Eric Weinstein Interview (Full Episode) | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

at this altitude I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking this episode is brought to you by wealthfront and this is a very unique sponsor wealthfront is a massively disruptive in a good way set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors it has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than two and a half billion dollars under management in fact some of my very good friends investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in wealth front so the question is why why is it so popular why is it unique because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them and this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations bloated sales teams etc and I'll come back to that in a second I suggest you check out wealthfront com forward slash Tim take the risk assessment quiz which only takes two to five minutes and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you in and if you just want to take their advice run with it do it yourself you can do that or as I would you can set it and forget it and here's why the value of wealth front is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't great investing is a marathon not a sprint and little things that you may or may not be familiar with like automatic tax loss harvesting rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time wealthfront as I mentioned since it's using software instead of retail locations etc can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible right off the bat you never pay commissions or account fees for everything they charge 0.25 percent per year on assets above the first 15,000 which is managed for free if you use my link wealthfront com forward slash Tim that is less than five dollars a month to invest a thirty thousand dollar account for instance now normally when I have a sponsor on the show it's because I use them and recommend them in this case it's a little different I don't use wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to here's the deal they wanted to sponsor this podcast but because of SEC regulations companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast but I've been so impressed by wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money at least for me in the team and the company itself so I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client now back to the recommendation as a Tim Ferriss show listener you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account but just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you take two minutes fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront dot-com forward slash Tim it's fast it's free there's no downside that I can think of now I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer wealthfront Inc is an SEC registered investment advisor investing in securities involves risks and there's the possibility of losing money past performance is no guarantee of future results please visit wealth front comm to read their full disclosure so check it out guys this is one of the hottest most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley and they're killing it they've become massively popular just take a look see what portfolio they would create for you and you can use that information however you want wealthfront comm forward slash Tim this episode is brought to you by 99designs 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business it's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs whether that's a logo website business card or anything else I use 99 designs to get book cover prototypes for the 4-hour body which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller and I also use them for banner ads illustrations and other things with 99designs designers around the world to compete to create the best design for you you give feedback and then pick your favorite you end up happy or you get your money back it's very simple you can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours meaning Tim Ferriss show listeners at 99designs comm forward slash Tim and right now my listeners you guys will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design that's 99designs dot-com forward slash Tim check it out greetings lads and lasses welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show I'm sitting at my kitchen table with mr. Eric now I've always this is embarrassing to say and I've done this with a number of friends now is it Weinstein Weinstein how do you say your last name I think it's Weinstein Weinstein I agree that's the more Germanic way to go about it now I am going to read a short bio I'm sure I'm going to bastardize this because I realized that we have so many wide-ranging conversations and I was wondering and asking myself where to start and I realized there's no real good place or no particular place to start so you can start anywhere so I'll start with your bio Eric Weinstein managing director of tail capital PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard research fellow at the mathematical Institute of Oxford University but as you and I have discussed that does not quite capture the eclectic combination of life experiences that is Eric so what are some other sort of colorful aspects of this this collage Oh who's yourself alright um so sometimes I I pretend to be an immigration expert particularly with respect to skilled labor I'm also a member of the advisory board for a group called drugs over dinner trying to get a rational and healthy drug policy for the US I was pretty early on sounding the alarm over mortgage backed securities and failed to alert the world with a bunch of other people who also failed but we gave it a little college try guess that makes it uncrowded trade it was well the problem is that early is another name for wrong yeah and also it you can't quite believe what you're saying that Goldman Sachs and the rest of the world is going to blow up it's hard to have have the courage of your convictions but o'cash I mean I think have you taken a lot of economics classes to inform all of these insights I've dated women and married them who have taken a lot of economics classes so I haven't taken any but in order to get some attention for the work we've done in economics I decided to start referring to myself as an economist I figured if I got called out then I would get to push the work in front of a world that was asking for my credentials and so strangely economists don't call you out when you call yourself an economist and so I ended up as an economist rather than having the attention that I was hoping to drag to this new theory of gauge theoretic and geometric economics and to to provide just a little bit of context which i think is fairly normal for our interactions so I'm just going to read one line from an email exchange and this is from Eric to me do you want to try a podcast on this and we'll get into maybe what this is psychedelics theories of everything and the need to destroy education in order to save it how did we first meet was it Summit Series was it somewhere else I think it was somewhat serious I think you were talking about the potential of the human mind and how to unlock it and I think I became very curious as to what the domain of applicability was and whether some of these techniques that would help you shoot baskets or learn tango could be applied to let's say quantum field theory which seemed like kind of the next logical place to go after tango dancing and I think many people would ask themselves managing director of Kiel Capital so how does someone who from a lay person's perspective is a mathematician pretending to be an economist very effectively ready to be a mathematician pretending to be a mathematician I get recruited and end up working with Peter Thiel till capital it's a really good question I knew Peter slightly before geez we are gonna be just entering at a random point so it's quite good the best I attempt I can in trying to be quantum so I had I had met Peter when I I had been sort of living in New York and playing in the area a little bit with the tech crowd and I was told by some friends you have to come out for this crazy being human conference and so any conference name being human seemed to Californian to be a good idea but I was forced into coming out and there was a sort of a circle of people which Peter was in and I was in talking about what it what it means to really look at the human condition from a rational but also open-hearted perspective and Peter and I started talking and I told him that I I was thinking that I might have a theory of everything that I should debut and I think he probably you know haircut the possibility that what I was saying was true but then I was invited to give these lectures at Oxford the Simoni special lectures in ammonia that the named after the Simoni who went to space also created Microsoft Charles Simoni yeah I think he was like the original engineer at Microsoft and and he had endowed a professorship in at Oxford where which was held is held now by Marcos de Soto after Richard Dawkins held it which has some lectures attached and I was invited to give lectures under this program and it you know I was giving technical talks but a story or two came out about how a potential theory of everything was being debuted and I guess Peter probably saw that he invited me to a quiet conference he was holding in the South of France and shortly afterwards and then he invited me to a breakfast after that and at the breakfast I think I was midway through some breakfast sausage and he just blurts out he says you have to leave New York I didn't understand why and I said it really and go where he says you could come here and I said and do what and he said you could work for me so I didn't know whether he was like suffering from too much sleep but it turned out he was quite serious and it's been one of the most rewarding intellectual relationships of my life he's just a stunning sparkling mind and somebody who has not only the courage of his convictions but has been right so many times and over enough things that he has had the freedom to break with all tradition when he thinks the world is wrong and one or two people may have it right which is that's exactly my cup of tea did he have a clear idea of what you would be doing when he hired you or made the offer um I'm probably less important to him is my guess is is that the first issue is that there are it's so difficult to think for yourself I mean I find it very difficult to think for myself I have all sorts of ideas in my head that aren't mine I'm subjected to all sorts of pressures I find difficult to resist and so I think Peters looking for the tiny universe of people who are attempting to think things through from first principles and as it's become very tough because social socially constructed reality is so much a part of our lives so I think first you his feeling would be find the people who are capable of seeing something really new and then figure out what to do with him later escaping the or averting the consensus reality is that you've mentioned whenever possible whenever possible what outside pressures do you find tempting or difficult to mitigate oh I mean everybody wants to to be loved to fit in the the the fear that happens when you start swimming away from the shore that you're not going to find a next Island before your strength gives out I think it's very rational to be afraid of thinking for yourself because you may very very easily find yourself at odds with the community on which you depend and I think for some of us is just a compulsive behavior it's not even necessarily the smartest evolutionary strategy it's just it's hard to do it any other way hugging the shore well or or not I mean if you if you if you keep trying to screw your eyes up so you can see the world the way other people people are reporting that they see it and it just doesn't work you realize at some point that it's a losing battle you might Trenton might as well try being yourself what is the first example that comes to mind of a time when you had that fear of swimming away from the consensus and facing the the scrutiny or criticism of people in a given community well sometimes it happens by accident so I remember for example being in a guitar store in Philadelphia and having a crowd of people gather around as I played something badly and I couldn't figure out why they would want to listen to somebody who is not very good at classical guitar and this isn't like bragging that I'm great at class I was really not that good and it turned out that I had taught myself from sheet music and I believed that the notation for using your thumb is to use the letter P which I interpreted as pinky so I was using my weakest finger for everything that needed to be done by my strongest finger and so my guitar was completely completely wrong and that was a you know a clear example of well this didn't come from a guitar teacher it didn't come from a normal experience with music came from teaching yourself something and having the scars to prove it so I think in that case you also learn how much power there is that you you can shortcut all sorts of things so as you know you've showed us with Pareto principles and trying to assume the work of the 10,000 hours you start to look realize that the world is meant to be jailbroken and and then you get into really scary stuff where you come up with political conclusions that aren't shared by others so for example I don't have the usual convictions of my groups about immigration I am of the opinion that what most people think of as progressive immigration is actually regressive and so you know at some point I came out with a free-market model to open borders but without adversely affecting American workers and have you written about that oh yeah I what was the peer-reviewed model for how to do it for a layperson interested in exploring your opinion on that or your perspective on that is that would you point them to a given paper or sure there's one called migration for the benefit of all in the International labor review think of 2002 and the funny thing about this paper is is that it takes what US corporations always claim they want which is access to any workers anywhere in the world and it achieves it through a market mechanism but unfortunately what they were really interested in wasn't the small gain and efficiency that comes from being able to hire on a global market they were really much more interested in the wealth transferred from American workers to American business owners and so it was a great example that they thought they'd make a free-market argument but in fact they weren't interested in the free market advantage they were interested in transfer payments and so when you give them a free market model they lose all interest in the free market which is I think just really funny you mentioned guitar I can recall we had dinner at your house which was not drugs over dinner was death over dinner where we talked about you know death and I think that was somehow related to NPR or some radio station capital capital radio some NPR affiliate that's right and we discussed death over dinner but one thing I noticed that your home was that you have a lot of musical instruments when did you start experimenting with music and how many musical instruments have you experimented with am i right that the federal government hasn't made musical instruments illegal so I've been experimenting with musical instruments for some time v III think it's some point you learned that music is an abstraction and that each particulars just a way to instantiate the same common abstraction and so this was extremely powerful for me because you explain what that what you mean by that well I don't really hear music very well I don't have a lot of intuitive feel for it to me it looks like systems and the idea that music was so highly systematized and that this was covered up by the standard relationship that we pick up where we take music lessons we learned to read music in this country lots of people are bad at reading music and lots of people embedded following instructions but you find that in other areas of the world in which notation isn't a big part of musical education people very casually pick up an instrument and start playing and I think it's because that's the systems if you will the math behind the music is so powerful that it allows you to improvise it allows you to compose and to understand that there are canonical songs at some point for example I wrote a tiny computer program in Python and put it in a tweet and it's only purpose was to reproduce the chord progression for Pachelbel's Canon as an algorithm did you say Taco Bell no I can't believe that that I've heard that correctly okay I thought I said Pachelbel's killer there we go all right yeah now when you're talking about the ability to improvise pick up an instrument and start playing I mean Paul McCartney I believe is is one example that I thought oh he's such a gifted intuitive musician I'm not that I heard and this could be a completely off base that he at least for a period of time couldn't read music and is is that because humans have potentially some type of innate grammar that they are for music in the same way they might have some type of innate Lang innate language grammar like along the lines of a Chomsky and his and his theories or is it something else I think you're right I mean I think that it it comes down a lot of it to the physics of a vibrating string or air column so if you look at the harmonic the patterns of vibration that are encoded into simply taking a catgut and stretching it between a wall and the ground and then twanging it there seen my spot room in other words that so much of our musical system is in the math and in the physics of a vibrating string there's really you know there's one crazy innovation which is even temperament which the West figured out which has to do with a strange math fact that if you raise the number two for twice the frequency which gives us the octave to the 19th power and then take the twelfth root thereof that's almost exactly equal to three and that weird numerical accident is what makes it possible to both have extremely beautiful intervals but have them also so regular that you can do harmony and and make chords and I don't think most musicians probably even know why we use a 12-ton system it's real and that's what you just described before the 12-ton system that's even temperament yeah that's Paul so I've always been somewhat insecure as it relates to music I've never thought I was how interested in neatly capable of being good with musical instruments and I grew up trying a lot of musical intruments and quitting them whether it was piano trumpet etc the drums is our one example or exception rather where I've I have so much fun playing even poorly that I will continue to practice on the flip side though how many if you had to just take a stab how many how many different instruments would you say you've toyed around with in one capacity or another I would say that the the ones that I regularly check in with would be mandolin harmonica guitar piano and occasionally some funkier stuff than that and you've but you've also dug into natural human languages yeah what languages have you in the past I think oh well oh gosh um I mean the ones I love sure Turkish and Indonesian were great fun to learn about and learn some of Russian is extremely emotional but grammatically unfairly unforgiving I enjoyed the little bit of Thai that I started trying to learn because tones are not a big part of any of the other languages that I've tried but when I tried a little bit of Vietnamese the tones were so hard that there was no satisfaction I spent three weeks and I couldn't say my first word convincingly why do you and I promise this is going somewhere oh not that it has to but why well it's a question I get asked often times is why do you study these languages that don't seem to have any practical application in your life how would you answer them like Turkish for example mmm there was a girl Indonesian same answer well Indonesian is is just brilliant it's everything that can go right with a language for a u.s. language learner has happened to Indonesian so for example it's not inflected for tense if you want to say I came you would say I already come right right so you if you wanted to it's not injected for inflected for number so if the word for child is a knock the word for children is a knock squared or a knock yeah what I'm going on or on wrong which person person yeah those people wondering automaton man of the forest very good so in them it's in a Latin script and so I would say that if you wanted to figure out your bang for your buck with a language try Indonesian if nothing else has worked for you you may find that you have over a hundred million new friends and a facility you never thought you could develop Indonesian super cool I remember spending a month in Bali and just drilling down into it and it was such a relief after studying languages like Mandarin which similar to Vietnamese is just so unforgiving if you don't get the tones right you could have a vocabulary of five thousand words and no one will be able to communicate with you in any meaningful way I think also when you try one of these languages that's less common to learn people are so much more appreciative than if you're yet the enth person they've met who's trying to speak French yeah the psychic payback and the gret the gratitude that you get is a factor that I think is undervalued expedia Spanish is X because I could travel to Y number of countries and talk to Z number of people and say well that might be true but if you say go to Greece as I did at one point and pick up 20 different lines and make sure you throw in two or three that are kind of ridiculous just for comedic effect you're the sort of added value to your save vacation there will be a hundred extra versus say a 2x with Spanish ompletely agree and that makes it so much fun Turkish oddly enough and we won't for those people who are not interested in languages we're not gonna spend the entire time talking about languages but I'm gonna try to tie this into music Turkish for instance and this is pointed out to me by Turk is grammatically extremely similar to Japanese it's really really weird I mean eerily similar so it was very easy for me to start to pick up Turkish from having spent time as an exchange student in Japan and so there brings up all sorts of interesting theories about migration patterns and so on from long long ago but what does if anything studying music have in common with studying natural languages because the latter is where I'm more comfortable even though I thought I was bad at languages until you know halfway through high school yeah I think that these areas of that are so intrinsically human and we don't even realize that there are these systems that are undergirding it I think that there's at least that as a formal similarity where you know until until Chomsky and his thoughts on grammar we didn't understand the way in which this could be potentially an innate process just the way the you know the hairs in in your ear and in the organ of Corti you know may predispose you to love particular intervals you know when you hear wise men say you know that's really going from the fundamental frequency to three-halves times that frequency back to the fundamental frequency and if you can hear the difference between that and going to two times with a bit of it somewhere I can't do that very well but you know these iconic intervals are really based on physics if you think about your phoneme production the wedding production yeah so that sounds that you can make with your mouths are really based on a five dimensional lattice which I didn't understand don't understand that either I'll need to explain well you could you can either turn your nasalization on or off you can have your vocal cords vibrating so vocalization can be on or off so those are two degrees of freedom you can have your lips in one of several positions a third degree and then Chinese retroflex that's a hard one there you go so instead of saying NASA's imma cheat oh that up hold on nos I'm assisting like in Taiwan and go to Beijing they say not sure if I'm sure cheating that like I see sounds very like Bengali and Portuguese with the Chevy shy and they love doing that anyway not to interrupt so that's three degrees of freedom and then you have where on the on the tongue on the pen the what location on the roof of the mouth your tongue is attempting to make contact and how how raised or lowered it is and so these five degrees of freedom generate the phonemes and if you ask you know opera singers to sing in a really squirrely language that they don't know like maybe they know Italian and French but they don't know Hungarian they may be able to produce all of these sounds because they've been forced to understand exactly what the degrees of freedom are to produce the sense even if they don't know what they mean right they have the the conscious awareness and control of oral articulation never used that before but much like a say ballerina with a vocabulary of different types of pirouettes and and movements would be able to replicate a lot of what you would find in tango because they have this this vocabulary and awareness as a side note for people who might be wondering Japanese people have a really tough time learning almost any foreign language because they have a very limited set of phonemes in their language so they kind of got short changed when you know God was handing out sounds and which is why I say with with R and L you know they have not ebu data as opposed to R or L but as soon as you point out to them the position of the tongue like la you touch the tip of your tongue to the back of your teeth then all of a sudden just like a snap of the fingers they can figure it out but no one's ever tried to explain it to them they're just like repeat this sound repeat this sound but once you explain that that one factor and you're like no no touch your tongue to the back of your teeth like oh I got and of course it takes practice to do quickly but that is why Japanese have a very tough time with almost every language Spanish maybe one exception let's let's come back to something you said earlier which is navigating from first principles exciting this is a really important concept to understand what what does that mean I think that and why is it important well very often we have some spectrum of difference that we're allowed frequently in politics or news somebody will talk about the Overton Window what can we discuss what can't we discuss yeah Overton Window the Overton one you mean in the context of say a debate or a news flash so for example when Donald Trump said that he wanted to temporary really ban Muslims from entering the u.s. that was considered outside the Overton Window it was not something that was discuss about and I think that a lot of us may benefit from the Overton Window this idea that we're going to make certain ideas too hot too dangerous for people to express employ company but on the other hand what we've started to do is to hamstring all the cognitive power in our contrarian thinkers where they don't feel comfortable or safe thinking aloud somebody tells you for example or asked you the question do you believe intelligence is perfectly even evenly distributed between genders or among ethnic groups statistically it would be crazy to say yes I believe it's perfectly distributed on the other hand socially it would be crazy to suggest that it isn't perfectly distributed and so we have all of these really funny situations where the top-down thinking tells us what's acceptable and what isn't but the bottom-up leads us to ask all sorts of questions that are framed out if you will by the usual terms of discussion and I think that this is you know this is really animating a lot of people who feel that social justice which they always thought was a positive is starting to metastasize into kind of a thought police where yeah well it's it seems to have turned into this sort of internet lynch mob version of McCarthyism and there you go and actually I'm gonna put this out there cuz I was I was thinking about writing a blog post about this but blog posts take a long time to write so I'm just gonna there's a term that I currently isn't much of a penalty for labeling people whatever it might be fill in the blank mist and so you can be accused and guilty until proven innocent of being sexist racist fill-in-the-blank misogynist whatever it might be classist you name it that can be really damaging to people who are accused of such things often with no evidence or very questionable evidence or even contrary evidence and so what I was hoping is there should be a term that you can apply to people who go on these witch hunts and apply these labels and I was thinking that bigoted ear could be a good one that's good what do you think so that therefore like if a journalist let's just say is taking the lazy route for cheap applause I eat cheap pageviews right and they're just accusing people of being these really career damaging things like sexist or racist whatever that they themselves could then be labeled a well-known bigoted ear for instance and then there would be some type of social consequence which I don't see currently to acting in such a haphazard and damaging way so currently we have this other weird term sjw for social justice warrior so I like bigoted ear why don't we try it in the wild and see what happened yeah I'd love that too to hear anyone's thoughts on this bigoted ear and then I thought a lot about this because I figured you needed a term that was sort of phonetically similar enough for just like mouth phonemes like phonetically similar enough to an already loaded term yeah so that people would immediately get the negative connotation like you can't being called a bigoted ear even though I as far as I know it hasn't existed can't really be a good thing I mean you have like bigger than any of the tier of in most people's minds associate with racketeering or something else but does a decent job of kind of describing the the sin against intellectual honesty that is you know what we're talking about this type of out-of-control so social justice warrior ship but I agree with you that it's I think that even more than top down this the phenomenon is is so puzzling in a way because it seems like people are creating prisons of their own making and in creating these lynch mobs or participating in them you're creating this momentum for this type of activity that ultimately has to come back and bite you in the ass or it just create these barriers to honest communication and it ended sorry I'm like up on my soapbox now that we brought up this stuff it also seems like and I'd love to hear your opinion on this but the oftentimes the most important conversations to have are the most uncomfortable that would fall outside of this Overton Window well by definition and even the conversation that you most want to have to try to remediate the long-term problem is prevented by the evident relish that some bigoted ears if you will the the relish that they obviously enjoy and take for themselves in sort of taking settling for the short ride rather than really trying to get some kind of structural change and I think that because the level of distrust is so high in the u.s. at the moment we have a problem that people are trying to shut down conversation because they just don't know where it's going to go and so as soon as anyone starts talking about something sensitive you you know you can always try it out check your priveledge or something that doesn't even have to be it can be completely content independent because you know everybody's enjoying some privilege at the moment and so if you're spending all of your time checking and you're probably not going to be able to say much of anything so I wanna I want to shift to a very serious topic and that is kung fu panda oh boy keep getting waiting it's getting weighty now I recall visiting the offices of Steel Capitol and we had a fun lunch chat with with a whole group of folks and I remember going to your office and seeing all sorts of toys various types and then a I guess a figurine of Kung Fu Panda what is your relationship to Kung Fu Panda this is this is emotional embarrassing and rather weighty but I I went reluctantly I did I can't say that I relished going to a children's film even though I had to kids who were excited to see it but my wife said it would be a good idea and as I sat there in the theater I got deeper and deeper into the story and when the film was finally over I found myself weeping and the prettier kids okay with that I don't think anybody was okay with that it was it was a little weird and what I realized was that it was the only film that I'd ever seen that struggled with the issue that I felt almost defines my my quest which is why can't a self teacher leave pupils and if you think about that for a second you realize that Einstein wasn't successful in leaving any Einsteins and Francis Crick didn't leave Francis Crick's and Winston Churchill didn't leave any Winston Churchill's if there was some way for a Newton to leave in Newton dependably the world would be a completely different place and what kung fu panda was trying to do in my opinion was to struggle with this question of how would an innovator leave a successor when it's his time to go and at some point somebody on Korra asked a question you know this sort of story doesn't make any sense to me how does a panda slob become the ultimate kung fu warrior and I wrote up my explanation and the thing is probably the most viral thing I've ever written what is that what is the title for people who and will link to this in the show notes for everybody just for our work we calm /li it's how does PO become an awesome kung fu warrior in the film Kung Fu Panda something like I'm sure if we look up your name in Kung Fu Panda it'll pop right up and so my claim was that the original innovator in the film is is a turtle which is an even more inappropriate kung fu archetype than a panda because they're obviously slow-moving and the turtle works out the of harmony and focus at the pool of sacred tears but when the kingdom is threatened by a kung fu student of great ability who's gone wrong all that the kingdom can muster is the usual collection of over trained students so think aspirants to Princeton and Stanford and Harvard and so these are all the kids we get like perfect SATs and have amazing extracurricular activities but fundamentally what we don't realize is that they've all been rendered incomplete in a way because they can't tap into the self teaching modality because they have been so thoroughly over taught and so the turtle recognizes that the Panda is the only one who can save the day and all the turtle has to go on in choosing a successor is that the Panda has innovated one silly thing which is to turn a fireworks cart into a makeshift rocket to jump a wall and so from this humble beginning the magic unfolds and it's it's really about the magic of how one self teacher leaves a successor and solves the problem have you come to any conclusions or beliefs outside of that essay that related to how autodidact or Newtons can leave Newton's when they travel on from this world I think so I I can't prove it but I think where I'm headed with this is that most of us who wind up using these sort of strange high agency hacks to negotiate the world have some kind of a traumatic birth that we may flatter ourselves that were in touch with reality but in fact reality is a second best strategy if you're lucky your family works pretty well and you never leave social reality it's only when something goes wrong that you discover okay the world doesn't work in any way the way I was told here's the underlying structure and what you then have to realize is if you want to do this at scale you've got to stop relying on these traumatic births it's like you're waiting for somebody to get bit by a spider to become spider-man now you have to do this as a more controlled fashion you have to harvest spiders that's right you've got it you've got to regularize it so I think what we need to do is we need to create a completely second secondary parallel educational structure for people who are going to be in the high agency creativity discovery in a idiom and realized that we know how to X in part expertise but we don't know how to impart creativity in genius what do you could you define high agency sure high agency or just explain what you mean by it well I think what I mean is are you constantly when you're told that the some but something is impossible is that the end of the conversation or does that start a second dialogue in your mind how to get around whoever it is that's just told you that you can't do something so how am I gonna get past this bouncer who told me that I can't come into this nightclub how am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience you're you're constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyver sort of a way and that's your approach to the world uh I'm not gonna take us off the rails here have you seen the Martian yes did you love it the ultimate high agency code I just saw it last night man it was just like two hours of MacGyver on steroids I loved it yeah and it I'm glad you brought it up I think it heralds a return at least among Americans to our previous way of being I think there was some terrible thing that happened starting around 1970 and that is just cracking now so really about 45 years of a low agency super-safe timid frightened kind of societal aspiration if you just stay on track can we keep the American prosperity machine going I think we now realize that you can't do it without a bunch of really marginal characters people who have might be described as disruptive have bad attitudes these are my people and they're tough to deal with and I don't always and enjoy them but I do think that without them it's not much of a football team what can someone do who's listening to this let's say and they're they live in a community where that is clearly low agency and they want to train themselves to be able to look at option C D and F when people say do you want a or B right or if they're given let's say the the know from the bouncer from the admissions officer from the fill in the blank they look for a way around it instead of just being stopped in their tracks how can someone are there any recommendations or tools or resources exercises that they could use to cultivate that hire agency well there's I don't think there's a community on earth where somebody isn't modifying their car beyond what's street legal I don't think that there's any community in which nobody is cooking something up in the basement that probably is prescribed by law I don't think that there's a community on earth where somebody isn't trying to break into their own computer in order to see how it works from the inside so there are high agency people everywhere what there isn't necessarily is critical mass and I think that you know sometimes I refer to the Bay Area is the innovation ghetto so you have all of the people who are too high agency to to behave properly and wait their turn and the rest of the country and so they've been given like the nicest piece of real estate an ungodly amount of cash and you know the pleasure of each other's company but they've been told you know okay you have to stay at the terms of your probation so you have to stay within the bay area and so what I'd love to see is I'd love to see more of us violating our parole and going into the rest of the country and trying to bring that irreverent spirit because I think one of the things that the u.s. still has over let's say a competitor like China is that we tolerate the middle finger it is perfectly acceptable to be disruptive here in San Francisco where you and I are conducting this interview whereas if I'm told that my child is disruptive in Kansas or South Carolina I'm probably being told that he's being sent home for bad behavior so I think it's really important to start respecting our marginal citizens of greatest ability and looking for the unusual personality types that are irreverent and committed enough to making things happen and to really do things what this is gonna seem like a detour but it might be related what book or books have you gifted most to other people oh there's so for my science friends I tell them to read the Emperor of sent by Chandler burr about my friend Luca Turin and it talks about a renegade scientist being stymied by the journal nature by various conferences by the established research centers and it's just a wonderful introduction to how the dissident voice is marginalized and because Luke is such a a genius of olfaction and chemistry he's able to take a perspective which may or may not be true but keep pushing it forward and battling through it so that's one of my favorites I have a another weird recommendation which is this book Herrick lesion fire laughs I see if I can smell this bye all right Herick leishan fire bye bye chakra who is the guy who effectively shorted Watson and Crick he told Watson and Crick that he didn't think that they were very good and very smart and then they were sort of they didn't know their chemistry they they weren't qualified to work on DNA and it turned out that they got it right and he got it wrong and when I heard that there was somebody who bet against Watson and Crick I thought well this is just gonna be the laugh of the century but it turned out just too short those guys required another genius and and he writes about trying to suppress these guys and failing because they were right and he was wrong and he has enough presence of mind to struggle with it so the these are books that I think are incredibly powerful because they talk about what it's like to be one against the many if you were advising say eh you might hate this question if you were advising say a senior in high school non-technical I'm sorry senior in college non-technical probably too late probably too late well let's just say that I mean that was me right so okay all right and I had you know fairies and sugar plums in my head about Silicon Valley and wanted to come here and attempt to build something amazing what what books sources would you suggest or what advice would you give well first of all if you can do anything else with your life other than innovate other than create go do that don't come if you're still here listening saying okay I can't really do anything else me but you have a compulsion that you cannot resist yeah but fundamentally you are zagging when other people are zigging you're not even thinking outside the box you haven't seen the box for years if that's who you are my feeling is just get here and I can't promise that your first week or your first month and a half is gonna be the greatest week or month and a half of your life but you will fall in with people there there's enough open hearted assistance that's given there's enough money that there's a different culture of abundance now that may not last this but more than this particular cycle but even if this is a bubble I think it'll reinf late in the same place because fundamentally we've run out of all other options other than innovation if we don't create and we don't think our way out of this I don't think we have a great plan for steady state so it's grow or die and that means that we'll have another bubble and bubbles aren't terrible things a lot of wonderful things happen during them what to you is the most powerful idea or few ideas in 0 to 1 or the material that helped generate that from moon glass that Peter taught which was transcribed by Blake masters yeah well there's so the entire book is about what to do if you think you have a secret if you really understand something the rest of the world is confused about and it's an important truth 0 to 1 says he here all the ways you might want to make that work I think the problem is the average person has never had an idea a really powerful personal idea and so most people don't have a single secret and so the real reason most people shouldn't start a company is that they don't know or believe anything that the rest of the world knows the thinks of as being nonsense right and so this is this is the engine behind the book and what's disturbing is to watch people reading this book not realizing that it's the whole thing is predicated on you hat you must have a secret and try to imagine somebody building a car with no engine it doesn't really matter how nice you get the upholstery it's not going to work now I there I suppose are different schools of thoughts here as with many different domains some people would say well you either have the hard wiring to come up with these secrets or spot these unpopular opinions or on propagated opinions that very few people are no other people hold then there are the folks I tend to lean this way who think that that can be facilitated right by and forcing people to ask for instance absurd questions and so if you had to 10x not just 10% increase but like 10x your output in whatever it might be how would you do it and forcing people to break whatever systems they might have in place right the current incremental approach to what they're doing these minut optimizations won't answer the question right they have to delve into this kind of Terra incognito things they haven't explored do you think this can be do you think it can be taught there you can help people to get better at spotting or or coming up with these these secrets seeing things that other people don't see well yeah I do and I think that in part this is why it's so difficult coming back to the sort of kung-fu panda pedagogy question assumed that I hit one or two of these secrets and I am successful at them doesn't have to be in business could be in science could be in literature anywhere the problem is is that you want to lead someone through the process of succeeding at something and seeing what blocked what blocked the path and what do you mean by that well here's a problem I give people okay if I'd solved it then in fact nobody's solved it was getting sort of free Mackenzie nu jitters okay how many golf balls can you fitness this is exactly what I hate about those problems is if the if there are answers in the back of the book it's not a good problem it has to be an actual problem that the the asker doesn't know so I don't know how to solve the problem of the umbrella there's nothing I like about umbrellas they have seriously Tim they blow up in wind so that they're easily wrecked under the conditions that they're supposed to be in which they're supposed to be used they have these long metal spikes at about eye level so they're clearly a safety hazard your legs always get drenched there you go everything about the umbrella strikes me as wrong now what I believe is is that there are and I've seen people try to innovate in the umbrella situation there are ones that have air blowers that blow the water away from you there are funky folding designs but I am almost positive that there exists some very simple mechanical design that would improve the umbrella on the other hand I don't have that same confidence about the coffee mug yes you could put some electronics in it you can make it smarter than it is but fundamentally it seems to be in such a simple stay that I wouldn't think that I should innovate there so if I can give the example where there is a solution known luggage before 1989 just going to ask you about this all right so it turns out that nobody really knew how to do wheeled luggage before 1989 it was just mind-blowing yeah anyway yeah it's well it's hard to imagine that like the whole world had their Wedd their heads wedged so far up there that they couldn't think to put in these large recessed wheels with a telescoping handle and this was the invention of a guy named Robert Plath I was a pilot for Northwest I think and in one fell swoop he convinced everyone that their old luggage was terrible so even though there wasn't a lot of growth he created the growth because nobody wanted their old luggage and you know you could compare these discrete brainwave innovations across field so for example in in table tennis in the early 50s the worst player on the Japanese team at the Bombay Table Tennis Championships was this guy hiroshi sato j-- who and he glued two foam expanses to both sides of a sandpaper the table tennis bat and nobody could cue off of the sounds because it changed the sound of the ball it's like a silencer round exactly it's like if so if you put a suppressor on your paddle suppressor just like that you use that word makes me think that you have a bunch of firearms hiding in your basement but anyway I can either confirm is it but but the the the idea that the worst player on one of the lower rated teams would be the undisputed champion simply through an innovation that was that profound shows you what the power of one of the eye these ideas is that the power laws are just so unbelievably in your favor if you win that it makes it worthwhile or dick Fosbury who went backwards over that I don't 68 you got it very good ridiculed and then mimicked and eventually standard yeah so in the case of say the the umbrella or the luggage is there a process for trying to tackle and innovate in these areas along the lines of something you might find it's a an idea or exercises that you guys do at teal capital when looking at different markets or trying to assess say an idea and its its validity or promise in a market are there any particular questions I guess is what I'm asking that you find very useful when trying to spot these these breakthrough ideas well it depends in situation by situation so for example in science I try to use various intellectual arbitrage techniques where if you have a bunch of smart people have been focused on a problem I try to look at what as a group their weaknesses are where how how how is the their bread buttered what is it that they can't afford to say or think what might be an example well so for example in in in theoretical physics there all sorts of shibboleths where if you can't say that you believe that quantum mechanics is intrinsically probabilistic you're not a member of the club because it's assumed that you sort of can't accept a difficult reality or if you can't sign up for one of the major schools you have no way to get funding because you there's no one who will support your grant applications so you start to look at what causes what should be a diverse portfolio of ideas to collapse in terms of the diversity where everybody starts representing the same point of view with tiny variations if you're looking at a problem that's never been attempted you don't want to use intellectual arbitrage because it's just blue sky there's no reason that the first attempts to think through the problem won't yield fruit but you know in the case of the umbrella I would start to think about well what made what made me think or what made one thing that this was a problematic object so count the number of moving parts then in general as things reach final form they they tend to get radically simple so there's too many moving parts if there's some innovation that's happened since the problem was originally considered so for example in the case of oculus rift and virtual reality maybe virtual reality was considered years before oculus but nobody had rethought it in the presence of economies of scale that bring the screens and smartphones down in price and so suddenly you have the high quality screens that are affordable that way back when would have cost prohibitive amount so ask yourself what's changed recently where is the object that currently inhabits the space violating some sort of aspect of canonical design what do you mean by canonical design well you know let's look at nature if I look at the there's a great back great virus called t4 bacteriophage and if you look it up it looks like a lunar lander it's really cool and the genetic material is held in a capsule called the capsid that has the form of an icosahedron and so you wonder something with some sides xx side there we go 20 sided platonic solid second what's a dodecahedron 12 goddammit all right they're dual to each other I might need to brush up on my Dungeons & Dragons dye references ok so please cancel crazy to think that before Plato ever existed nature had figured out this complicated 20-sided object but because it was so natural at a mathematical level even if it was complex nature found the canonical design even though there was no canonical designer there was no God given because it was a god-given form it didn't need to be funk up if you will by any individual or the recent discovery of grasshoppers that use gear mechanisms for jumping you would think we'd invented gears but in fact gears are such a natural idea that natural selection founded long before we did so is is this natural idea than roughly synonymous with canonical or is that yeah it does have a different connotation I mean I I sort of think about it if we get visited by aliens from another planet we're pretty advanced they're gonna know about platonic solids they're not going to call them platonic solids because they didn't have Plato and in fact they were known before Plato but these forms that really don't have a an inventor so much as a Discoverer got it these are things that just sort of have to be mm-hmm okay I took I took us down the rabbit hole a little bit but we're talking about umbrellas yeah and the number of elements are moving pieces is a medium that is a clue that something is wrong right right right it's not as elegant as it should be so I would I would for example immediately think about you know let's say the Japanese and their love of origami and the mathematics of paper folding that would be a place that I might see whether I could mine that silo of expertise for any application to the umbrella very often it's a question of being the first person to connect to things that have never been connected before and that's something that is a commonplace solution in one area is not thought of in another so I think that it involves recognizing when something is likely to allow an innovation figuring out where the information might be and as a last resort thinking really hard about what the form of the solution might be before you actually push yourself to be concrete I think very often you see people get very impatient with hand waving oh that's a lot of hand waving for my tastes well if you stay practical you'll probably be part of a lot of incremental improvements but you may never be part of one of these moments where that idea changes everything I was reading a quote today I'm blanking on this philosophers first name last name Dennett maybe you know Daniel you know I wanted to say that and then I said and then I thought to myself that's too much like Daniel Tammet who's the subject of this documentary called brain man but I think it is Daniel and I'm gonna butcher this but he said something along the lines of people look down upon those who say it seemed like a good idea at the time but that is actually a sign of of brilliance in some capacity because you're able to look back and admit that and have that type of self-awareness and I apologize Daniel if okay this mostly wrong but what would you think if you had to create a class for any grade level from ninth grade to the end of college what would the class be and when would you teach it well I'm gonna go grab a copy of this quote that's gonna bug me but I'm listening okay so it's a really interesting question part of the problem surrounds where would I be allowed to teach this class so first where you like well the first question is are you really allowed to deeply question your teacher or your school yeah so I would I would look to for example the Milgram experiment and the Asch conformity experiment so in the Asch conformity experiment one person was led into a room and asked simple questions which a bunch of Confederates of the experimenter Confederate those people cooperating with the experiment right agreed to answer the question and under its effect yes the actors answer the question in an obviously wrong way and then when it comes time for the only real participant to answer the question they often falsify their answer just to fit in so you should be able to pass the Asch conformity test and then there's the Milgram obedience experiment where a an experimenter appeared to ask the only participant to administer a series of increasing electric shocks and it's really important that most people continue to administer the shocks even when they heard screaming from the actor in that case if they were assured that it was expected of them and that they would not be held responsible and so I think what you're always looking for is you're looking for an education which makes students unteachable by standard methods and this is where we get into the trouble which is we don't talk about teaching disabilities we talk about learning disabilities and a lot of the kids that I want that's so true I think what you're good right apart are kids who have been labeled learning disabled but they're actually super learners they're like learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower and when teachers can't deal with this we label those kids learning disabled to cover up from the fact that the economics of teaching require that one central actor the teacher be able to lead a room of 20 or more people in lockstep well that's not a good that's not a good model and so what I want is I want to get as many of my dangerous kids out of that idiom whether it requires dropping out of high school dropping out of college but not for for no purpose drop into something start creating building join a lab skip college don't so this would be that was the program is it the it's not 20 under 20 the scholarship program that Patil fellowship the teal fellowship could you describe that for people who are in how can you describe that in brief and then does that is that an example of what you're describing or is it different well so a lot of there's a lot of confluence between how Peter thinks and how I think even though we start from radically different places the teal fellowship pre-existed my coming on and it's a program that will pay kids a hundred thousand dollars over two years to leave college to try something like start a company or a non-profit or do something of high agency and roughly speaking a lot of the kids drop out of the Stanford's and Princeton's and Harvard's they're incredibly impressive and we're not that worried that in life they're going to be set back because they're gonna do just fine under any circumstances and they get now in fairness to the most of those schools will allow them to come back that's true but two years is a little bit longer than it's comfortable a lot of people understand that there's a gap year but one of the things that we hope is is that if they do go back they will go back maybe as graduate students that maybe the undergraduate degree is unnecessary in fact we at some point did a little study and we found that for every advanced professional degree we could think of there was somebody who held that degree who had never gotten a BA or a BS and so the idea of skipping college is now quite appealing to me and with the idea being that a master's degree or a PhD or a JD or an MD has an embedded assumption of a BA or a BS but in fact you'll never be asked about that lower degree because the the leading degree the professional degree credential is usually the one that matters now what would you say to those out there who might look at your credentials and say well how would you have been able to obtain these very helpful degrees from places like Harvard and Oxford if you hadn't had the prerequisites set by going to undergrad well I guess I would imagine they're critics who would say there's a there's a survivorship bias sure you hear about the zuckerberg x' but you don't hear about the 999 other people who might drop out but then end up feeling or being restricted in their career options because they can't show a college degree that at least is a common refrain so what would you say to those people what's so my undergraduate wasn't from Oxford was from Penn and there was their language requirement the University of Pennsylvania and I at the time couldn't figure out how to satisfy it so I assumed that I would not graduate from Penn and then I just broke all the rules they had a program that actually helped you break all the rules if you could find it and what we and I have to ask what what did that look like so it looked like one guy his name was Mike Zuckerman he was a professor in the history department and he's what we would call in Yiddish a shtarker he's the guy who breaks kneecaps for his people she taka daka it's like German you know like strain like the stronger and stronger and so every time I would like sign up for a class that had a prerequisite and I would be kept held back he'd get on the phone he'd say I understand your hold this is Mike Zuckerman at the office of university scholars I understand that you're holding one of my kids hostage with red tape you know it wasn't like he had any power but the sound of it caused other professors to let go and always his official job he's just like this history the professor oh he was okay wasn't just like the secret mercenary I think in the basement he this was a brilliant idea that he thought up and it was sort of a secret kind of a secret program so you didn't know that it was there and it had power it allowed you to I think immediate access to any of Penn's graduate school is the program called university scholars so it sounded respectable it sounds very respected right and it was just a anti red tape program for kids who wanted to do research while undergraduate and it was created by this history yeah amazing yeah and this shows you what you know all through corporate America and and and and the Ivy League universities there are rebels who can't quite leave these institutions but I call it the core the rebel end of corporate and the corporate end of rebel so I end up as the corporate end of rebel but I've always had help from the rebel end of corporate and he was a guy who was the rebel end of corporate rule end of corporate he was the maverick within the machine that's right let's switch gears a little bit because for this part one I have to get to the airport shortly so I want to ask a couple of my favorite questions that are short questions that you don't have to give short answers to but we'll see what we can knock off when you think of the word successful who's the first person who comes to mind and why Paul Dirac because he found what must be the strangest and most bizarre piece of physics I ever hoped to encounter how do you spell his last name D IRAC Dirac I don't know why I put a weird Turkish back on his name I just really wanted to what else can you say about him that leads you to call him successful is it is it just that discovery or is it the way you went about it you know there were so I'm very focused on physics into the 20s and and in physics in the 20th century there were really three guys who were the main forces behind the three major equations and what I noticed about all three of them Einstein Dirac and a guy named Seon yang is that they all followed the same weird path which was to use aesthetics rather than experiment as their guide so the entire rest of the field has had to use experiment and be in a regular science idiom and these are the three guys who more than anyone just sort of closed their eyes and tried to figure out how should this game go and then prove that the world more or less went the way they said it should now by aesthetics do you mean looking for what they perceived as beautiful or elegant no all right so the this is like the you know I have to make this joke that the scientific method is the radio edit of great science great science doesn't look much like the story you've been told about people diligently trying to falsify things and in all sorts of statistical significance great science looks like breaking into graveyards and digging up bodies when you know you shouldn't or trusting your aesthetic sense when the data tells you otherwise and and I've always loved this aspect of Sciences it's that you may want to tame this thing and it won't be tamed it will always be the case that the leaders of the field are the misfits in the back throwing spitballs rather than the good kids who are always there on time raising their hands we asked about books earlier so we won't hit that do you have a favorite documentary or movie besides kung-fu panda or any that come to mind well there was a brilliant one that I haven't heard ever heard of since I saw it called rated X which had the great idea it X yes and it was about pornographers and it was an anti pornography movie and it's it's gambit was to just let pornographers talk at length without interruption or editing and so it made its point by just giving these people a mic when they really shouldn't have said anything I thought that was absolutely ingenious I really want to watch that yeah sometimes the the best sort of refutation and debating tactic is just letting somebody talk just let them bury themselves what $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life in recent memory last six months a year whatever I just bought my punk ten-year-old kid a mandolin and suddenly that's all we hear in the house and I just think what a completely bizarre instrument to fall in love with and I think I got it for 98 bucks just on my it's a hair's breadth away and why the mandolin as opposed to a different instrument you know I think it's really important like we're talking about with older with with languages that are less commonly studied I think that the mandolin is the loser of an old battle between the mandolin and the guitar it was very popular at the end of the 19th century when a bunch of I think they were called like the Italian students or the Spanish students came through and everyone went crazy for mandalas but they weren't quite as versatile it's the same fingering patterns as a violin so that everything that you learned to pluck you can then learn to bow later but it's also compact and it's highly melodic in its nature so you cannot alternate between court it's like a little bit of a ukulele on steroids do you have any favorite mandolin player oh gosh well there's this this guy just got the McArthur fellowship that I can't think of his name of course I'm imagining I can't be that many mandolin playing MacArthur winners maybe hoorah but I guess have you surged you know the Marco Marco Connor who was the great bluegrass prodigy first a violin I think he won the fiddle championship three years in a row they outlawed him ever winning again so he became the flatpicking champion on guitar I think he's pretty terrific what was Mark O'Connor mark O'Connor so the MacArthur award this is the Oh this is another this different person yeah the cards are worthless people not familiar it's actually a cool word worth looking into that's called the genius grant yeah do you have any particular morning rituals that are important to you okay each morning is basically a struggle against a new day which I view is a series of opponents who must be defeated I'm not a morning person so every morning I get out of bed I'm just astounded that I've done you've gotten on your feet well you know there was a was a Julian Schwinger the great Harvard physicist I think was asked if he would teach the 9 a.m. quantum mechanics course knee he stopped for a second mmm the person who was asking said what's the problem professor srini says I don't know if I can stay up that light so what if you are trying to do deep creative work that requires a lot of synthesis or just as a vol my rava cop might say orthogonal thinking and so on what would your what would your kind of work psycho I'm like when do you do that type of work so I use a weird technique I used coprolalia where I say since it sounds pornographic a little bit it's you know those strings of obscenities that Tourette's patients involuntarily utter sure so I was long term I think it's coprolalia cavalierly coprolalia okay I've got it like just talking streams of yeah so I find that when we use words that are prohibited to us it tells our brain that we are inhabiting unsafe space and it's it's a bit of a sign that you're going into a different mode so I tend to become sort of facultative ly autistic that is I think I can be social and personable if I'm trying to do that but when I I'm going to do deep work very often it's kind of very powerful aggressive energy to it it's not easy to be around it's very exacting and I think I would probably look very autistic to people who know me to be social were they ever to see me in work moment so how do you how do you incite that how do you know that so do you just going back to the expression that I still honor the term I still can't say do you just start trying to string together as many as sanity's as possible I have like I have my same seeing limitation it's like an invariant mantra that I have to say can you share it or don't know no one's top secret is like it's and you can't share your meditation like TM yeah exactly how well just some hints then how long is it probably takes me 7 seconds to say it oh my god the curiosity is killing right but but it starts to you have to you have to decamp from normal reality where you start thinking about everything in positive terms well how am i negatively going to impact my neighbor no your this is your time you're stealing the time and it's you know the act of creation is itself a violent action what time of day would you typically bring up this this mantra and going to that mode well if give a preferred time sure there's a so this is a politically incorrect statement but mathematicians of an older generation discussed the hour of the night when all theorems are true and all women are beautiful that the pleasure of doing math or physics at 3:00 a.m. when the phone stops ringing when you have no FOMO because everybody's asleep it's a Monday night and it's just you in an expansive whiteboard that's when the magic happens yeah unfortunately for my social life that's also when I do mind not saying it's good but my best writing and synthesis happens yeah is that right yeah it's it's typically between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. I find five stuff I come up with is a little bit unreliable five is only if I've managed to catch the wave how nice the wave you've been waiting for for an entire season of mess or thing and you're like okay there's no way I can paddle in now and miss that set that's coming and you just have to to ride it at least i what i will do is ride it until i just collapse from exhaustion if i have it if the muse is somehow been captured in the bottle i mean i'm a cycle over 24-hour I mean not go to sleep in that state but you know that's what that's rare it's not you have to yeah it is rare for me also not to compare the the funny how-to stuff that I write to complex physics if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it what would it say one billboard anything on it just because a large number of well credentialed experts believe something in common doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong but if they've reached consensus that's the way to bet some somehow people have to learn that consensus is a huge problem if there's no arithmetic consensus because it doesn't require a consensus but there is a washington consensus there is a climate consensus in general consensus is how we bully people into pretending that there's nothing to see you know move along everyone and so I think that in part you should start to learn that when people are people don't naturally come to high levels agreement of agreement unless something is either absolutely clear in which case consensus isn't present or there's an implied threat of violence to livelihood or self what advice would you give to your 30 year old self and if you could just place us in time what were you doing at that age so when I was 30 I guess I was still struggling to stay in or get out of academics and I think what I didn't realize is that the structure of the universities was that they were either hitting steady-state or growing very very little or shrinking and that was a not a healthy place to be because most of the good seats in the musical chairs competition had already been found in the 60s and they had occupants and we were in some sort of a game where we were doing work for the system but we weren't set to inherit it and I think what I needed to do was to decamp and to realize that technology was going to be a boom area and even though I wanted to do science rather than technology it's better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field than to be in a contracting world where people's worst behavior comes out and your mind is grooved in defensive and rent-seeking types of ways that I just life is too short to be petty and defensive and cruel to other people who are seeking to innovate alongside you in the last question maybe the last of more - that doesn't make any sense but now here we go do you have any ask or requests for my audience for people listening anything they should think on do or otherwise well first of all I would really like a high-quality umbrella from one of you just to prove the point that was actually a reasonable problem to set I guess what I would really like is for those of you who've been told that you're learning disabled or you're not good at math or that you're terrible at music or something like that seek out unconventional ways of proving that wrong believe not only in yourselves but that there are structures that are powerful enough to make things that look very difficult much easier than you ever imagined that is great advice and for those people there who particularly have this music and security as I do one thing that is seemed to me like a life raft and the sea of complexity is the the 3 chord song by the axis of awesome work words I knew I was gonna do that four chords on there we go so you can look that up on YouTube or elsewhere for a real hilarious but also potential potential what the hell am i trying to say here I just ran out of caffeine this is the moment no it's sort of like it's a it's an amazing act that they put together which shows you how complexity can be created through simplicity or / or perceived complexity well yeah and it shows you that your mind has stored over a hundred songs that you think of as being completely different in different places even though there was a simple fact draw bringing them all together you know III liken it to the moment that people realize that in it almost every advertisement for wristwatches the watches are set to ten ten and before you realize that you can't really believe that it's true but afterwards you realize that the world has just pulled one over on you because ten ten looks like a smile to watch advertisers I guess it's very symmetrical isn't it yeah but it what's funny is is that isn't that the wisdom has crept into the to the point and sometimes you'll see digital watch ads and they'll still be set to tens that even though it doesn't look like a smile so I'm gonna I'm just gonna throw out a teaser here because we don't have time to get into it today but you and I have privately spoken quite a bit about psychedelics I am either by the time people hear this or very shortly going to be helping to raise funds for a very interesting study that Johns Hopkins is putting together you said to me not too long ago something along the lines of you'd be amazed or you wouldn't believe how straight Nair I was for so long when was the first time that you tried psychedelics relatively recently and it was because I was I had been propagandized so thoroughly that even to this day I don't like the Association I don't like the word cloud around them there were all sorts of confusions that the power of one of these substances must come from killing brain cells like pouring acid on your brain and leaving it as Swiss cheese it wasn't until I started meeting some of the most intellectually gifted people in the sciences and beyond and I realized that this was sort of the open secret of what I call the hallucinogenic elite whether it's billionaires or Nobel laureates or inventors and encoders that a lot of these people were using these agents either for creativity or to gain access to the things that are so difficult to get access to through therapy and other conventional means so tune in next time when you'll hear Tim say I will dig into this into this font of knowledge this gold mine and give a Google guys search my name and Johns Hopkins by the time you hear this you might see some very interesting stuff up about this and you could actually get involved and learn a lot more about it but before that and in closing I suppose I should ask where can people find you on the end where can they ping you if they want to share with you their incredible origami umbrella solution that's a good question I'm on Twitter or wherever you might be more than less yes I'm on Twitter at Eric our Weinstein and you can find some of my essays at edge org particularly one on professional wrestling as a metaphor for living in it constructed and false reality well Eric I love hanging out this is always so much fun and I appreciate you taking the time to join us and to brainstorm and share your wisdom with me and with everybody listening thank you so much Tim thanks for inviting me into your world and allowing me to talk to your base alright folks so let us know you think definitely say hi to Eric at Eric our Weinstein say hi to me also if you have any feedback if you'd like to hear around to at tea Farris TFE our Riss on Twitter and until next time thank you for listening hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet Friday do you want to get a short email from me would you enjoy getting a short email for me every Friday and that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that I've discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do it could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend so if you want to receive that check it out just go to 4-hour workweek dot-com that's four hour work week com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you'll get the very next one and if you sign up I hope you enjoyed this episode is brought to you by 99designs 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business it's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs whether that's a logo website business card or anything else I use 99 designs to get book cover prototypes for the 4-hour body which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller and I also use them for banner ads illustrations and other things with 99designs designers around the world to compete to create the best design for you you give feedback and then pick your favorite you end up happy or you get your money back it's very simple you can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours meaning Tim Ferriss show listeners at 99designs com forward slash Tim and right now my listeners you guys will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design that's 99designs dot-com forward slash Tim check it out this episode is brought to you by wealthfront and this is a very unique sponsor wealthfront is a massively disruptive in a good way set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors it has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than two and a half billion dollars under management in fact some of my very good friends investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in wealth run so the question is why why is it so popular why is it unique because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them and this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations bloated sales teams etc and I'll come back to that in a second I suggest you check out wealthfront com forward slash Tim take the risk assessment quiz which only takes two to five minutes and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you in and if you just want to take their advice run with it do it yourself you can do that or as I would you can set it and forget it and here's why the value of wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't great investing is a marathon not a sprint and little things that you may or may not be familiar with like automatic tax loss harvesting rebalancing your portfolio across more than ten asset classes and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time wealthfront as I mentioned since it's using software instead of retail locations etc can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible right off the bat you never pay commissions or account fees for everything they charge 0.25 percent per year on assets above the first 15,000 which is managed for free if you use my link wealthfront com forward slash Tim that is less than five dollars a month to invest a thirty thousand dollar account for instance now normally when I have a sponsor on this show is because I use them and recommend them in this case it's a little different I don't use wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to here's the deal they wanted to sponsor this podcast but because of SEC regulations companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials so I couldn't be a user and have on the podcast but I've been so impressed by wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money at least for me in the team and the company itself so I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client now back to the recommendation as a Tim Ferriss show listener you'll get fifteen thousand dollars managed for free if you decide to open an account but just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you take two minutes fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront comm forward slash Tim it's fast it's free there's no downside that I can think of now I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer wealthfront Inc is an SEC registered investment advisor investing in securities involves risks and there's the possibility of losing money past performance is no guarantee of future results please visit wealthfront comm to read their full disclosure so check it out guys this is one of the hottest most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley and they're killing it they've become massively popular just take a look see what portfolio they would create for you and you can use that information however you want wealthfront comm forward slash Tim and until next time thank you for listening

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 65,786

Rating: 4.8634953 out of 5

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, forbes, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, best-seller, public speaker, angel investor, ferriss, twitter, Facebook, stumbleUpon, evernote, uber, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Eric Weinstein, Eric Weinstein Interview

Id: 8LPwyy4scAc

Length: 100min 24sec (6024 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/astro-pimmel]

I usually don't care much about Tim Ferriss' podcast but a every one in a while he has a great guest on as was the case with Eric. It exposed me to completely new domains of knowledge and unique ways of thinking that I'm extremely grateful for.

[u/IamCayal]

First exposure to Eric as well. I was directly impressed with his broad knowledge and ability to connect different topics. I still remember him asking the audience to find a better solution to the umbrella.

[u/[deleted]]

I tried listening to Tim Ferriss once. I didn’t get past the intro. His whole hook seems to be promising people otherworldly results with little effort / time. I can’t stand how many influencers out there build their content around this. It creates unrealistic expexcstiobs, self doubt and anxiety.

[u/[deleted]]

I went back to view this when Sam Harris mentioned it.

Ferriss seems pre-occupied with name dropping and topic dropping things that say "I'm wealthy in California, folks!" To his great credit, Eric comes across as informative, and moreover, patient with Ferriss' frequent detours.

To be fair, I felt the same way with Eric's recent chat with the lady podcaster.