurred?

02:06:06 You can talk about side chains,

02:06:08 you can talk about any means of doing this,

02:06:10 but effectively we have a problem,

02:06:11 which is if I think about this differently,

02:06:13 I have a glass that is extant,

02:06:16 you have a glass that is abstent.

02:06:19 We’re supposed to call the constructor method

02:06:23 on your glass at the same moment

02:06:24 we call the destructor method on my glass

02:06:26 in order to have a conservation principle.

02:06:29 It would be far more efficient to do this

02:06:32 with the one system that is known

02:06:34 never to throw an exception, which is nature.

02:06:37 And nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry

02:06:39 for her underlying language.

02:06:41 We now know due to work of Pia Malani at Harvard

02:06:45 in economics in the mid 1990s, which I was her coauthor on,

02:06:49 but I wish to promote her as well as this being my idea.

02:06:57 We know that modern economic theory

02:06:59 is a naturally occurring gauge theory.

02:07:01 And the failure of that community to acknowledge

02:07:04 that that work occurred and that it was put down

02:07:06 for reasons that make no analytic sense

02:07:10 is important in particular due to the relatively

02:07:13 new innovation of distributed computing

02:07:15 and Satoshi’s brainchild.

02:07:17 So you’re thinking we need to have the mathematics

02:07:20 that captures, that enforces cryptocurrency

02:07:23 as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one

02:07:25 where the blockchain says that crypto should be centralized.

02:07:30 The abundance economy much discussed in Silicon Valley

02:07:35 or what’s left of it is actually a huge threat

02:07:38 to the planet because what it really is

02:07:41 is that it is what Marc Andreessen

02:07:43 has called software eating the world.

02:07:45 And what that means is that you’re gonna push

02:07:47 things from being private goods and services

02:07:49 into public goods and services and public goods

02:07:51 and services cannot have price and value tied together.

02:07:55 Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value

02:07:59 to the world that they cannot command a price

02:08:01 and they will not be able to capture the value

02:08:03 that they have created or a significant enough

02:08:05 fraction of it.

02:08:07 The abundance economy is a disaster.

02:08:09 It will lead to a reduction in human freedom.

02:08:13 The great innovation of Satoshi is locally enforced

02:08:16 or semi locally enforced conservation laws

02:08:20 where the idea is just as gold is hard,

02:08:22 why is gold hard to create or destroy?

02:08:24 It’s because it’s created not only in stars

02:08:26 but in violent events involving stars

02:08:28 like supernova collisions.

02:08:31 When gold is created and we transact,

02:08:35 we’re using conservation laws.

02:08:38 The physics determines the custodianship,

02:08:41 whatever it is that I don’t have, you now have

02:08:43 and conversely, in such a situation,

02:08:47 we should be looking for the abstraction

02:08:49 that most closely matches the physical world

02:08:52 because the physical world is known

02:08:53 not to throw an exception.

02:08:55 The blockchain is a vulnerability.

02:08:57 The idea that the 51% problem isn’t solved,

02:09:00 that you could have crazy race conditions,

02:09:03 all of these things, we know that they’re solved

02:09:06 inside of gauge theory somehow.

02:09:10 So the important thing is to recognize

02:09:12 that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever

02:09:15 in the history of economic theory took place already

02:09:18 and was essentially instantly buried

02:09:22 and I will stand by those comments.

02:09:24 Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you.

02:09:28 Are you Satoshi?

02:09:29 No.

02:09:31 No, no, no, I don’t have that kind of ability.

02:09:33 I really don’t.

02:09:34 I do other things.

02:09:36 Speaking of Satoshi and gauge theory,

02:09:38 you’ve mentioned to Brian Keating

02:09:43 that you may be releasing a geometric unity paper this year

02:09:47 or some other form of additional material on the topic.

02:09:51 What is your thinking around this?

02:09:54 What’s the process you’re going through now

02:09:56 in preparing this?

02:09:58 I used April 1st to try to start a tradition

02:10:02 which I hope to use to liberate mankind.

02:10:04 The tradition is that at least one day a year,

02:10:10 you should be able to say heretical things

02:10:13 and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off or Mark Zuckerberg.

02:10:16 Your provost shouldn’t call you up and say,

02:10:18 what did you say?

02:10:20 We need at some level to have a jubilee

02:10:23 from centralized control.

02:10:26 And so my hope is that,

02:10:28 you know what a tradition is in America?

02:10:30 Something a baby boomer did twice.

02:10:35 Impeachment.

02:10:37 That’s very funny.

02:10:41 Anyway, so I’m not a baby boomer, but as an exer,

02:10:46 I’ve thought about whether or not April 1st

02:10:48 would be a good date on which to release a printed version

02:10:52 of what I already said in lecture form.

02:10:55 Because I think it’s hysterically funny

02:10:56 that the physics community claims

02:10:59 that it can’t decode a lecture.

02:11:03 It must be paper.

02:11:04 And you know what?

02:11:05 There will be a steady stream of new complaints

02:11:08 up until the point that they fit it into a narrative

02:11:10 that they like.

02:11:13 Yeah, I’m thinking about April 1st

02:11:16 as a date in which to release a document

02:11:19 and it won’t be perfectly complete,

02:11:21 but it’ll be very complete.

02:11:22 And then they’ll try to say, it’s wrong.

02:11:26 Or you already did it.

02:11:27 Or no, that was dumb,

02:11:29 but what we just did on top of it is brilliant.

02:11:31 Or it doesn’t match experiment.

02:11:34 Or who knows what.

02:11:35 They’ll go through all of their usual nonsense.

02:11:38 It’s time to go.

02:11:40 Is there still puzzles in your own mind

02:11:43 that need to be figured out

02:11:44 for you to try to put it on paper?

02:11:46 I mean, those are different mediums, right?

02:11:48 It was a great question.

02:11:50 I did not count on something

02:11:51 that turns out to be important.

02:11:54 When you work on your own outside of the system

02:11:57 for a long time,

02:11:58 you probably don’t think you’re gonna be doing this

02:12:00 as a 55 year old man.

02:12:03 And I have been so long outside

02:12:06 of math and physics departments,

02:12:07 and I’ve been occupied with so many other things

02:12:09 as you can see,

02:12:10 that the old idea that I had was

02:12:14 if I always did it in little pieces,

02:12:17 then I was always safe because it wouldn’t be stealable.

02:12:21 And so now those pieces never got assembled completely.

02:12:26 In essence, I have all the pieces

02:12:29 and I can fit them together.

02:12:32 But there’s probably a small amount of glue code.

02:12:35 Like there are a few algebraic things

02:12:37 I’ve forgotten how to do.

02:12:38 I may or may not figure them out

02:12:39 between now and April 1st.

02:12:41 But it’s pretty complete.

02:12:43 But that’s the puzzle you’re kind of struggling

02:12:46 to now figure out,

02:12:47 to get it all in the same, the glue together.

02:12:50 I can’t tell you whether the theory

02:12:52 is correct or incorrect.

02:12:54 But for example, there’s what’s the exact form

02:12:56 of the supersymmetry algebra,

02:12:57 or what’s the rule for passing a minus sign

02:13:00 through a particular operator.

02:13:02 And all of that stuff got a lot more difficult

02:13:05 because I didn’t do it every,

02:13:09 look, it’s a little bit like if you’re a violinist

02:13:14 and you don’t touch your violin regularly for 15 years,

02:13:17 you come back to it and you pretty much know the pieces,

02:13:19 sort of, but there’s lots of stuff that’s missing,

02:13:21 your tone is off and that kind of stuff.

02:13:24 I would say I’ll get the ship to the harbor

02:13:27 and it’ll require a tugboat probably to get it in.

02:13:30 And if the tugboat doesn’t show up,

02:13:31 then I’ll pilot the thing right into the dock myself.

02:13:34 But it’s not a big deal.

02:13:35 I think that it is essentially complete.

02:13:38 Psychologically, just as a human being,

02:13:41 this is, I remember perhaps by accident,

02:13:45 but maybe there’s no accidents in the universe.

02:13:48 I was tuned in, I don’t remember where,

02:13:51 on April 1st to you, oh, I think on your Discord,

02:13:58 kind of thinking about, thinking through this release.

02:14:00 I mean, it wasn’t like,

02:14:03 it wasn’t obvious that you were going to do it,

02:14:04 you were thinking through it.

02:14:05 And I remember there was intellectual,

02:14:08 personal, psychological struggle with this, right?

02:14:11 Well, because I thought it was dangerous.

02:14:13 If this turns out to be right,

02:14:14 I don’t know what it unlocks.

02:14:16 If it’s wrong, I think I understand where we are.

02:14:23 If it’s wrong, it’ll be the first fool’s gold

02:14:29 that really looks like a theory of everything.

02:14:33 It’ll be the iron pyrites of physics.

02:14:35 And we haven’t even had fool’s gold in my opinion yet.

02:14:39 Got it.

02:14:40 So what is your intuition why this looks right to you?

02:14:45 Like why it feels like it would be,

02:14:48 if wrong, the first fool’s gold.

02:14:49 I can say it very simply.

02:14:51 It’s way smarter than I am.

02:14:53 Can you break that apart a little more?

02:14:55 Every time you poke at it,

02:14:56 it’s giving you intuitions that follow

02:14:58 with the currently known physics.

02:15:00 Let’s put it in computer science terms.

02:15:02 Yes, please.

02:15:03 Okay, there’s a concept of technical debt

02:15:05 that computer scientists struggle with.

02:15:07 As you commit crimes,

02:15:09 you have to pay those crimes back at a later date.

02:15:11 In general, most of the problem with physical theories

02:15:15 is that as you try to do something that matches reality,

02:15:20 you usually have to go into some structure

02:15:23 that gets you farther away.

02:15:25 And your hope is, is that you’re gonna be able

02:15:26 to pay back the technical debt.

02:15:28 And in general, these wind up as check hiding schemes

02:15:33 or like you’re funding a startup

02:15:34 and there are too many pivots, right?

02:15:37 So you keep adding epicycles in order to cover,

02:15:41 things that have gone wrong.

02:15:44 My belief is, is that this thing

02:15:49 represents something like a summit to me.

02:15:53 And I’m very proud of having found a route up this summit.

02:15:58 But the root is what’s due to me.

02:16:01 The summit can’t possibly be due to me.

02:16:06 You know, like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

02:16:09 did not create Mount Everest.

02:16:13 They know that they didn’t create that.

02:16:14 They figured out a way up.

02:16:18 You gotta tell me what Mount Everest

02:16:20 is in this metaphor relative

02:16:22 and also connected to the technical debt.

02:16:24 So technical debt is a negative thing that it’s kind of,

02:16:28 you will eventually have to pay it.

02:16:30 Are you saying in the,

02:16:32 in the ascent that you’re seeing now in the theory

02:16:35 is you do not have much technical debt.

02:16:37 Well, that’s right.

02:16:38 That what happens is, is that early on what I would say is,

02:16:43 I believe now that the physics community

02:16:48 has said many things incorrectly

02:16:51 about the current state of the universe.

02:16:54 They’re not wildly off, which is why,

02:16:57 like for example, the claim is that

02:16:59 there are three generations of matter.

02:17:01 I do not believe that there are three generations of matter.

02:17:03 I believe that there are two generations of matter

02:17:05 and there’s a third collection

02:17:08 that looks like a generation of matter as the first two,

02:17:13 only at low energy.

02:17:15 Okay, well, that’s not a frequent claim.

02:17:18 People imagine that there are three

02:17:19 or more generations of matter.

02:17:21 I would claim that that’s false.

02:17:23 People claim that the matter is chiral.

02:17:25 That is, it knows it’s left from its right.

02:17:28 I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental,

02:17:31 but it is emergent.

02:17:32 But we could keep going at all these sorts of things.

02:17:36 People think that space time

02:17:38 is the fundamental geometrical construct.

02:17:41 I do not agree.

02:17:42 I think it’s something that I’ve termed the observers.

02:17:45 All of these different things

02:17:48 represent a series of overinterpretations of the world

02:17:55 that preclude progress.

02:17:56 So you gave, I think you gave some credit

02:18:01 to string theory as, string theory,

02:18:03 I think loop quantum gravity, if I remember correctly,

02:18:06 as like getting close to the fool’s gold.

02:18:11 Well, I said that Garrett Lisi, phenomenologically,

02:18:16 gets a lot of things right.

02:18:18 He gets, he’s got a reason for chirality,

02:18:20 a reason for uniqueness using E8.

02:18:23 In fact, E8 uses something called vial fermions,

02:18:25 which are chiral.

02:18:27 He has a way of getting geometry

02:18:30 to get Riemann’s geometry underneath general relativity

02:18:36 to play with Erisman’s geometry,

02:18:38 which is underneath the standard model,

02:18:39 using something called Cartan connections

02:18:41 that are out of favor.

02:18:42 He’s figured out something involving super connections

02:18:46 to make sure that the fermion,

02:18:47 the matter in the system isn’t quantized

02:18:49 the same way as the bosons were,

02:18:51 which is a problem in his old theory.

02:18:53 He’s got something about three generations for triality.

02:18:56 He’s got a lot of phenomenological hits.

02:18:59 I don’t think Garrett’s theory works.

02:19:01 It also has a very simple Lagrangian.

02:19:02 He’s basically using the Yang Mills norm squared,

02:19:05 the same thing you would use as a cost function

02:19:09 if you were doing neural nets, okay?

02:19:14 The string theorists have a different selling point,

02:19:16 which is that they may have gotten

02:19:18 a renormalizable theory of gravity

02:19:20 if quantum gravity was what we were meant to do.

02:19:22 And they’ve done some stuff with black holes

02:19:24 that they can get some solutions correct.

02:19:28 And then they have lots of agreements

02:19:29 with where they show mathematical truths

02:19:33 that mathematicians didn’t even know.

02:19:36 I’m very underwhelmed by string theory

02:19:39 based on how many people have worked on it

02:19:41 and how little is supporting the claims

02:19:43 to it being a theory of everything.

02:19:45 But those are the two that I take quite seriously.

02:19:50 I don’t yet take Wolfram’s quite seriously

02:19:53 because if he really finds one of these cellular automata

02:19:57 that are really distinct and generative,

02:20:00 it’ll be amazing.

02:20:01 But he’s looking for such a thing.

02:20:02 I don’t think he’s found anything.

02:20:05 Tegmark, I view as a philosopher

02:20:07 who is somehow taking credit for Platonism,

02:20:10 which I don’t see any reason for fighting with Max

02:20:13 because I like Max, but if it ever comes time,

02:20:16 I’m putting a post it note that I’m not positive

02:20:18 the mathematical universe hypothesis

02:20:21 is really anything new.

02:20:24 And in general, loop quantum gravity really,

02:20:28 I think grew out of some hopes

02:20:29 that the general relativistic community had

02:20:32 that they would be able to do particle theory.

02:20:34 And I don’t think that they’ve shown

02:20:36 any particle theoretic realism.

02:20:37 So essentially, here’s what I really think, Lex.

02:20:44 I think we didn’t understand how big the difference

02:20:46 between an effective theory and a theory of everything

02:20:49 is conceptually.

02:20:51 Maybe it’s not mathematically that different,

02:20:54 but conceptually trying to figure out

02:20:56 what a theory of every, how does the universe,

02:20:58 and I’ve compared it to Escher’s drawing hands.

02:21:01 How do two hands draw themselves into existence?

02:21:04 That’s the puzzle that I think has just been wanting.

02:21:08 And I’ll be honest, I’m really surprised

02:21:11 that the theoretical physics community didn’t even get up

02:21:19 on their high horse and say,

02:21:21 this is the most stupid nonsense imaginable,

02:21:25 because clearly I always say I’m not a physicist.

02:21:28 So I’m an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors.

02:21:33 So in your journey of releasing this,

02:21:35 and I’m sure further maybe it will be

02:21:39 another American tradition on April 1st

02:21:42 that will continue for years to come.

02:21:43 I hope so.

02:21:49 There’s sort of crumbs along the way

02:21:53 that I’m hoping to collect in my naive view of things

02:21:58 of the beauty that, in your geometric view of the universe.

02:22:03 So one question I’d like to ask is

02:22:11 if you were to challenge me to visualize something beautiful,

02:22:15 something important about geometric unity

02:22:18 in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty

02:22:21 from the outsider’s perspective, what would that thing be?

02:22:26 Interesting question.

02:22:27 Perhaps we can both have a journey

02:22:29 towards April 1st.

02:22:35 Take a look at that.

02:22:38 Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose,

02:22:41 not Melrose, Montana in Santa Monica.

02:22:45 Now you’ll notice that all of those disks

02:22:48 rotate independently.

02:22:51 Yes.

02:22:54 If you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous,

02:22:59 but not uniform everywhere,

02:23:01 what you’re doing is a so called gauge transformation

02:23:04 on the torus seen as a U1 bundle over a U1 space time.

02:23:09 So the concept of space time here

02:23:12 in a very simplified case isn’t four dimensional,

02:23:15 but it’s one dimensional, it’s just a circle.

02:23:18 And there’s a circle above every point in the circle

02:23:21 represented by those little disks.

02:23:23 So imagine if you will, that we took a rubber band

02:23:31 and placed it around here and decided

02:23:33 that that was a function from the circle

02:23:36 into the circle that is representing a Y axis

02:23:42 that’s wrapped around itself.

02:23:44 Well, you would have an idea of what it means

02:23:46 for a function to be constant,

02:23:47 if it just went all around the outside.

02:23:50 But what happens if I turn this a little bit?

02:23:53 Then the function would be mostly constant.

02:23:55 We’d have a little place where it dipped and it went back.

02:23:58 It turns out that you can transform that function

02:24:03 and transform the derivative that says that function

02:24:06 is equal to zero when I take its derivative

02:24:09 at the same time.

02:24:11 That’s what a gauge transformation is.

02:24:14 Amazing to me that we don’t have a simple video,

02:24:19 visualizing things that I’ve already had built

02:24:24 and that I can clearly demonstrate.

02:24:26 When you do that Taurus,

02:24:28 who’s the code of the Taurus is itself generating.

02:24:31 The Taurus.

02:24:32 The spinning Taurus.

02:24:33 Yeah.

02:24:34 This is a U1 principle bundle.

02:24:36 And the world needs to know what a gauge theory is,

02:24:39 not by analogy, not with Lawrence Krauss saying,

02:24:41 it’s like a checkerboard.

02:24:42 If you change some of the colors this way,

02:24:44 not saying that it’s a local symmetry involving,

02:24:50 it’s none of those things.

02:24:51 It’s a theory of differential calculus

02:24:53 where the functions and the derivatives

02:24:56 are both subject to a particular kind of change

02:25:00 so that if a function was constant under one derivative,

02:25:03 then the new function is constant under the new derivative

02:25:07 transformed in the same fashion.

02:25:09 And would you put that under the category

02:25:11 of just gauge transformations?

02:25:12 Yes, that would be gauge transformations

02:25:15 applied to sections and connections

02:25:17 where connections are the derivatives in the theory.

02:25:21 This is easily explained.

02:25:23 It is pathological that the community of people

02:25:26 who understand what I’m saying have never bothered

02:25:29 to do this in a clear fashion for the general public.

02:25:31 You and I could visualize this overnight.

02:25:35 This is not hard.

02:25:38 The public needs to know in some sense

02:25:41 that let’s say quantum electrodynamics,

02:25:43 the theory of photons and electrons,

02:25:45 more or less electrons are functions

02:25:48 and photons are derivatives.

02:25:50 Now there’s some, you can object in some ways,

02:25:53 but basically a gauge theory is the way

02:25:55 in which you can translate a shift

02:26:00 in the definition of the functions

02:26:02 and the shift of the definition of the derivatives

02:26:04 so that the underlying physics is not harmed or changed.

02:26:08 So you have to do both at the same time.

02:26:10 Now you and I can visualize that.

02:26:12 So if what you wanted to do rather than going directly

02:26:15 to geometric unity is that I could sit down with you

02:26:18 and I could say here are the various components

02:26:20 of geometric unity and if the public needs a visualization

02:26:24 in order to play along, we’ve got a little over two months

02:26:27 and I’d be happy to work with you.

02:26:29 I love that as a challenge and I’ll take it on

02:26:32 and I hope we do make it happen.

02:26:33 And David Goggins, if Lex doesn’t do some super macho thing

02:26:38 because he’s gotta work to get some of this stuff done,

02:26:42 you’ll understand he’ll be available to you after April.

02:26:45 Thank you for the escape clause.

02:26:47 I really needed that escape clause.

02:26:49 I’m glad that’s on record.

02:26:50 I’m worried 48 miles in 48 hours.

02:26:53 By the way, I just wanna say how much I admire

02:26:56 your willingness to keep this kind of hardcore attitude.

02:27:01 I know that Russians have it and Russian Jews have it

02:27:04 in spades, but it’s harder to do in a society that’s sloppy

02:27:08 and that’s weak and that’s lazy.

02:27:11 And the fact that you bring so much heart to saying,

02:27:14 I’m gonna bring this to jujitsu,

02:27:16 I’m gonna bring this to guitar, I’m gonna bring this to AI,

02:27:18 I’m gonna bring this to podcasting.

02:27:21 It comes through loud and clear.

02:27:22 I just find it completely and utterly inspiring

02:27:25 that you keep this kind of hardcore aspect at the same time

02:27:28 that you’re the guy who’s extolling the virtue of love

02:27:31 in a modern society and doing it at scale.

02:27:33 Thank you.

02:27:34 That means a lot.

02:27:34 I don’t know why I’m doing it,

02:27:36 but I’m just following my heart on it

02:27:37 and just going with the gut.

02:27:40 It seems to make sense somehow.

02:27:43 I personally think we better get tougher

02:27:45 or we’re gonna get in a world of pain.

02:27:47 And I do think that when it comes time to lead,

02:27:51 it’s great to have people who you know

02:27:53 don’t crack under pressure.

02:27:55 Do you mind if we talk about love

02:27:59 and what it takes to be a father for a bit?

02:28:01 Sure.

02:28:02 Do you mind if Zev joins us?

02:28:03 I’d be an honor.

02:28:07 So Eric, I’ve talked to your son Zev,

02:28:11 who’s an incredible human being,

02:28:14 but let me ask you,

02:28:19 this might be difficult

02:28:21 because you’re both sitting together.

02:28:24 What advice do you have for him

02:28:27 as he makes his way in this world,

02:28:31 especially given that, as we mentioned before on Joe Rogan,

02:28:35 you’re flawed in that just like all humans, you’re mortal.

02:28:39 Well, at some level, I guess one of my issues

02:28:44 is that I’ve got to stop giving quite so much advice.

02:28:48 Early on, I was very worried

02:28:50 that I could see Zev’s abilities

02:28:52 and I could see his challenges

02:28:55 and I saw them in terms of myself.

02:28:57 So a certain amount of Zev rhymes with

02:29:01 whatever I went through as a kid.

02:29:02 And I don’t wanna doom him to the same outcomes

02:29:07 that sufficed for me.

02:29:08 I think that he’s got a much better head on his shoulders

02:29:11 at age 15, he’s much better adjusted.

02:29:14 And in part, it’s important for me to recognize

02:29:19 that because I think I did a reasonably decent job early on,

02:29:22 I don’t need to get this part right.

02:29:26 And I’m looking at Zev’s trajectory and saying,

02:29:33 you’re gonna need to be incredibly

02:29:36 and even pathologically self confident.

02:29:38 The antidote for that is gonna be something

02:29:41 you’re gonna need to carry on board,

02:29:42 which is radical humility.

02:29:45 And you’re gonna have to have those

02:29:46 in a dialectical tension, which is never resolved,

02:29:49 which is a huge burden.

02:29:51 You are going to have to forgive people

02:29:53 who do not appreciate your gifts

02:29:55 because your gifts are clearly evident.

02:29:57 And many people will have to pretend not to see them

02:29:59 because if they see your gifts,

02:30:02 then they’re gonna have to question their entire approach

02:30:04 to education or employment or critical thinking.

02:30:08 And what my hope is, is that you can just forgive those

02:30:12 who don’t see them and who complicate

02:30:14 and frustrate your life and realize

02:30:16 that you’re gonna have to take care of them too.

02:30:18 Zev, let me ask you the more challenging question

02:30:20 because the guy’s sitting right here.

02:30:22 What advice do you have for your dad?

02:30:25 Since after talking to you,

02:30:26 I realize you’re the more brilliant

02:30:30 aside from the better looking member of the family.

02:30:38 It’s a bit of an odd question.

02:30:43 Sorry.

02:30:43 You can say anything you want.

02:30:44 This is the last time we’re gonna be seeing left.

02:30:46 It’s gonna be an awkward drive home.

02:30:49 I think sort of a new perspective I’ve taken on parenting

02:30:57 is that it is a task for which no human

02:31:01 is really supposed to be prepared.

02:31:04 You know, there are in Jewish tradition, for example,

02:31:08 there are myriad analogies in the Torah and the Talmud

02:31:12 that compare the role of a parent to the role of a God,

02:31:18 right?

02:31:18 That no human is prepared to play God

02:31:21 and create and guide a life,

02:31:23 but somehow we’re forced into it as people.

02:31:29 And I think sometimes it’s hard for children to understand

02:31:33 that however their parents are failing

02:31:38 sort of has to be.

02:31:39 It’s a theme here.

02:31:40 Is something for which we must budget

02:31:43 because our parents play a role in our lives

02:31:46 of which they’re not worthy

02:31:49 and they devote themselves to regardless

02:31:52 because that becomes who they are in a certain sense.

02:31:55 So I hope to have realistic expectations of you as a human

02:32:08 because I think too often it’s easy

02:32:12 to have godly expectations of people

02:32:14 who are far from such a role.

02:32:18 And I think I’m really happy

02:32:20 that you’ve been as open as you have with me

02:32:23 about the fact that, you know, you really,

02:32:28 you don’t pretend to be a God in my life.

02:32:31 You are a guide who allows me to see myself

02:32:38 and that’s been very important considering the fact

02:32:41 that by your self teaching paradigm I will have to,

02:32:47 I will have to guide myself and being able to see it

02:32:50 and see myself accurately has been one of the greatest gifts

02:32:53 that you’ve given me.

02:32:55 So I’m very appreciative.

02:32:57 And I want you to know that I don’t buy into the role

02:33:02 that you’re supposed to sort of fake your way through

02:33:14 in my life but I am unbelievably happy

02:33:22 with a more realistic connection

02:33:25 that we’ve been able to build in lieu of it, so.

02:33:29 I think it’s been easier on you actually

02:33:31 as you come to realize what I don’t know,

02:33:34 what I can’t do and that there’s been a period of time,

02:33:37 I guess, that’s fascinating to me

02:33:38 where you’re sort of surprised

02:33:41 that I don’t know the answer to a certain thing

02:33:45 as well as you do.

02:33:46 And that I remember going through this

02:33:50 with a particular mathematician who I held,

02:33:52 I still hold in awe, named David Kajdan.

02:33:55 And, you know, he famously said to,

02:33:58 and weirdly our family knew his family

02:34:00 in the Soviet Union.

02:34:01 But he said, you know, Eric,

02:34:05 I always appreciate you coming to my office

02:34:07 because I always find what you have to say interesting

02:34:10 but you have to realize that in the areas

02:34:11 that you’re talking about, you are no longer the student,

02:34:14 you are actually my teacher.

02:34:16 And I wasn’t prepared to hear that.

02:34:18 And there are many ways in which,

02:34:20 as I was just saying with the Mozart,

02:34:22 I am learning at an incredible rate from you.

02:34:27 I used to learn from you

02:34:28 because I didn’t understand what was possible.

02:34:30 You were very much, I mean, this is the weird thing.

02:34:33 There used to be this thing called Harvey,

02:34:35 the invisible rabbit.

02:34:36 This guy had a rabbit that was like six feet tall

02:34:39 that only he could see maybe was talking.

02:34:41 And that was like you at age four.

02:34:44 You were saying batshit crazy things

02:34:47 that were all totally sensible

02:34:48 and nobody else could put them together.

02:34:50 And so what’s wonderful is that the world hasn’t caught on,

02:34:55 but enormous numbers of people are starting to.

02:34:58 And I really do hope that that genuineness of spirit

02:35:03 and that outside the box intellectual commitment

02:35:08 serves you well as the world starts to appreciate

02:35:13 that I think you’re a very trustworthy voice.

02:35:16 You don’t get everything right,

02:35:17 but the idea that we have somebody at your age

02:35:20 who’s embedded in your generation

02:35:21 who can tell us something about what’s happening

02:35:23 is really valuable to me.

02:35:25 And I do hope that you’ll consider boosting that voice

02:35:28 more than just at the dinner table.

02:35:31 I apologize for saying this four letter word,

02:35:36 but do you love Zev?

02:35:41 Was really worried it was gonna be another four letter word.

02:35:44 There’s so many to choose from.

02:35:46 It doesn’t even rise to the level of the question.

02:35:49 I mean, I just, there are a tiny number of people

02:35:53 with whom you share so much life

02:35:56 that you can’t even think of yourself in their absence.

02:36:01 And I don’t know if Zev would find that,

02:36:04 but it’s, you can have a kid

02:36:08 and never make this level of connection.

02:36:11 I think even right down to the fact

02:36:14 that when Zev chooses boogie woogie piano

02:36:20 for his own set of reasons,

02:36:22 why I would choose boogie woogie piano

02:36:24 if I could play in any style, it’s a question

02:36:28 about a decrease in loneliness.

02:36:30 You know, like my grandfather played the mandolin

02:36:34 and I had to learn some mandolin

02:36:35 because otherwise that instrument would go silent.

02:36:39 You don’t expect that you get this much of a chance

02:36:42 to leave this much of yourself in another person

02:36:45 who is choosing it and recreating it

02:36:50 rather than it being directly instilled.

02:36:54 And my proudest achievement is in a certain sense

02:36:59 having not taught him and having shared this much.

02:37:04 So, you know, it’s not even love, it’s like well beyond.

02:37:09 So you mentioned love for you making a less lonely world.

02:37:14 I think I speak for, I would argue,

02:37:20 probably millions of people that you, Eric,

02:37:22 because this is a conversation with you,

02:37:24 have made for many people, for me, a less lonely world.

02:37:30 And I can’t wait to see how you develop as an intellect,

02:37:35 but also I’m so heartworn by the optimism

02:37:40 and the hopefulness that was in you

02:37:43 that I hope develops further.

02:37:45 And lastly, I’m deeply thankful that you, Eric are my friend

02:37:52 and would give me, would honor me with this watch.

02:37:57 It means more than words can say.

02:38:00 Thanks guys, thanks for talking today.

02:38:01 Thank you.

02:38:03 Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:38:05 with Eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors,

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02:38:17 Click the sponsor links to get a discount

02:38:20 and to support this podcast.

02:38:22 And now let me leave you with some words from Socrates.

02:38:25 To find yourself, think for yourself.

02:38:28 Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.