Eric Weinstein: On the Nature of Good and Evil, Genius and Madness | Lex Fridman Podcast #134

the following is a conversation with eric weinstein the third time we've spoken on this podcast he is the wise turtle master oogway to my kung fu panda one of my favorite people to talk to in this world a complicated and fascinating mind that i'm grateful to have the chance to accompany in exploring this world through conversation on this podcast and on his the latter called the portal quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode first is grammarly a service i use in my writing to check spelling grammar sentence structure and readability second is sun basket a meal delivery service i use to add healthy variety into my culinary life third is sem rush the most advanced seo optimization tool i've ever come across i don't like looking at numbers but somebody should it helps you make good decisions and finally expressvpn the vpn i've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that wherever this life takes me i'm drawn to the possibility of having many more conversations with eric through the years i think we have just the right kind of contrasting world views and a deep respect and appreciation of each other's life stories that creates for this magical experience in the realm of conversation that feels like we're always looking for something that we never quite find but are always better for having tried i'm not sure how or why the universe is connected eric and me but it did and i would be a fool not to trust its judgment and enjoy the journey if somehow you like this podcast please subscribe on youtube review it with five stars and apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with eric weinstein who's the greatest musician of all time would you say we were just off camera talking about eddie van halen he unfortunately passed away who's the greatest musician of all time yeah jonathan richmond who's that it's a weird question so i'm going to give you a weird answer it's not because thank you okay jonathan richard the reason i'm picking on him is that he had a quote uh he was the front man of a group called the modern lovers and his quote was something like we have to be prepared to play music when our instruments are broken the electricity's out and it's raining something like that and i thought that that quote was very interesting because what it said was you have to be able to strip this thing down farther and farther back to get to something that is intrinsically musical so we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity and we're talking about eddie van halen and his recent passing and that affected me emotionally i don't know whether it affected you i was never a van halen the group fan but i i revered eddie van halen's capacity for innovation just i saw him like uh you know rodney mullen the skateboarder i had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast just to talk about what it's like to totally discontinuously innovate and he posted a video of spanish fly i think and saying like i didn't know the guitar could make those kinds of sounds like what is this voodoo movie is it well this is the thing right the arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast and the attacks uh from the hammer-ons when they go at light speed as he did uh particularly and the reason i chose that was is that i wanted to strip out the electronics because part of the claim would be is that he's a rock musician and a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar to sort of the electrified setup you know his his use of the whammy bar for example or the frankenstrat that he built from different pieces right all of those aspects in my opinion are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship and that's why i chose spanish fly because everyone of course will go to something like eruption or running with the devil which is the first things that they heard that let them know that there was a new force erupting out of southern california that was eddie van halen right i mean i just i i'm in love with i'm in love with the story of it you're often so poetic about music like it clearly touches your soul on some kind of on many levels what is that is it deeper than just rocking out with the uh in your convertible corvette 69 i imagine eric weinstein is driving down the california highways blasting some kind of music is it just like being able to be carefree for moments of time or is there something more fundamental that connects to like the theory of everything in physics and life and all that how often do you have the chance for example to hear mathematics performed as you do in bach right like something with that kind of precision and elegance that can't really be grasped where you know uh to go back to leonard cohen's uh famous line the baffled king composing right such a good song such a good song but it's also like individual verses of that song are insanely important um the the baffled king is how we often make music we don't really understand what did we just do that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch right and so it's a very strange thing that you should be able to have think of it like you're a computer you've got this weird open music port you know port 37.8 you know like it's not even it's not even supposed to be there and suddenly somebody starts playing guitar and they're making you feel things or you know like in particular particular instruments like the violin it's so difficult it's so unforgiving and when it gives up its secrets it just you know it it wraps its fingers around your heart and won't let go sometimes i talk about head heart and loins when something can grab your head heart and your loins at the same moment and integrate them there are very few opportunities to live like that and if you think about eddie van halen uh you know as far as your head the the musical innovations and the fact that he was drawing directly from the classical canon um you know really speaks to the idea that maybe rock is what um somebody like jimi hendrix saw it as being you know an infinitely extensible medium uh in terms of heart um i always notice the smile on his face it's painful to look at an eddie van gaal and solo now like sometimes you'll see the cigarette dripping off the side of his mouth and you're like that's gonna [ __ ] kill you and i'm not even worried about it for you i'm worried about it for me you're gonna rob i don't even need to hear you play another note i just like knowing that you're in the world that there is somebody that everyone looks to that no but i've never heard a guitarist say yeah i don't know i think it was okay like i've never just never heard it you can hate him but you still think he was a genius there are very few people like that in the in the world and then loins those leaps that guy was incredibly good-looking and you know skin-tight pants super athleticism he completely owned the sexual the male sexuality of the stage both being the completely dominant you know sort of mythical alpha male i hate that expression but there you are but also this kind of little boy with this mischievous smirk and you know the sense that it all came together how could you not eat that up you could just imagine the millions of like young teenage boys who are just like playing air guitar in their in their room just that yeah basically dreaming of being that kind of god the the the most perfect example of what a human being can be yeah it's fascinating to think it is and and then you know as in many of the cases with these bands you get these multiple talents in the same outfit and i think that the original configuration with david lee roy i mean david lee roth is such a hot mess at all times i would love you to talk to david like if there that that dance would be just gorgeous i don't know he's can you handle it can you ride that probably not yeah probably not because i think he's very i i get the feeling that he's very smart and very uh dysregulated and i don't know that i could like like bring him down to earth for a moment well i can also get pretty disregulated yeah yeah and so i don't know i don't know whether it could be magic it could be a [ __ ] show i don't know what you thought of his appearance on rogan that was an interesting one i loved it but joe and that and joe does this sometimes sometimes he just sits back and listens and he just lets like the music play which works really well i think you have a chance to kind of jump into the chaos i care too and then you'll just start and the places you will go you may not even talk about music for like hours it might just go to this because he i think lives in japan like there's a weird he's a he's been in like an emt after he was a rock star he chose to be kind of like i don't know you know it it like there's depth to that man that uh that hasn't been explored by him either so i that'll be an exciting conversation can we go back to larry cohen yeah can we just i the things i feel when i listen to hallelujah by leonard cohen or anything by him really but that one what do you want to get into it let's go what what does it that song mean to you is it love oh boy well first of all it's it's it's mystery like it starts off about mystery so what are you what are you doing you're doing this alternation between the two chords so three notes at the same time one is called the the tonic or you have the the major and the relative minor and he's alternating between them there's only one note of difference between those two chords one of them would be feeling sad one of them would be more joyous typically described and so by altering one note it's the minimal amount to take you back and forth between joy and happiness as that's encoded in us so he starts off with it i heard there was a scene david played the please lord but you don't really care for music do you um that's really interesting because it's he's using this technique called bathos right so the alternation between the sublime and kind of the guttural or ridiculous or the mundane right so he's like uh there's a bitterness to it too is it just play well the way i hear it again you know great song allows for different interpretations you happen to be asking me so i'm going to impart some stuff that probably isn't in the song but why it speaks to me and that's what makes it great um the way i hear it is he doesn't believe the audience you don't really care for music do you then what are you doing listening to this you stupid idiots you know of course you of course you care for music you're too cool to care so i see through you and screw you that's like the kind that's that's the energy i get then he does this weird thing it goes like this is where he should put the description of where he is in the chord progression which is the tonic right it goes like this and then he hits the fourth and the fifth which are the two other major elements the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony so he's describing the chord progression in real time in the lyrics there's two ways this can come about in other songs like we had this example of um every time we say goodbye do you know the song every time we say goodbye no i think it was a cole porter maybe or gershwin maybe porter i don't know i cry a little there is no love song finer but how strange the change from major to minor right like it's beautiful then then there's times when it's duplicitous so for example you'll have i guess my favorite examples of this are johnny cash's ring of fire i fell into a burning ring of fire then what does he do with the lyrics in the tune i went down down down it goes up yeah right and so the idea is like oh okay that was a head fake yeah right and another one of these um you know is nina simone's feeling good oh okay so what do you get a bird's flying high you know how i feel and sun up in the sky high you know how i feel that woman's voice she doesn't give a damn yet she's and i'm feeling but then what's the dude yeah it's like heavy stripping music it's it's you're not in a good place you're probably in some strip club with the last of your money you're drinking lousy beer some bad situation yeah and she's feeling good no it's funerial it's oppressive right i never thought of that song that way wow well you think of it as joyous yeah no no if you think about it contrast it with ray charles for example you know do you know do you know lonely avenue well my room has got two windows but the sun never comes through it's really depressed it's the same sort of vibe as nina but she's claiming that she's in great shape so she's like a good case of the unreliable narrator leonard cohen to me is talking about the unreliable audience that's too cool to be with the performer on stage the things that go with the music like the cole porter stuff they go against like the johnny cash i think these are the games that musicians play that the rest of us only sort of notice subliminally okay fourth the fifth and then he when he he should say something about the relative minor or the he's giving you the secret the baffled king in other words he doesn't know why it works did paco bell know why pachelbel's canon would work yeah it was a discovery that's the whole thing like some music is discovered and some music is invented and he's talking about a musical discovery he's talking about the pythagorean power of the wave equation and then superimposed like there's two genius intellectual concepts behind music one of which is the wave equation usually we solve it for a one-dimensional medium because we're talking about strings or air columns occasionally you're talking about things like hand pans or steel drums or metallophones or gamalons whatever and those have a wave equation too that's much more chaotic the other equation is this crazy thing that 2 to the 19 12 is almost exactly equal to 3 which is what gave us even temperament and so the tension between those two things is in fact one of these most beautiful stories inside of that system that formula of the baffled king is a discovery it's not he's not really composing it the reason he's baffled it's imagine that you took like a little brush and you started brushing off uh you know a pyramid under the sands you you might think that you created the pyramid by your brushing but in fact if somebody else did it that's why you're baffled right that's beautifully played you're right and as as creating one of the greatest songs of all time and as he's doing it he's baffled and he's in his mouth he leonard is within the song and he leonard is baffled is my my contention but he knows enough to know that he's baffled right and so the idea is that he is composing he has the audacity to compose as david he's echoing david at a minimum and then in a later song which i really wish we would discuss that's totally dystopic and you will not like it at all uh is the future which contains this line that i i think i used in my episode with roger penrose on the portal uh note the subtle plug the portal the portal i'm the little jew that wrote the bible so there is this way in which leonard cohen i think is constantly coming to the idea of being a biblical-like scribe and i think this is one of the great things that you know you see dylan doing this with all along the watchtower you saw warren zivan who we should talk much more about doing this with a song called i was in the house when the house burned down do you know this thing no this is embarrassing sweetheart that's a great day warren zivan is one of the most important songwriters of our time and he's been largely forgotten uh by this generation but you know bob dylan uh would sing one of his songs in tribute i've heard bob dylan you know very small number of songwriters really move him woody got three gordon lightfoot and uh warren zevon by the way bob dylan if you're out there appear on either one of our podcasts we need to get your voice into a new medium for a new group definitely this is a time this is a time for bob dylan my friend honestly you've been doing an amazing job in this space one of the reasons i'm super excited to do this podcast again is that i've learned some things about what i don't do well and i also have sort of struggled with the question should i do those things better because what if it's you know i always use the same example of the fitted sheet when you're trying to put a queen-size fitted sheet on a king-sized mattress he's like okay i got that corner squared away and then you get another corner that pops off and then you go back around i wonder whether i can improve my style in the ways in which uh you know i think it's just a recognition of a difference you do a better job of getting to the soul of a really top intellectual guest and making them accessible and presenting them as themselves for a huge number of people and i'd give my tooth to be able to do that do you ever think about this like because i think about what is the greatest conversation i'll ever have you know like in in a sense the portal not to reduce it to anything but there will be the greatest conversation you may have already had it but it's very possible if if if enough people like me can keep twisting your arm to keep doing the portal please that is there'll be an amazing conversation one of the questions that i ask myself is like who is the person that i'm especially equipped for some reason i'm convinced on putin there's something in my head that says i i i can do this man better than anyone else in this world i got this thought in my head about it i don't know why and i'm convinced but i think the universe works in that way like if it tells you it's kind of happens the way i would say it is is that almost everybody who becomes a supreme court justice believes at a very early age they're going to become a supreme court justice many people believe at an early age that they can do it don't get there but of those who get there almost all of them had this sort of well i call it pathological self-confidence and i do think you have pathological self-confidence and you also have humility and most people would hear those as a contradiction i think that you would not be able to get away with what you do if you didn't have the humility and so i think you know the great danger is that your equation becomes unbalanced that you either lose the humility or you lose the the humility overwhelms the ego and the drive because right now you've got a mexican standoff in your mind and the rest of us are just benefiting that's beautifully put my mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours it's all reservoir dogs all the time yeah but um actually the person who that describes is peter thiel peter thiel thinks more dif people always say like what does peter think about x y and z p and q it's like well do you want communist peter do you want hyper peter in there oh my god right on everything that's why he's successful is that he's got all these minds fighting each other and so when people say peter is this repeater is that i just laugh because it like nobody who knows him would describe him as having thoughts at the level that people are claiming and i do think that you know in my case um you know there's also pathological epistemic humility like just i know i know how little i know how little i can do in one life i know how many things i've screwed up i know how many things i've got wrong and on the other hand i know that if if not you know it's like hillel's questions you know if i'm not for myself who will be for me and if i'm only for myself what am i if not now when you know at some level there's a question about if i don't decide that someone is capable and that somebody is me and i if i apply that to everyone else on the planet then nobody's going to do anything and so i do think that one of the things that people like you and i get is who are you to say that right f that man just sign me up for some dunning-kruger yeah but it's multiple minds like you said like this morning i was feeling so good and confident about i couldn't think no wrong and i remember last night clearly thinking that i'm the dumbest human who's ever lived yeah and nothing i've ever said is worth anything what the [ __ ] am i doing with my life why am i scared i was terrified of this conversation who the hell is my conversation because i'm an idiot and because you know lex but no no but this morning [Laughter] i was the baddest [ __ ] who's ever walked this earth so it was i was very conscious i think it was the coffee i'm not sure maybe some sleep this sounds very russian and it involves multiple beverages some of them being alcoholic others containing caffeine there's in fact i can't share the story behind it but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge okay so i mean i should have hate you for coffee because this is a morning there's a morning show here so i put out a call that we get a chance to have this conversation and people ask these wonderful questions a few people asked about depression and suicide it's a this this is a russian program so we'll have to go there and i think about leonard cohen and one of the things that always kind of um broke my heart and kind of suffocated the hope i have for just uh i don't know for love in a person's life is to hear how much the how much depression was a part of leonard cohen's life and how much he suffered see i guess one way i'm not sure where we can go with this question but do you think about the places that the mind can go like these dark places yeah is there something like where the only escape out is suicide for example that's the darkest version of it that i really think suicide is a big place in suicidal ideation and self-harm and we don't talk a lot about it um it's it's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans these are umbrella categories and if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves but we don't know whether that's coming because of a problem in brain chemistry because of an event in their life um whether evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal whether or not it might have a religious motivation there's there's too many different forms of self-harm and something like the 10th largest killer thereabouts and i think that you know you can look at it from different angles i i'm old enough to have you know had pete seeger come to my college when i was at university and to watch his good humor in the face of all adversity um i think of odetta i used to go to odetta concerts any i don't know if you you know who she is okay this is going to be one of the better days of your life check out odetta when we're done with the interview um she was a civil rights figure but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship these people were in the struggle right and they they saw lots of bad things happen and they kept their humor about them and you know the thing is that you can take on the velcro merits you know the pain of the of the planet or you can try to do something else which is to be a happy warrior even if the odds are terrible and the and the cost of failure is catastrophic so even when surrounded by darkness but the thing is with leonard cohen is he created such beautiful music and yet it's like anthony bourdain the same and yet they go to this dark place and it could be it's easy to say it's just biochemistry no there's a linkage between this highly generative creative side and in some cases dark depression in other cases not so you can't say that it's tied the genius and madness are always you know co-traveling or the beauty and pain are one and the same what you can say is that there's a cluster of people that tell you that for that cluster there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty and i do think that in part it's squaring circles that can't be squared you know that well we're just talking before about the inability to serve two perfect systems the perfect system of the wave equation and the perfect system of even temperament they're both perfect they're not compatible and once you realize that there is perfection and an inability to make contact with perfection i think you know you recognize that um there is no solution to this world yeah that's weird with the poets and musicians do you want to say this is a particular thing that you do but then there's spanish fly by van halen and then you realize oh well what do you get out of spanish fly by david i i think it's very singular because of its the fact that it's purely acoustic for some reason i always i couldn't imagine eddie van halen separates from the band in front of thousands of people just screaming and rocking out with lights everywhere and spanish fly made me think like you made me imagine him sitting alone on a couch in a room i think that's who he was i really do i mean i i it's believe me i get it it was a rock star it's a rock guy got it got it got it got it i'm almost positive that you can't get to where he got to without being a complete introvert yeah like it made me imagine that there's like some half naked supermodel walking around hoping that uh they can you know do their thing together and and he's completely disinterested he'd be able to be with the guitar right yeah because like honestly at some level in one case you know maybe you're maybe you're conquesting maybe you're pursuing love and romance and the other case you're talking about a relationship to the to the order the creator the almighty whatever it is you want to call that substrate that is reality and you know do i believe that eddie van halen and jimi hendrix and paganini and heifetz jacked into the you know the true essence of the world yeah they did i don't think it's as good as differential geometry i'm sorry i do think it's amazing for other reasons and thank god because it's very difficult to communicate differential geometry at scale but the thing about eruption for example what level do you want to come into eruption do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry do you want the theatrics like you could put him on on wires and you know set his pants on fire or whatever and you know it'd be it'd be totally in keeping with it on the other hand you want to talk something completely precise that you know shows off the virtuosity of what's possible with the stratocaster everything works multi-axis but there's a precision to it which and which is very different than hendrix there's a messiness to hendrix that to me somebody who has ocd has always been how does that affect you i mean let's have the jimi hendrix conversation i don't know that we can do anything to it that hasn't already been done to it maybe that's not true maybe the idea is that every generation has to have its hendrix conversation and this is a long time it's johnny hendricks experience yeah it's so funny yeah i hear he stole it from joe rogan yeah there's so many details one it hurt my soul on so many levels that you can put a thumb over the guitar to to play a note to hold the note and it doesn't because i want it to be the russian virtuoso that sits with his classical guitar and a perfect form plays really fast with the fingers and and then you don't want you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed and supportive that's the russian conservatory student conservatory yeah then there's like the russian wild man which one is that well haven't they're different russian archetypes right so the completely idiosyncratic russian is very different in a weird way from the uh you know i can do this backwards in any key in any sli in my sleep in in any time signature that you you know just just snap your fingers we've discussed my uh piano tuner in previous episodes no no that was offline conversation you told me the story but i should tell you this you should you should re-tell the story there it was in darkest manhattan yeah with the world's shittiest uh it wasn't even an upright was a spin it piano a friend had given it to me the piano fell out of tune and i would have to tune it and the only tuner i knew was this russian guy and i hated dealing with him there's something about his attitude just really rubbed me the wrong way so anyway my wife says tune that thing so we get the piano tuner to come and he's tuning this and he's like are you sure are you sure you want to tune this this piece of [ __ ] you know okay fine so he's like okay it's your money the phone rings and i have the the phone ringer set on a landline to paganini caprice 24. and immediately as the phone rings he figures out what key the phone ringer is and which is not the key that like list composed the variations on on uh caprice 24. and he starts going into theme and variations on caprice 24 at some level i've never heard before just jaw dropping it and like the phone stops ringing and we have this awkward silence i said i didn't know you were such a great piano player and then he says one of these things and in you know in russian accented english hurts in a way you can't imagine no you are the piano player i am merely the piano tuner i was just like oh man through the heart you know it's kind of reminiscent i'd love to hear actually your opinion this is reminiscent of the goodwill hunting story what do you think about that that movie that movie it's about it's mit yeah i guess when i think of that film i think about matt damon as a young guy risking everything giving up harvard i think you know probably the most accomplished group of people in the world are people who choose to give up harvard voluntarily it's beautiful right that's true bigger than harvard you know ives was one of these people um bill gates of course uh and then oddly uh you know zuckerberg what zuckerberg but then steve jobs gave up a read and read is like the weirdest craziest college in the world people should pay much more attention to read and i'm sorry it's going through a hard time at the moment but what it was before the current craziness is really an interesting story irregardless as we say in the 617 area code um i think that a lot about a lot of my reaction is to the the real story of matt damon uh having this vision and being the young guy to pull it off and you know i also think about robin williams trying to explore heart through this lens of acting and you know as you and i you've hung out with comedians they know that they are a screwed up bunch of people they do they'll they're proud about it they really are the idea that robin williams who i saw many years ago when i was in la um in the comedy clubs around here you know he was a straight-up crazy dysregulated genius in tremendous pain and his desire to do it earnestly through acting rather than constantly by just sniping you know or or being a clown or or showing us how fast his mind worked relative to ours um i i was really moved by that i thought that he he brought some authenticity and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that real and again like you said it doesn't always have to be but in that case the madness and the genius were neighbors that one couldn't have been any other way yeah no because his mind you the thing about seeing him in a comedy club was that he would react to random stimulus in the environment you know it could be a heckler sometimes he almost got the feeling that he wanted a heckler because it was it gave him something to play against right he was just he was infinitely instantly inventive but i actually to me the best robin williams is as he got closer and closer to the end of his life because there was a sadness and he's almost fighting the sadness with this improvisational like the weapons he has is this wit and humor and this dancing that he does with language but and then sometimes when you just fall silent you can see the sadness and and i don't know there's something so beautiful about that it's like this bird with a broken wing that's like trying to fly you know and it's getting older and older and i mean those he would have made a one hell of a podcast guess i'll tell you i'll tell you that that's a sad um yeah i have some sadness that i really do think that part of what we call podcasting is actually just getting to know a soul right over and over again like yeah maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression and sadness and heavy feelings is not an american specialty seeing that in context with the beauty of life is a russian specialty like it is very much special it sounds like a diner menu what yeah what the a big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression i i do think that we're in a really terrifying and depressing time and i think that part of it is we don't know if something huge is about to get started and we don't even know what this is i mean we just sit here in this weird world that is falling into some new state and we're not even super curious it's like what the hell just happened everybody's got an answer and i'm positive that all of those answers are wrong let's let's try to at least sneak up on the good answer so the central core of the answer is that the us seemed to be the greatest thing in the world in large measure because we hadn't noticed that we were getting a benefit from having no plan not having to make a plan for low growth as long as we had growth we were in great shape let's imagine that there was a that you could run an experiment you have a billion copies of earth and you start the initial conditions slightly different on some giant number of planets a lot of the things that were discovered from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century are discovered in a period of time because a lot of that just has to do with once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments you can see more and the more you can see the more you can make use of what you can see and it turns out there was lots of stuff to do with like you know germs or electron orbitals or you know spectrum electromagnetic spectrum and so we got to do all of those things and the us roughly corresponded for a good chunk of its history with this bonanza and so of course we look like an amazing genius country we have no plan imagine that you you could sell a car you don't have to put in seat belts you don't have to put in airbags you don't have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors or a rear view mirror you could save a lot of money on a car by not putting in all of the stuff to keep things from going wrong and i think that's what we had we had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good we plowed it back the riches and spoils and then treasure back into the system and made more genius stuff and we carried along a good chunk of humanity hundreds of millions of people we did not have a plan for what happens when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society how confident should we be that the growth has slowed in in a way that uh is permanent rather than a kind of slap in the face where is that the right concept right concept is i i try to use the same words over and over again in case people see mold because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere so i use this analogy of the orchard because everyone talks about low-hanging fruit they know the concept of low-hanging fruit but they don't think in terms of orchards so they say things like you think we've picked all the low-hanging fruit but i believe in the infinite inventiveness of the human mind yeah it's like okay that doesn't even work as an analogy what if the idea is we only picked all the low-hanging fruit here and then we're having this stupid argument about low-hanging fruit and we're not going and looking for new orchards we're not planting new orchards we're not looking for forests we're we're just sitting here arguing about low-hanging fruit so my claim is there's probably a lot more low-hanging fruit and it's not here it's in other orchards it's in other orchards one of those turned out to be the digital orchard the digital orchard has not been a stagnant as lots of these other like the chemical uh orchard you know i have faith that there is a small percentage of the population but not zero that's looking for those other orchards like i'm excited about one of those orchards which is i believe there will be robots in everybody's homes and that will unlock some totally new thing totally new set of technologies ideas the way we live life the productivity all the everything it'll change everything so i'm excited about that orchard so i'm si you know i'm roaming that orchard and wondering how the hell you kind of bring back like the ant that finds a new source of food yeah i'm trying to find an apple i can bring back to the the great so you're in an you're in in an explorer idiom and you have faith that there's enough of those i don't think there are very many of us i mean i'm one of them too yeah how many does it take it takes one hand it takes one end what are you talking about how many uh elons does it take to screw in a light bulb okay let's imagine that we went imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food yeah right and then it comes back to the colony and it says hey i think i found a new source of food and the initial reaction is you're not you're not authorized to find new food what why would you try to go find new food we're going to remove you from twitter yeah and by the way i think the fact that you think you're allowed to go find you shows how privileged you are as an aunt get out of the colony kill him kill him well that's probably not a great model for finding new orchards and i think that what we find is that where there's a system that allows somebody to ascend without a lot of gatekeeping you can have that but you know i saw this happen in hedge funds hedge funds for a while uh hoovered up a lot of talent because they were places that had funding and had freedom and in general really smart people want to be free and they don't want to think a lot about how they're going to you know feed themselves they want to get lost in their minds so you can either give them productive places to play dangerous places to play you know they're either going to break into computers or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies and we're not providing for the people who have to disrupt and have to innovate and trying to channel that effort we're so focused on this other thing which is like fairness and safety and fairness and safety by the way are really important i don't want to denigrate them but the singular focus on fairness and safety without in the same breath being focused on growth and discovery and creation is going to doom us because what we're talking about is we're always talking about divvying up the pie that is as opposed to the pie that will be imagine that you spent all your time trying to divvy up the 13th century pie and you destroyed your ability to get to the 20th century you'd be an idiot but one place i think i disagree with you is uh i don't think you need that many people to empower the geniuses the innovators the people who refuse to spend most of their days in meetings about fairness this is good uh-huh let's have a disagreement i think podcasting whatever you call that medium it's just one little example of a tool that you can give power to like you and your podcast can have the next elon musk and make him a star now i see where you're going okay there has been a series of places for people to play and be free and we've lost them successively what's a good place you remember because i disagree with you there too i think they're still there you can still play you interviewed noam chomsky yes okay noam chomsky comes from an era where you can play where you could play at mit at mit and you can't play this is where i disagree with you we've already had this but go check the clips channel for the lexi friedman podcast i i think i wasn't brave enough at that time and i'm not really brave enough now come on because that's the vodka uh it's a feeling and because people are going to tear me apart oh what are you and and you speak from emotions and facts the feeling the podcast is this it's yours yes okay tell the people who are currently editing your brain because i saw that move right now yeah that they should go find another podcast right let's get rid of some of your audience right now yeah please go find another podcast if you're editing my brain nevertheless all the self-doubt they're sitting in that brain so i can't stand to watch this but all right okay what is the self-doubt loop that you're in the thing is when i walk the halls of mit yeah there's bureaucracy there's administrators that never have done anything interesting in their entire lives there's meetings there's all these crowds the usual crap but there's in the eyes of individuals yeah there's this glow of excitement has nothing to do with career i understand this and and that's just it's still a playground there's little little pockets of playgrounds from which genius can emerge still and they're unaffected by diversity meetings or fairness meetings or or blah blah blah i love to hear this yeah but you don't think so i don't believe it because i've watched the change lex i've watched people and we're all editing ourselves all the time i remember my old mind i liked it better all of this relentless focus on critical race theory and you know critical theory post-modernism fairness social justice it's making many of us into worse people you think that's that do you think the mad demons are of you know the character is paying attention to any of that you think that has enough have you seen what happened to matt damon himself matt damon has tried to say various things at various times that seem to be relatively innocuous he can't can't speak okay well let's let's not mix up matt damon is just an actor well no no he was just a harvard student who came up with his own genius screenshot acted and made it happen no yeah no but we're somewhere else you don't think you can build the rocket company no no i think that there are things that you can still do but we're losing them we lose them we keep losing them i would say the biggest problem here let me just say like what i think the solution would be is to fire anybody who is doesn't like who's not like faculty especially young faculty should have way more power and administration should have much less power because right now the administration which used some of the who used to be faculty but they've lost the fire the spark that gave them they've lost the memories of the playground and so the people that admire and love the playground like you could see it in their behavior should have way more power and so we should create a systems that give them power you're very idealistic yeah and you're very you've got a huge heart it's a weird time because i don't want to dissuade you from believing beautiful things um because i see how potent you are you you do all these things jiu jitsu guitar podcasting programming computers um etc etc i don't think you're right i think we're in a really deeply screwed up place where even the tiny number of let me give you an alternate version of this dystopia i do think that there are people who are capable and there's still places to play and cause things to happen that progress the story forward but if you look at the fire that some of the people are in who fit that profile like how much crap has elon musk taken quite considerable right and not much at admiration from the craig venter jim watson these are very difficult people steve jobs is a very difficult guy you know yeah it is a bit heartbreaking to me i mean everybody is different generations i just my mind is a little focused on elon musk because he's the modern person well you know him i mean he's a person to you i it hurts my heart to see how few faculty and uh people with nobel prizes and so on uh admire eon like how little prop he gets he gets a lot of fans from like people who buy his products and you know young minds yeah just excited but like why don't we as institute why doesn't mit say that we wanna we we somebody amongst us will be the next elon musk and we want to encourage them it's like say that say that in a meeting say that like that's success no kidding for us as mit and they instead there's this jealousy it's like well here's the did you hear what he almost tweeted did you did you see like how responsible is what he's doing how the the like just saying all these things that are just dripping with jealousy and basically i want what he's got that's the thing right and then if yeah here's the weird thing rivalry has a different signature you see when you know that you're never going to make it yeah that's the position you take what is it in kung fu panda which you've watched now yes yes what does tai long say when he's looking for the dragon warrior and the furious five come to defeat him on the bridge one of them gives a poe's name accidentally and tai long hears it po so that is his name finally a worthy opponent our battle will be legendary right he's excited why is that well you learn about this in boxing sometimes you'll see a division or an mma which is lousy with talent just you can't swing a cat without hitting an amazing amazing athlete sometimes you'll have a division which at that particular moment has one star and no real competition in that weight class or something that person is in bad shape because you can't build a legend without the other when you think of muhammad ali what are the names that you immediately think of now you have to fraser you have to think of the other ways listen right yeah so those those opponents are in part what made muhammad ali muhammad ali and that's you know that that's why the the the mayweather um mcgregor revelation that okay this guy's got his opponent's picture in his house how weird is that well because without the opponent you may not be able to get there now i am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries you have examples in mind well there are rivalries where people take each other's credit and screw each other over and then there are other rivalries like the rna tie club where these guys were so in love with what they were doing that they couldn't wait to share everything and like nobel prizes were so abundant that you know most people got nobel prizes just for being a member of the rna tie club and doing cool stuff and yeah that's that's the golden that's the golden kind of sweet spot um most of these people can't do what elon's doing because they can't break rules they can't take the pressure i'll tell you what really concerns me about your perspective i think that there are a lot of genius ideas inside of people who don't have the stomach for conflict and derision and i think a lot of those people are female and i think that until we come up with a world in which we can swat down the trolls where we can actually cause the trolls not to ruin everything and i don't necessarily mean by shutting them up i don't necessarily mean by being brutal to them but somehow separating off people who are working in people who are trolling i think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius in part because women in particular are not necessarily going to push an idea if it results in 10 years of being derided very few men are willing to do that either but there are some of us who are so dumb that we will pigheadedly stick to an idea for 10 years even if the world collapses i don't think that there are as many women who are going to make that calculation even if they know the idea is correct and one of the things that i believe technology can help us fight the trolls of all definitions of troll like i believe that a better twitter can be built interesting i do not i don't believe that a twitter successor can be built that solves most of the problems i think you can always improve what we have but i don't think that converges in something that really works because i think ultimately the problem isn't twitter the problem is us for example i've recently made a very disturbing realization which is academics and trolls have very many similar behaviors absolutely it's largely a trolling community i tend to believe that the trolls are not it's like the peter thiel many mind idea yeah which in all of the trolls there's the possibility of goodness and all you have to do not all you have to do what you have to do is create technology that incentivizes them to uh to embrace to to discover to embrace to practice the the better angels of their nature and i believe that like the people actually want to do that the trolls is a short-term dopamine rush of uh childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome i believe that like deep within we want to overcome that i i try to keep myself from believing what you believe because you'll be disappointed if it's not because it's dangerous because a lot of these people are implacable foes and there aren't many of them but when you meet somebody's like yeah i just like screwing people up i'm here for the pain i i just believe even in them there's a good there's a wonderful book that i'm going to recommend to you where i hope this comes from maybe i've got the source wrong but in any event it's a great book called the maximum city about bombay and i believe the the conceit is that the author leaves bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult and he realizes he has to rediscover the city because he can't live in the city he left so he gets in contact with all of the weird areas of the city and one of them is the underworld he hangs out with the police but in the underworld he's talking to contract killers and he says you know it's really weird everybody pleads for their life right before i kill them and they always say this thing about i've got a i've got two kids at home he says never say that to a contract killer because we have terrible relationships with our parents it doesn't endear us to you and that's just like oh wow so there's a minus sign in front of that statement you're sitting there saying you know i've got a three-year-old it's like okay well i'm going to take this pos out of out of that kid's life maybe he'll have a chance you don't know how people are wired and as much as i hate to say it there are people whose wiring is so disturbing and so different from yours that you will never guess why you can't reach them or how much pleasure they may have gotten because they may have gone over a point of no return nevertheless you are just a smart guy who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis you do not know this for sure no and i am you know whatever the hell i am uh that has a different hypothesis that even in the darkest human beings that that seem to be only full of evil there's a good person there that could be discovered and that's one of the reasons i love doing your show is is that you have these beliefs even as a russian [Laughter] the russian special as you know the russian there is a weirdness which is a total cynicism and total idealism yeah locked together right that's very much part of the russian character the reason i was i was kept bothering you kept bothering to have this conversation is i'm really worried about the next couple of months no kidding and uh if there's anybody in this world that could help alleviate my worry by um by at least walking along with me through this worry of mine it's you do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war some kind of division that explodes beyond just stuff on twitter but something that's really destruct destructive to the fabric of our society well i believe we're in a revolution as you know i've called it the no name revolution or n squared revolution i've been talking about it for years i don't think i think waiting for this to be called a civil war is not smart only history will cause such fine but i think that the problem is is that you're encountering things that you've never seen trying to fit them into things that you already know right and but history repeats itself yes ish you don't see lessons from history and i do we see today but i don't see it repeating itself you know the the violence the famous quote is that it rhymes it rhymes i mean the thing i guess i'm speaking to is violence and we're in there the abstraction of violence imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class okay thank you for speaking to the audience trying to lose these people come with me go on i don't know i i i've dealt with your audience and your audience contains the smartest people around yeah i guarantee you if i say some stuff uh first of all any wrong thing that i'll say they're gonna detail so that'll be a little bit of catnip to bring in the smart people but they'll also digest it for each other it's one of the great lessons of long-form podcasting if you don't if you don't waste all your time explaining things that's the job of the audience to do amongst themselves they're happy doing the work and those who aren't they leave isn't that great they'll leave the people who don't want to struggle will leave you can get rid of them i think that the point is you you would want to say violence is defined relative to a context so let's call it meta violence so that we don't get into the the problem we already have a term for physical violence right so we have meta violence and physical violence i would say that physical violence is subclassed from meta violence meta violence is the disruption of a system it's sort of you know it's a you know if we for example if a cell dies you can die through apoptosis or necrosis apoptosis is controlled programmed cell death uh necrosis is just like okay this didn't work that was a violent disruption of the system and this meta class is presumed in the documentation is it all negative no what are you talking about so this is part of the problem and the madness of our age right which is if you if you open up a drawer in your in your cabinet right in your kitchen and you see knives spoons and forks do you have a sense that the spoons are good utensils and the knives are forks or bad utensils because they're mean i mean like if you start thinking in these terms yeah that knife is there to do violence that's violence you want done right when i cut a mango i'm doing violence to the mango the mango expects that i will do violence to it because otherwise i won't be able to get the the meat and it won't get its seed um spread somewhere else so in part violence is absolutely part of our story so okay so there's this meta violence class yeah and what's so the metaviolence class is already you know it's a multiple inheritance pattern whatever's going on right now inherits from meta violence no but there's there's certain subclasses that allow evil to emerge so what what what i'm specifically worried about is that what's on your mind lex what's really going on okay i i worry that um amidst the chaos of we have these protests or the chaos that could be created by the feeling that the election does not represent the the voice of the people like saying that whoever gets quote unquote wins the election according to the some kind of reporting of the numbers that come out that's not going to represent what people actually who people actually want to be the leader like something in that narrative will create so much division that people will resort to literal violence like protests that really that the united states loses its united aspect and because of that because of that chaos and tension evil evil people evil forces that my definition of evil is you know just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power the kind of power that is ultimately goes against the ideal of the united states that could be donald trump that could be another human being it doesn't really matter my my worry is that love doesn't win out in this the unity doesn't win out in this and i feel like you and i have responsibility no small yeah i know and so how do we let love win in this moment of we're gonna potentially you're gonna have to become a fighter you have to you have to throw some serious punches if that's what you want you have to be muhammad ali here because the moment you start criticizing anything yeah people you have to be a masterful communicator because that's why you're here look lex in part your decency is allowing you to do things that you couldn't otherwise do i saw that you had michael malus on your podcast yeah now michael malus is i think of somebody who at his best is extremely shrewd and insightful yes he's also got this trolling game which he's quite open about and you talk to him about it which i can't stand and that's this is the idea oh grandpa doesn't get the internet well i'm grandpa i don't get the internet i don't love the trolling yeah there are trolls of the past who were incredibly good i don't see any of the modern trolls as being that kind of genius level trolling the people who deserve it in the way that they deserve it you know right now what i see is that anything that stands up gets cut down yeah you know it's like anything earnest you have to turn into cynicism and a meme and it's this idea that the people who believe that the world is chaos and has no point are constantly trying to let you know don't try to use the internet for meaning for decency for goodness because we are going to find out that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy and we will we will make you suffer so i do think that there's a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world some of it mine some of it yours but we all have it and the trolls somewhat remove that but it's not a judicious kind constructive compassion a caring version most of the time and a lot of those trolls and i i have this feeling about michael malus i don't know whether it's right that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath it and that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior and you and i don't seem to be doing that i don't see you as almost ever trolling yeah you and i are get i i'm very much against trolling i'm very much against trolling it doesn't mean that it's selective you know i'm not even it's not even true like everything we say we say like i'm forward i'm against it this isn't my native language i speak nuance i don't speak this internet [ __ ] and i the more i have to communicate through internet [ __ ] right i almost never take a tweet seriously if it contains the the letters lmao lol rtfl you know fol there's a interesting effect where people say stuff and then finish with lol you put it beautifully that it indicates to me that this is a person we've talked about like why i wear this stupid suit yeah it's like this is anti this is to fight the lol at the end of sentences is take it's like stand up for the words you're saying yeah don't finish stuff with lol removing completely the responsibility of the content of the sentence that preceded it yeah also choosing the outfit that worked both for men in black and the blues brothers not a terrible choice okay but getting back look lex we're not in a position to do this you need to be seated in a different chair your chair is the wrong chair you're in the wrong chair it's been so long all right i want to talk about you and joe biden joe biden was a 29 year old guy with nothing particular going on so far as i can tell okay i know people as impressive at age 29 as joe biden you know 12 rows back three three deep doesn't matter huge number of people none of them my age can get to where he got like we're all morons anytime somebody takes out like if you found eddie van halen in a guitar shop you'd be angry what is this guy doing repairing guitars then somebody said maybe he loves to repair guitars yeah i mean what is your piano russian piano tuna doing what is my russian piano that was the whole point of that story which is what is it that happened in that life that converted somebody and i find this for example with russian doctors who are you know technicians in offices now there's a huge amount of talent in the world that's not sitting in its proper seat yeah and quite honestly i've gotten to the point where my feeling is we've got to take the seats right maybe we don't sit in them maybe the idea is that we take the seats and we put some smart gen z person in the seat and say look no chanting i don't want to hear you say no justice no peace if there aren't verbs if it rhymes it's wrong like i used to have this thing rhyme things that rhyme are more true but like in general if something starts at one two three four i don't wanna hear what the rest of your sentence is yeah but i i feel like the responsibility that you carry that i carry this is where joe rogan generally removes himself from being i'm just a comedian this idea of i'm just a comedian i'll do that but at this moment in history like history literally can pivot on the wards of a tattooed ripped 50 year old you know comedian and i think the same is true with you okay well i'm i'm interested and i care speaking of lyrics uh you know there are many here among us who feel that life has been a joke that's not us the hour is getting late that's not us in the song the the joker and the thief are on opposite sides of jesus having this conversation over jesus you and i we've been through that that's not our fate that's somebody else's fate to throw spit balls at the internet that's not your fate you're an earnest guy you're filled with love you're getting the most amazing podcast guess you're right over the internet this is the point i'm trying to make that you're saying i'm i'm i'm just a grandpa i don't know the internet no i'm telling you you're going to get bigger and then you're going to get cut down you're going to keep ascending for a while lex and then you're saying and naturally there's i'm telling you i watch the same process people get up to a certain level and one of the things that's going on in my opinion with joe rogan is is that when joe rogan starts to talk about his misgivings about joe biden you know in a way that you find at any bar in america about cognitive decline in a 77 year old who's about to be 78 i believe in november we have never had anything remotely as insane as a 78 year old person slated to win the white house and you're saying when that idea that is is being communicated is there something that's about the disc concept do you talk about the system naturally bad thing happens to joe or one of joe's close associates the ability to destroy people who become inconvenient has been documented this is what we have done in the past whether we are doing it now we don't know because we are not doing this church church committee to in order to know whether or not you are currently destroying american citizens as we did in the past as we have documented as we found out in 1976 the federal government destroyed americans who had political beliefs that the government didn't want to continue and i don't know whether you are grasping that one interpretation of why jon stewart and why joe rogan why bill maher all these people to some extent hide behind it's a joke yeah it's because they're trying to find a protected class is there some place i can stand and speak the truth which does not result in my being garbage collected interesting i i guess you're right my intuition is you can stand as you gain more power you can stand you yeah there's a photo for joe rogan right now i mean i i've talked about it for a few years now people did not understand how big that program was people didn't understand long-form podcasting i was derided by people who i think of as being very shrewd um for believing in these podcasts as a major force and most of the people who derided me have said wow did i not get things it's like if you started to propose um you know you wanted to do the sopranos in the era of 30-minute sitcoms um like you don't get it man the american people they're not interested in these long plot story lines that's your weird thing nobody cares dude everybody just wants short fast memorable and like okay so if you do that you totally miss the opportunity and you know the savvy people used to say kid let me tell you nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the american people well that was totally wrong because they didn't calculate opportunity costs i have been talking about the problem of of joe for a long time um the problem is is that when the system wakes up they're going to want to control it and they're different they come up with new different mechanisms of doing that i guess one interesting one is cancel culture well look at the number of people around joe who they've come after since they realized that joe was really big joey diaz brian callan um crystalia now i'm not saying that those are all related but i do notice that there are at least correlations between when joe says something when something bad happens in joe's universe it's easier for me to believe that that's happening when it's happening around joe himself yeah but i'm worried about my friend yeah and i don't necessarily want to push him towards being more if he doesn't want it because i don't think i don't want to i don't want to conscript people he's got a great life he's got a great situation he's done a huge service thank god do you know yeah like how much do i owe joe just for what he's done for you to say nothing of what he's done for me or for brett or for sam or any of these people and you know i'd like to think that we all try to give back but i'm worried about joe he's not worried one of the inspiring things about joe yeah is i mean he's in this war alone and the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life well that's his thing as long as he stays close to things that he loves and being you know one of the things he's honest about his drug use he loves to hunt so he's just he does a certain amount of like semi-vice signaling up front and then you just also know him this is why every time they try to take him down you use the n-word you know it's like unfortunately everybody knows who joe is and he yes he he doesn't act as if he went to a fancy finishing school right that's not his energy the fact that you've got some super smart guy who always pretends to be a meathead just like you know it's like hey i'm a comedian like all these defenses and disguises okay you've got this super smart guy who um he's admitted to most of the things that you know you can you can take him down for and because everybody's been effectively in his den or his basement think about that studio as his basement people have hung out with joe so many hours that you can't tell them something about joe or they're going to say wow i'm going to believe the new york times and not the hundreds of hours i've spent on the joe rogan experience but the cool thing is that this is what inspires me is that the way he's waging war against the system is just by being a good person and and talking enough hours in a week where that message like bleeds throughout the words yeah in the gaps between and that that's so inspiring to me that the good people can win by just being good and he's kind and he's tough and he also he's no pushover no i i always worry a little bit when i sit down in that chair you still get scared that he'll call you on some kind of [ __ ] that you weren't even aware of no it the first time i was on the show the energy wasn't great between us and it was in a sober october situation so i think i hadn't understood that and maybe our egos got a little bit off um i don't know i mean i i i was having fun but maybe it was just too complicated life forms getting to know each other the first one was probably um yeah it made me a little nervous for the future but then you know joe and i become friends although sometimes we have miscommunications like on yom kippur i i texted him and i said joe you know i i want to apologize for uh ways i've let you down as a friend that haven't been there for you and appreciate everything you've done for me alisa like i get this text back like what the [ __ ] is your problem you're great dude i don't know what bad place you're in but cheer up it's like joe don't you have any jews in your life to apologize for what they've done he was just like dude have you lost your mind what the hell's gotten into you yeah what do you think uh what do you think about the spotify thing what about it ask me a question he's now as opposed to being just a comedian with the podcast he now is just a comedian with the podcast who stepped like in the middle of the center of cancer culture which is like it's i know spotify is in sweden but they represent silicon valley they represent the very kind of structures they contain and represent the kind of structures that threaten to destroy the elons of the world and he just like stepped like with his alex jones and his uh joey diaz just strolled right into the middle of it i think it's awesome i love it but do you think he'll he's strong enough to well i don't know i mean i don't even know the right way to ask this but is he strong enough to persevere it's a bit interesting it's like when alliance decides wow that honey badger looks tasty i'm gonna swallow it whole see what happens because i talked to him offline he really seems to be willing to give away the hundred million which gives him so much power oh i don't it's a powerful thing to be able to say i don't yeah to the honey badger he just strolls in but he's willing to walk away from anything in this well he's going to walk out the other side of the the lion i don't think he's going to go out the way he came in yeah well you know what it is it's tommy lee jones entering the bug this is like a giant alien he just walks into it he just he gets swallowed by the bug and he blasts out from the inside yeah i i have it as tommy lee jones yeah but anyway yeah is that my feeling is that spotify doesn't understand what they're messing with i could be wrong but i'm not no you're right i'm right because joe doesn't need anything man i mean this is the weird thing about it it's like i'm sure that he loves all his toys whatever blah blah blah he's a rich guy yes he's got fu money he had fu money a long time ago and you're not you know the other thing about it's a bit weird being friends with a dude like that it just is because like you call him up or he'll call you up and he's like i said what's going on in your life i don't know kind of depressed trying to get some math done what are you up oh dude i can cheer you up i just came off of a you know 29 thousand person stadium it's like oh cool how'd you do that oh i don't know i just announced it on instagram a few days ago and it filled up just like oh damn yeah i mean that thing is so powerful yeah so there you go i mean you could be that too the instant takes an interest in politics and saving the world you might destroy all that it's going bye-bye i promise i just disagree with you i mean because you have to you have to do it like you've said this many times before i'll bet you yeah i'll bet you uh a bottle of stoli that you can get uh if you you get joe rogan to get highly politically active and call out the system for all the [ __ ] that it is in a very pointed and determined fashion uh and he doesn't get destroyed i'll give you i'll give you the vodka the vodka yeah that sounds like a pretty damn good deal so but this you've said this i mean there's no living heroes my friend no living heroes i just no living heroes it's it's just difficult you just have to be good at it i mean if you just say generic political things no no you it you're going to be taken down but the more heroic you are the more beautiful you are the more you will be made to suffer if they cannot get you on reputation if jesus himself came down i don't know if i ever read i probably never read to you the hit piece i did on jesus you don't know about this no i did not know i did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world wow so whoever it was who cured cancer you know discovered new particles or whatever it is i did a hit piece against them to prove that i can do it to anybody around anything at any time except eddie van halen as we were talking about well eddie van gaal is now dead but if if this was a uh a situation you know hot for teacher cancelled disrespectful absolutely also you know packaging uh female objectification for young men clearly eddie van gaal is one of the worst people alive but was the skill the incredible inspiration that is just radiating from his music inspires so many millions that they will fight those canceled pieces they they will fight though this is your thing yeah you have this idea that there's a war between good and evil and the good has already been decided designated the winner it's not true but your belief in that it's true until you make it no i mean you gotta it's motivating both of us like i also believe that we're gonna win because if i don't then i can't get out of bed and it's pretty heavy at the moment do you think 2021 can uh could make us feel good about the trajectory of society so like where we emerge from this year feeling good like there's a smile and there are quests on his face and the next time we talk we'll be doing some kind of duet and guitar and not having this worried look on our faces no okay but you've also promised you're going to somehow end this in a positive uh positive so okay so how do you how do you turn the no around what's the u-turn from the no no until we get some actually decent people in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking about their next paycheck i don't see a solution let me just say what the the prerequisites for a solution are and to let you know why i don't think it's coming first of all both of these political parties the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go they're tearing us apart they lack the will to be americans they don't understand the subtlety of the project they're simply the people who've figured out how to inhabit the seats and that is their great achievement i believe that in order to solve this you need people who can integrate who are not partisan at the level of the partisan warriors that we're seeing people who believe in dividing the pies of the future rather than the present pie as our main task as americans because we are built around growth i'm sorry to say it um you need an ability to have subtle conversations and you need the ability to exclude and and you know at the moment everyone knows inclusion is good which it isn't it's like saying well water is good if i say water is good everybody will agree with me it's not people drown people need to you know get dehydrated it can be life-saving or life-ending it it isn't good or bad inclusion is not good or bad inclusion is just inclusion exclusion is part of inclusion we've taught people that they can reason through the world as um sub you know cocker spaniels they just bark things at each other you know i'm for safety i'm for inclusion i'm for growth oh really do you guys use verbs dependent clauses are there compound complex sentences where are we in this sea of nonsense you have to be able to build a place where you have smart talented people who represent a diverse group of correct opinions you need to get rid of almost all of the people who have opinions that are antithetical to what we're trying to accomplish you need to give them insulation which we're terrified because we don't trust anybody so everything has to be transparent if you're going to the bathroom i want those walls to be plexiglas so i can see what you're doing it's like that's too much transparency we have too much and not enough at the same time and then you know in essence um you need to ensure that people aren't worried about feeding their family every four seconds for being real none of that is happening and our billionaires our billionaires are pathetic what is the point of billionaires if you're not going to do billionaire type cool stuff like saying fu and i'm going to throw you know 3 billion dollars at the project of restoring the national conversation i don't grasp this what is the point of creating obscene wealth if we don't have anyone smart enough and caring enough to use it so i agree with that that last part for sure let me slightly push back on the idea that the leaders themselves are broken i feel like this goes to the joe rogan uh joe biden and trump having a debate on that program i feel like joe biden has a lot of really interesting ideas that he's almost forgot how to communicate he's been fake for so long within the system hillary was fake for too long i'm sure she had real ideas at the beginning that she still was campaigning on decades later but like if the system if the platforms empowered you to search to be honest to be real to search for those ideas within yourself like long-form conversations do then we even the donald trump and joe biden leaders we have now would would take this country to a better place that that would unite people so like we can keep the current congress we just need to create better platforms this might this is going to the intuition that there's good in donald trump there's there is depth and competition there is good intelligence there is and the same with joe biden does good and joe biden and it's just we're not incentivizing i mean there's several things i think are broken one of them is twitter the other is journalism just it's just the platforms of us communicating with each other one of the reasons that i try to come up with unifying explanations is that you know if you look at the number of wildfires in california let's say that we've just seen if you treat them all as spontaneous uncorrelated uh instances it feels like oh my god it's just whack-a-mole every time i send a fire truck here there's a fire over there so you want to come up with something like a central theory which is why do i suddenly have a problem when i hadn't had a problem before so i look for these unifying explanations and i found one the other day that really speaks to me um i mean people are very frustrated because they've been trained to think about this incorrectly in my opinion but here's the graph that you need to look at on the x-axis is uh time by year and on the y-axis is something like average age of a human the title of the graph is any desirable situation involving institutions so that could be ceo it could be tenured professor it could be who's getting grants it could be the age at which people win nobel prizes university presidents all these things go up in other words for a long period of time the average age of the person in a desirable situation has been increasing something like 9 months for every 12. those graphs have to go down at some point the specter of willingly put of having five people all born in the 1940s as the final uh entrance in the presidential context that makes no sense think about how bizarre a thing that nobody's even really talking about the last five people were all ancient by presidential standards not one not two but five we are talking about a contest between somebody who is the oldest of the baby boomers the very beginning of the baby boom summer of 46th birthday fighting somebody who is in the silent generation the silent generation guy in a town hall in florida gets this question from a gen z guy saying you know what what's going on with my future joe biden has the um audacity to say i'm a transitional president you guys the highly educated one when has any generation in history needed a transitional 78 year old person to take office it's bizarre it's preposterous that graph is the graph we can't talk about that graph is the graph of our destruction because it has the you can make a one-line argument which is sounds like ageism which isn't a very good argument no but what it does is is it it muddles the conversation and you always have to ask yourself the question if this conversation becomes muddled who wins as a result of the muddling well it's a battle but so we let's just win it let's win the battle you give are you running for sure i'll run i was born in russia can't run so uh but we russians can hack elections so we'll figure it out uh this is me officially announcing my run i was born in st petersburg florida yeah lex what is it that you really want to ask i think i want to put some responsibility on the portal the portal the portal that the portal gives power to the people in that graph like because you you put it quite brilliantly that the people that moved the world their age has been going up and not moved the world but put in the position where they get the chance to affect the world the these new platforms i think twitter falls in in them give power to the younger people it doesn't have to be about asia necessarily but the younger thinking people so that's a promising thing and you are like you're like gandalf you get to you get to pick your frodos or whatever i'm not very good with the the analogy but the whole point is for us gandalf i don't know that i make that much sense gandalf makes sense i don't know if people know how to fit me into this ecosystem i think there's something in my presentation that people find very confusing oh figure it out i'm not i disagree with you but you need to look at the mirror and think like what what is it is it um maybe you need a mustache i don't know but there's something about figuring out um how to be a charismatic communicator in this and that that's the responsibility you said like finishing sentences with the lol is painful for your soul yeah that's just how somebody lets me know i don't have to take their opinion seriously yeah it's still the language the the way that people are communicating and you're swimming that way if you have a big platform i'm i have a growing platform it feels like this is the place to give i agree i agree but we're gonna get swatted now i just don't think so you're wrong why are you afraid of the big like this is i've studied it because i've studied let me ask you a question lex i believe that every society is supposed to have a collection of what i call break glass in case of emergency people yeah these are people who are universally loved and trusted by your society for example david attenborough the great british naturalist and presenter uh recently came on instagram he's worried about the planet and i said you know look there are very few of these people left let's pay attention find out what he has to say maybe maybe he's going to be an ass maybe he's going to be in it maybe he's going to say wrong things don't know tell me about your top 10 universal american heroes this is not a rhetorical question no give me five but everybody looks to that person and says yep the best of us well everybody's an interesting concept i mean elon musk is very divisive right but i'm talking about overwhelmingly people would would follow that person if that person gave a rousing intelligent speech that said we we must act now because we're in in dire straits i think a lot of people fall in that category for me it would be uh in the in the tech world in the engineering world elon musk elon musk the rock i'm thinking like who is the most eloquent actor so like you think celebrities so people with platforms don't say celebrities nobody well known i believe like platform yeah so this goes to joe rogan first two did not really impress me as being what i said but okay elon several years ago would have can you can you try to joe rogan why do they fail why why does why is lots of people treat joe rogan as if he's some sort of right-wing racist because they've never watched his program they don't know who his friends i don't know oh but when i thought you said everybody i thought you meant a large enough people where huge change can happen not actually literally everybody because i mean people who've pulled up like people who've pulled off something where everybody's convinced that that person just deeply i think i've told you the story before but the one time i've seen the power of a figure like this i mean very few times i've been in a large crowd and i've seen people just moved where they would do almost anything good bad and different because they were primed um one was a rolling stones concert the other one was nelson mandela coming to boston and man you've never seen anything like this you check out the photos from the banks of the charles river when nelson mandela came um there are people that you need in your dark hours and we can't agree on who they are and as soon as they emerge we tar them with [ __ ] we get out the [ __ ] brunch yeah i just disagree with you so i think what do we disagree about it okay i think it doesn't matter who it is i think really good speeches are needed and right i think i'm going to give them i saw killer mike try to give a good speech yeah he did well in atlanta right yeah that was something very impressed yeah even keller mike immediately gets into this sell out like uh yeah but he he he didn't take up the responsibility i would say he didn't of of going bigger so he was speaking to the community and he was doing what he did on this particular moment he's exceptional at it and he was speaking to this particular moment he didn't take it a step far farther which is like giving the same speech but bigger than race bigger than this particular moment but more about the the american project you know the guy who landed the plane in the hudson yes yeah there you go that's a good example sorry that guy until we screw him up is the kind of thing that i'm talking about yeah exactly okay i mean jocko maybe that's another jocko is pretty good jaco is pretty good can't really tell is he a democrat is a republican i don't know he's an american that's for damn sure yeah and i think there's a lot of fun and then you know no i think jocko there aren't that's one of the reasons why chocolate is so special yeah your podcast the portal is something in my little universe is something a lot of people really love and it moves them they draw a lot of meaning from it and also especially in difficult times and they it gives them a comfort of through like this kind of uh it's not just nuance it's there's like even when you're talking about chaos there's love underneath all of it and i think people draw a lot of meaning from it which is why they are wondering why you haven't been doing that many podcasts or you haven't done it in maybe a month and a half or two months in this most difficult of times is there is there a good reason yeah there are lots of good reasons so the first one is kind of weird which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous and if you say i don't want to be famous it's like oh you're just saying that because you want to be every everyone to think you're famous you're not that famous you know okay i don't love being as well known as i've become there's lots of things that are fun about it it's wonderful that you can go to i can go to any city in the world there are portal listeners there uh all i need to do is put out a tweet and 20 people show up for a drink and they're amazing people and they're almost i mean you can see my live q and a's on my instagram page if you go to eric r weinstein i just picked somebody randomly and i was really worried about it at first and you know maybe i should be worried about it but in general people all over the world are just so positive and so you know and thoughtful and thoughtful people have a story because they're self-selected right yeah but i don't like the fame the thing we just described comes with the fame it's a beautiful thing you don't you're worried that it's getting it's it's ephemeral it'll look lex it'll turn on you in a heartbeat yeah it'll turn on you in a heartbeat and the other problem is i don't i don't like my audience being my audience i want to get closer to them i want to talk to them i want to find out what is this doing in your life my house fills up with art that people send me the lightest thing is an effects pedal called something like i don't know it's a bowtie overdrive from a guy in mexico right yeah you play lefty by the way and then a tiny little tangent did you play election i have a stratocaster okay but it doesn't have a strap and i don't know what to do with it and i have a bad amp so you should you should you should hook me up with uh we'll find it at home maybe okay you're starting to sense that this is too much no i want to be i want to be here i want to do the work very simply i don't have an ability to fully explain myself i don't want to claim that i don't love the fact that how much love do we get from these programs like i generically people are incredibly generous um you know people have begged me set up a patreon account and i haven't been able to do it i should do it i've said to everybody it's a business it's the business it's a business yeah but like they're so used to being defrauded when somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives my goal was to say i'm going to keep talking to you about you you wonder why i started doing ads on my show was because i wanted people to think from the get-go this is a business this is what i sound like when i'm selling but you know like you see i've lost weight a lot of that is due to athletic greens athletic greens you know um code uh what's the i don't know what my promo code is for athletic green well probably athleticgreens.com portal but doesn't portal but you know fitbit who doesn't advertise has also been instrumental as well as a guy named steven cates who you know was a fan from the show found me on the street and just said i'm a trainer i want to help train you it's got me on a on a good pro a good path so you know that's one paid advertiser and two people i'm calling out just because there are you know two two outfits stephen cates and fitbit that have changed my life i wanted people to say you know you don't have to be afraid of advertising if i do it in this way this is powering your show but the whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy feelings like oh wow i knew he was a shill he's a grifter you know okay i didn't love that i didn't love the issues so i didn't set up a patreon the security issues for talking and being me are significant and i don't have the kind of money to hire around the clock i mean i i desperately want to get to a level of wealth where i don't have to think about money i don't think it's you know some people want money because they they need it for status i think i can handle status if i want it doing this i don't want the status necessarily and i don't want i i'd want the status but i don't want the fame that goes with it i want the money i don't want to be seen as this is about money because it's about a substance yeah and try you know all of those things that's part of i haven't solved these issues i i've been feeling bad because people say where's the portal we're desperate these are difficult times we have an election coming up and it's just like do you think for a moment that i want to explain that i actually got really uncomfortable being as well known as i was and then what is it that i want because i want to be better known and less well-known at the same time it doesn't there's nothing the audience can do i don't want the audience to be the audience that doesn't make sense to people i want it to be a business but i don't think people need to fear a business if the business is open about being a business that and then that's all to the side what you're seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly meta-violent period in our online existence and i believe that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are completely screwed at the moment the leadership of these parties is unsalvageable unworkable everyone hears that from inside the two-party system oh i get it he's trying to subtract votes off of biden oh i get it he's trying to scuttle trump oh i get it this is a play for his show because he's trying to plug in to discuss there's a bill hicks routine on marketing have you ever seen this it's brilliant i recommend it to everyone where he comes out on stage and he says are there any people in marketing and sales in the audience yeah it's like okay great can you do us all a favor and die and like everybody laughs he's like no i'm not laughing i'm seeing being serious so he talks about how marketing is horrible so you're like where is this act going then it gets to the point of it like oh i know how you marketing people think bill's going after that uh resentment dollar that's good dollar let's get that resentment anti-marketing dollar yeah it's like no that's not what i'm saying i really hate marketers oh that's good it's the authenticity dollar you can't escape this kind of negative marketing thought and i guess that gets to the issue that i don't want to be destroyed in advance of this election i don't think it's a good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting how completely ridiculous donald trump and joe biden are as candidates for the president of the united states full stop none of this makes any sense these moderators of these pseudo debates were in the wrong format with the wrong people no part of this makes a wit of sense can i try to push back several claims one is i don't believe the systems as they stand now can destroy the eric weinstein voice the voice you you're a child i'm sorry to say that but well let me well it's also possible it's entirely impossible okay that you're the child okay because a child would say you would call other people a child yeah get in the first blow i think reveal the tell i because the only power they have is to attack you psychologically no well i believe that the army of people that love you yeah is much more powerful than uh mainstream media then people that you might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said which is try to reduce you like the marketing yeah thinking i just believe there's an army maybe there's a better term of people that see you for who you are and the hungry like i'm not disputing those things and what i'm saying i would venture to say as your therapist that you're actually uh the battle is all in your mind that you have found these demons in the system and they're just a tiny minority and it's all in your mind they cannot actually remove they're not strong enough to remove the voice of eric einstein to silence the voice i love this this is some of the best fiction writing i've ever heard let me tell you i have relatives who've known me my entire life yeah where one article in the new york times they will believe that over me my contention is that only that has no power except to affect your psychology you know what you have to do is the rogan thing which is loud hearing me just laugh i am laughing i know but more i'm tell no i'm telling you something yes okay the way this works is through ruin ruin can come to anyone there is no one who cannot be ruined every single person is signed up right now to be ruined by the system but don't you understand that you have more power than the system the ruling you can ruin the system your twitter account the podcast that's right i'm telling you about the army i agree that my twitter account my pocket but what we've seen for example you saw what happened to brett's articles of unity project yes okay what happened the you know from on the twitter side on the twitter side what happened what happened well actually say the word answer say the word it was uh blocked or removed from twitter suspends account suspended yeah okay so i'm talking to the ceo who i am crazy enough to still believe in good i do too i believe it somehow there's a very strange thing going on with jack dorsey i cannot possibly reconcile the actions but the person i've that that is a next level mind in there i'm not i don't know it well enough to say that it's all next level i'm not claiming he doesn't have any blind spots every smart person i know has blind spots i don't know what he's up against blah blah blah there's no way that the jack dorsey that i've talked to and the jack dorsey that interacted over articles of unity can be the same person he is constrained by that company in some way that doesn't make sense to me either that or he's the most implicitous person on earth and i'm not believing it i just don't buy it okay yeah something horrible is happening i my claim is i i can remove you functionally from the chess board in a tiny number of moves no matter who you are no matter how virtuous or how much of a bastard you've been your entire life it doesn't take more than three or four moves to basically neuter you as a force yeah and i disagree that if that's possible that means i'm not very good at chess like unity 2020 was removed from twitter because it's not good enough not within the system like the army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea was too small okay but fear uncertainty and doubt is the name of the game the point of the realm psychology though it's not real power it just affects the mind okay i have a reading assignment for you because you're russian you'll really enjoy this as part of the great american tobacco settlement the tobacco institute had to disgorge its archives of all of its strategies all of its skullduggery and put it on the web for all time so that we could all understand how the tobacco companies got together and destroyed people right you see tobacco destroys people you can see you know scientology destroys people there are various vindictive organizations that will not tolerate um reality and opposition to them let's take them down okay that's what i'm trying to tell you is okay no so so why aren't you doing the podcast to return because that's one of the weapons because of war well first of all if you're at war and i don't want to discuss strategy on a podcast right but that's you you're missing what did montgomery say about rommel but wasn't his line that i read your book you beautiful bastard it's like why are using the tactics that you already explained okay so one of the things i'm doing is i'm not having a strategic conversation with you and 100 yeah several hundred thousand of our closest friends i pulled back because this is not the battle that i know what i'm doing i i do not feel passionately enough about defeating donald trump to elect joe biden even if that's the way i'm going to ultimately vote right i don't believe in the biden democratic party i don't believe in the trump republican party so yes it's an incredibly consequential election but to me it's like the the crips and the bloods and the latin kings fighting over the right to extort you know a business and the business trying to figure out who it wants to to do the extorting but don't you think listen there's very few people that are as good with the english language as you do don't you think it's possible to draw a line that doesn't that betw in between that finds how we find our common humanity that ensures a better 2021 without having to say like donald trump is evil or joe biden is incompetent or any of that just somehow driving a beautiful scene so much pain this election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who comments on it lex maybe they're not good enough they're not good enough no i but that but okay the hope is do you believe in me yes you do yes listen to me very carefully my spider senses my intuition that has allowed me to survive in the space i've been mouthing off since the 80s tells me this is a super dangerous time for smart people to be spending the dry powder because the election doesn't make sense it doesn't mean that i don't have a sense that one outcome would be better than the other probably but the variance on that i'm not even positive that i'm right these two options are so completely inappropriate to the world of 2020 what we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and more silent generation people trying to sort out a highly technical world being my mediated through social media we need more exclusion we need more actual elites the people we've called the elites are not the elite they need to go yeah we need excellence competence we need people who can be trusted behind closed doors and we need to close the doors so we can't see what those people are doing here's the thing imagine that you had a bunch of people who'd all seen action in combat had all volunteered to be part of the armed services had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need to so you were convinced that these people had put their lives on their line for their country not for a payday imagine you had 10 of these people with technical backgrounds men women black white muslim jew doesn't matter right i would trust those people and i close the door i don't want to know what they talked about i don't want transparency into all of their negotiations i want to know that they're patriotic that they have they see something in the world bigger than themselves and their family fortunes i want to know that they're courageous i want to know that they've got all of our well-being and i'm willing to roll the dice and if they screw us over i'd rather go down like that okay so i disagree with you there because there's a difference between those and jocko because because you're not speaking to people with credentials of no talking about self-credentialed people self-financing i view jaco as self-credential but the biggest the powerful thing about jacob is he's not only self-credential but he's been real with people the the magical thing about jocko is in his book isn't his life story is he's been talking on a podcast for a long there's something real that happens okay so if you took everybody if you took dan crenshaw yeah and tulsi gabbard and you took jocko willing and maybe jessie ventura right uh you can take i see where you're going with this what you can take bernie sanders yeah who's you know a lone voice you take all of these people who've like really just risked like why do we trust why is catherine hepburn the best that hollywood ever produced because she told hollywood to go [ __ ] itself hard they gave her four academy awards and she said love you sweeties i'm gonna use them as the doorstops for the bathrooms in my house see that skill that's uh that's that's just that's what you were talking about yeah be katherine hepburn audrey hepburn is pretty amazing but katherine hepburn is next level right well you i mean that's what you're trying to say to me yeah okay i'm trying to figure it out lex okay i don't have the answer yet what i do know is that this election is chewing people up and i mean two separate things one that parties don't have enough integrity that if you comment either for or against there's a short sequence where you make a comment that's nuanced you get referenced to something right like you know take this thing about you know find people on both sides that is non-resolved after n years whether the context should be reported or not we are in some situation in which democrats and republicans are primed to fight each other the way introducing two ants from two different ant colonies always produces a battle yeah okay i don't want to be in that fray because those people are going to kill each other mindlessly like robots and until the election is concluded like i do i think this is dire yes could it be make or break absolutely i'm not saying that do i know which way this goes i can make an excellent argument that we need to elect joe biden right now that we've got a situation which can only be cured by voting for joe biden i can make another argument that we could have a situation that can only be cured by defeating joe biden right now and all of the things that the modern democratic party represents yeah i don't have you know it's not the lady and the tiger we're choosing between the tiger and the tiger it's the sumatran tiger versus the siberian tiger right i'm trying to think well which tiger can i do i have a better chance against um the key problem for us politically is that we have to divorce the concept of the center in moderation from kleptocracy every time we try to say something like we need more moderate solutions we need more pluralistic solutions people will say wow you just want to hand us right back into the swamp don't you the swamp people because the moderates and the swamp people are the same people all right so then we have these two crazy wings we can't have crazy right wing people i don't want any tiki torch bs we can't have crazy left wing don't attack my courthouse really don't attack my courthouse and we can't have moderates it's like okay how do we install our children and rape pillage and get these speaking fees when we're out of office and become you know cozy with the things when we're supposed to be regulating them and then you know become their lobbyists you know immediately when we leave office all of this stuff we need an entirely different system and i can't talk about that at the moment when i talk people say oh wow so you're going to sit this one out because you're a [ __ ] because you're a coward great to know eric we thought better if you buy click yeah i don't know what to do so but are you thinking of what to do yeah oh you you better believe it look bret brett had this idea of unity 2020 and i told him it was a wrong idea yeah i didn't tell him that unity 2024 was a wrong idea i didn't tell him that unity 2028 is the wrong idea and if i were to make the case that he was right and i was wrong because he's now shuddered the thing right i would say that the case to be made that he was correct was is that by doing this in 2020 we found out what we were up against it's good to know that twitter can turn this off at the drop of a hat yeah great to know it's good to know as we learned that you cannot have meetings of of of presidential candidates in a primary that are not approved of by the party right like they've got this thing figured out so we don't have any way in and now unity 2024 makes sense because unity 2020 was tried okay i don't know that we get to to 2024 under all circumstances in some we do and some we don't but there's there's a game theoretic thing that i'm not sure you're accounting for but you probably are but let me just make an argument is jack dorsey very likely listens to your podcast and what this is the power of these words something deep went wrong but we can change it with the power of words something went wrong at twitter they have so much division on their platform that's what i'm trying to say they've gotten it's not wrong they just don't know they're understaffed they have no they have an insoluble problem difficult to solve they have an insoluble problem the argument i disagree because well all right i would like to create a competitor no so then you know give it to me yeah wait create the competitor show me you actually understood this because my guess is is that most of the things that you'll think about i mean i can tell you things i've talked to jack about which i know would make twitter much better however i i think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet and you subtract off all sorts of context and mutual self-knowledge the problem is us it's not the platforms you're thinking about a technological solution and i'm saying the problem is is that we are ultimately the product and i just disagree with that and there's a lot of let's probably could save that for tomorrow i look forward to uh spending summers in your villa uh when you when you debut this product and i would love to angel invest in it by the way in terms of money i'll never have a villa yeah no i will always give away everything i own don't do that no sorry uh invest into like things you like you mentioned awesome things invest fine but a little bit of evoncular advice don't pledge to be the person who disgorges themselves of security money is freedom that's what it is it's a big honking pile of freedom okay you can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you if you don't you know so you can use it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money but generally speaking lex money is freedom and your voice is important at least retain the amount of money security you need to follow joe's advice what is the point of fu money if you don't say fu the number of people who have fu money who don't say fu indicates the number of people who chose the freedom of their wealth to create a prison they built a prison with the freedom they had and they walked into it locked the door i think it's too difficult not to create the reason i want to give away the money is because i just know my own psychology and you create prisons our human mind just creates those prisons the f.u money is enough for basic shelter and basic food that's that's the optimal if you don't have kids yet this is a okay this is the problem this is why i'm so this is me single lex speaking great but future future lex i'm talking to future licks single single present lex please don't listen yeah don't be an ass you're going to need some money and don't make these pledges to say on a podcast i'm i'm say i want to save you from yourself you need money to do many of the beautiful things that we're counting on you to do don't f it up can i talk to you about roger penrose sure you've talked to roger on the portal but also in between the lines and offline just everything you've said about roger penrose for people who don't know he just recently a few days ago won the uh 2020 share the 2020 uh nobel prize for physics but it's clear to me that he had like a deep personal impact on you a connection with you uh in terms of both your love of mathematics just the way you see the world like the this is the eddie van halen conversation this is clearly somebody who's profound in your worldview can you talk about roger can you talk about what it means that he won this highest of prizes just in general let's celebrate the man yeah okay so first of all there are two other people who won this prize i'm sorry i just didn't happen to know who they were before they won um roger is a very it is not roger in particular but the class from which roger comes that is so important so i would put roger in the class of feynman einstein dirac yang um you put whitten in there i know i mean witten's a special case but whidden is weirdly the reverse of the roger penrose story right because whitten is the first physicist to win a mathematical fields medal the highest honor in mathematics penrose is in some sense a mathematician who's now won the nobel prize so it's a perfect sort of a couplet yeah um roger's class means everything to me that's the highest achievement of the human mind i'd probably throw bach in with feynman and dirac in company right um i think that he was so inventive it was very frustrating to watch this career it's a little bit frustrating to watch feynman's career feynman was so good and had he been born slightly different at a slightly different time i believe his claim on physics would be far greater i feel like penrose in some sense came up a very difficult path because you see einstein effectively solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the beginning as a result the children of einstein are impoverished because there wasn't as much to pick off of the trees and sell at the market whereas bohr didn't and plonk didn't do nearly as good of a job with quantum theory so there's lots to do in quantum theory i think that roger affected me personally by a diagram that i saw in a paper of hermann gluck at the university of pennsylvania it was the first picture i'd ever seen of the hop vibrations sketched and that you know weirdly i brought that to the rogan program in order to sort of convey the wonder it was recapitulating my own journey i think i probably saw that at like age 16 or something it just flipped my mind roger is incredibly visual he's incredibly geometric he's incredibly suey generous he just does his own thing he's got lots of bets none of them had really come through the way you would hope and i think they stretched the rules to be blunt about it uh to give them the prize yeah i do you you said this thing on twitter which is beautiful that every once in a while comes a human being that gives uh value to the prize versus the prize giving value to the human two different kinds of prizes the reason that we care about the nobel prize isn't because of alfred nobel it's because it came along at the right time to reward um einstein derock schrodinger feynman most of the most of the people who should have won one most of the awards are not good in the sense that they don't really follow the prize is used to rewrite history that's its problem so it's you should have a love-hate relationship with it because on the one hand it does focus the world on what really matters and on the other hand it distorts what really matters and both of those functions take place simultaneously in this case i think that they violated their own rules slightly so it wasn't really clearly a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion but they like we better give this award to somebody of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize is fully funded with prestige going forward that's that's sort of my weird speculative guess as to what happened and so roger's getting on in years and the person should be alive so they i think they meant the rules and i think they couldn't have bent it for a better person and i hope they will not bend the rules out of weakness but out of strength in future it would be great to get madame wu and emmy nerder a posthumous prize along with doug prasher george sudarshan uh and george zweig as well as ernst stokelberg nobel prizes there have been some terrible omissions on the first two being females who revolutionized our view of the world and i take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people from ethnic groups or genders or whatever in order to make it plural and inclusive if it's not following the work and i feel very clear that in a few cases we know there was a real problem with the nobel committee because we have stunning accomplishments you know try to get through a day as a physicist without nerder's theorem and try to imagine the universe without madame wu's discovery that left and right don't appear to be symmetric i mean these are terrible emissions and they're a huge blot on science for not being more inclusive when it matters yeah so just like you said the nobel prize is plagued by omissions as much as and distortions and dilutions for example derock and schrodinger were i believe given the prize in the same year there's no reason that those two people needed to dilute each other the same thing with you know dyson was an omission tomonaga probably got included in part because we had an opportunity to show that something had happened on both sides of the pacific after the war but i don't think we needed to dilute weinberg or feynman or schwinger it just makes me it makes me somewhat sick all of these people are such important giants and it has to do with the field i think not wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget cuts and worldly pressures i think it's really important that we have absolute superstars because we produce superstars we acknowledge them we don't dilute them and that we bend the rules to make sure that the prize stays funded with the prestige that comes from giving it to the roger penrose's albert einsteins and paul derocks of the world can we talk a little bit about evil sure i haven't actually talked to you about this topic and it's been sitting on my mind mostly because everybody at mit is quiet about it which is jeffrey epstein i didn't get a chance to experience what mit was like at the time when jeffrey epstein was part of this but it's i'd love to try to understand how evil was allowed to flourish in in the place that i love whether you think maybe let me ask the question this way was it the man evil or was the system evil or is evil too strong a word because what i see is the presence of of this particular human being in the eyes of many destroyed the reputations of many really strong scientists and also weaken the ability like weaken the institution of mit by making everybody quiet like almost making them unable to say anything interesting or difficult yeah and what what is that and what am i supposed to uh we don't know why is everyone quiet about jeffrey we don't agree no we don't know obviously i want to scream about it too right and i probably have said too much about jeffrey epstein look something horrible happened i don't know what it is but something horrible happened and you know at the one thing that okay let's just do this the first thing i need to do is i need to get rid of this woke crap about power differentials okay in general can talk about hypergamy and power differentials are russell conjugates of the same concept just the way particular proportions and symmetries are mathematically provable to be attractive in females to males male attractiveness is largely determined by male competence and ability to amass power and success and all these sorts of things the relationship between consenting adults is quite frankly not something i want to sort out the relationship between the sexuality of adults and miners and particularly you know there's the the the 17 18 issue that's very different than 12 13. um we're talking about really sick depravity with respect to what it appears that jeffrey epstein was involved in at some level i believe this story is super complicated in part because i think one thing jeffrey epstein was doing was providing money encouragement and support to scientists another thing he was doing i believe was giving tax advice to very rich people i believe another thing he was doing was hooking very wealthy people up with young adult females another thing he was doing i think was doing stuff with children that will curl your toes so between so there's an entire spectrum of different stuff and at the moment nobody can pull apart or deconflate anything because the woke thing comes over it and says you know i think it's disgusting that you know a 43 year old billionaire would be partying with a 23 year old right yeah okay yeah i don't want to adjudicate that i'm worried about 12 and 14 year olds that we're not talking about but i mostly i don't think mit was deep into pedophilia my guess is that that did not happen i don't think that the scientists were the targets of the really sick depraved stuff it's my guess my my guess is that what you're looking at was a government construct it may have been our government it may have been a joint government project maybe somebody else's government i don't know i believe that in part we don't really understand robert maxwell sorry who's robert maxwell galen gillian as well's father was very active in scientific publishing i don't know where peer review came from i would love to run down the relationship between peer review and robert maxwell i would love to run down the missing fortune of robert maxwell and the mysterious fortune of jeffrey epstein because i don't think jeffrey epstein ever ran a hedge fund i don't think he was a money advisor the way people claimed so there's two things i want to talk about so one is the shallow conversations of woke identity politics that you're referring to seems to be removing everyone's ability no everyone willing one of the things to talk about like what the hell is this person and how is he allowed more most importantly to how do we prevent it in the future and from the individual perspective the question for me it's the same question i asked about 1930s nazi germany i've been reading way too much probably or not enough about that period currently is if i was in germany at that time what is the heroic action to take when i think about mit with jeffrey epstein what is the heroic action to take we're not talking about virtue signaling i wouldn't know what to do i would like to know what you're up against lex you're not hearing me the problem here is what was jeffrey epstein well that question might be the heroic action to take that's what i'm trying to say i'm just trying to get my first question you have to map the silence with jeffrey epstein what you're describing is a map of the silence at mit yeah well is there a map of the silence in washington state around jeffrey epstein the bay area new york city the amount of silence around jeffrey epstein should be telling you everything the number of dogs that don't bark is like nothing we've ever seen you're exactly correct but i want to know what is it telling us because what it's telling me is not some kind of conspiracy but more a disappointing weakness not some kind of conspiracy or might it's not some kind of conspiracy but you've got to be kidding me no you're so you're so afraid of saying the word conspiracy that you don't think it's a conspiracy i personally i just think it's people who i thought were my heroes just being weak no be of good cheer sir a cheer be of good cheer of good cheer yeah you think that there's a conspiracy i think there is a conspiracy a very impressive one that's the scale of it i tend to believe that large scale can only be an emergent phenomena really i find this so fascinating yeah because i always see you as like a logic logic and love drive your drive your soul you're very logical you're relentless you got a lot of love in your heart i believe that if you would review the video where is it from dubai or abu dhabi of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest you ever seen this thing yeah oh what happened it's the assassination in 2010 10 years ago of mahmoud al-mabu something like that in dubai where i believe 26 separate individuals on multiple teams are shown converging coming in from all over the world on false passports pretending to be tennis players or you know business people or vacationers and all of these teams have different functions and they murder this guy in his in his hotel room and the dubai i guess chief of police security officer was so angered that he put together this amazing video that says we can completely detail what you did we caught you on closed circuit tv we don't know exactly who you are because your disguises and your false passports but yeah 26 people converged to kill one no i don't believe you i don't believe after cointelpro an operation paperclip and operation mockingbird i don't know whether i should even bring up rex 84 to not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy so you you have a sense that uh evil can be as competent or more competent first of all when evil wants to operate at scale it needs to make sure that people don't try to figure out evil when evil operates at scale yes from first principles you have to realize that evil must not want it investigated that's correct the most efficient way to keep yourself from being investigated if you are a an evil institutional player needs to do this repeatedly is to invest in a world in which no one can afford to say the word conspiracy you will notice that there is a special radioactivity around the word conspiracy we have provable conspiracies we have admitted to conspiracies you have been invited to conspiracies there is no shortage conspiracies are everywhere some of them are mundane some of them are like price fixing cartels you know or trade groups are generally speaking conspiracies so the first thing you have to realize is that all of us are under a in a memetic complex where you can be taken off the chess board by saying conspiracy theorists get done it's a one it's like a one-line proof we don't have to listen to lex he said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show okay that is partially distorting our conversation if you want to ask me about jeffrey epstein you have to agree with me that that is a logical description of what you would have to have if you wanted to commit conspiracies is that you have to make sure that people are dissuaded from investigating yes okay but it's a very it's a fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy theories in the world without conspiracy theories to the to the shallow glance looks the same well my point there is responsible conspiracy theorizing where you look at the history of unearthed conspiracies and just like you would with any other topic just think about how different the rules in your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus x theorizing where x can be anything right it's like if i say to you um i can say the statement that average weight is not the same between widely separated populations you'd say yeah i'd say average height is not the same between widely separated populations you'd say yeah then i say in fact no continuous variable that has that shows variation should be expected to be identical between widely separated of course eric like iq whoa whoa whoa hold on right so we have a violent reaction to specific topics so the first thing i want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into everyone's mind that's really important to state yeah that's it's very interesting at that and as a prerequisite as you're saying that would be the first step if you wanted to uh pull off a conspiracy in a competent way that's he would have to first convince the world i just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time i highly recommend it 1971. well the film is entitled 1971 and it's about the citizens committee to investigate the fbi which was run by a student of murray gelman a physicist and broke into fbi offices in pennsylvania to steal files which allowed freedom of information requests that discovered a huge conspiracy it was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy inside the federal government a double conspiracy story which launched multiple conspiracies i think that the problem with modern americans is that they are so timid that they don't even learn about the history of conspiracies that we have absolutely proven so with that done jeff epstein in my opinion represented somebody's [ __ ] construction i don't think it's scary to think about yeah well what part of the story isn't scary i in part did something which i i imagine may get me destroyed because i was more worried about being destroyed by somebody else i had a conversation with around jeff epstein right so i'm just trying to like get let it be known that i don't know anything more than i've already said now your friends at mit yeah their problem is is that jeff epstein showed up as the only person capable of continuing u.s scientific tradition you see the u.s scientific tradition is a little bit like the russian it's it's combative okay and we're a free society and we act like a free society we're a rich society and we research like we're a rich society that is historically and then came the 1970s and william prox meyer and the golden fleece awards and the idea that we have to we're paying too much and these are welfare queens and lab coats and blah blah blah blah we need more transparency more oversight everything went to hell and the national culture of u.s science was lost the thing that produced all this prosperity and security and power was lost and then jeff epstein shows up and a tiny number of funders maybe fred cavley um maybe yuri milner maybe who else would be in this category peter thiel to an extent howard hughes would be the largest of these things which has different grant structures than the nih gave people a modicum of risk-taking ability okay when jeff epstein showed up everybody wanted to take risk in science and suddenly a charismatic billionaire says hey i can make that work for you here's a hundred thousand dollars go go research something crazy well that money was supposed to be provided by the federal government under the terms of the endless frontier compact between the federal government and the universities and the federal government the taxpayers welched okay so that's one place to lay the blame for jeffrey epstein as that the the failure of the federal government to honor to honor its commitment yeah right so the universities became psychopathic it's not like everybody doesn't remember what we're supposed to be doing to be moral but the point was there wasn't enough money to be moral so it was time to uh to eye each other as a source of protein as i like to say and in that process jeffrey epstein said hey come to my world we can do it like we used to do so in in part my point is is that almost none of your colleagues at mit have that kind of religious commitment to science that they're willing to go down with ship science the galileo galilei thing became very important to science because occasionally you just have to say look this isn't about me and you i there isn't enough money in the world to buy the kind of legacy i want to leave to this planet this is one of the great things about science you know potentially it's worth dying for yeah i'm glad you said it science is one of the things that is best that's worth dying for i mean i'm not eager to martyr myself but i've certainly risked my health my fortune you know i i've destroyed myself economically over science and um and my my my need to oppose these sons of [ __ ] in chaired professorships who are destroying our system along with everyone else let me um bring in grandmaster who went into this oogway ugly master ugly i think he's a grand master oh that would make him a chess playing turtle so i've read some wikipedia uh-oh shifu is a master there's apparently only one grand master that's uh anyway is the phrase grand master ever uttered in the script i don't think so i don't think so but there's a story oh there's there's off off script canon i'm gonna call glenn berger right now and find out if any of this is true all right you're not supposed to call out my journalistic integrity um but master oogway master uh he says a couple things i'd like to bring up with you so one as part of a longer quote recommends that you should find a battle worth fighting we've talked about several battles just now what is the battle worth fighting for for eric weinstein in the next few months in the next year there's only one oh it's the moses it's the moses thing it's time to go it's time to leave this place is over to get off the planet i yeah i i i freak people out when i say that but like look at your world you just got introduced to the problem of a virus wait wait till it's fusion devices and you understand what it means to have one interconnected planet with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else you know so do you see the foray your work in physics and maybe like the echoes of it in uh ship elon everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming if we don't have one should work on the plan that he she thinks best right so elon wants to do rockets people misinterpret me i meta eric says i don't think that's a smart plan regular eric says all people who have hope should do that thing yeah at least it's mars man at least it's the moon and mars and maybe titan and whatever and i don't think it'll work and it doesn't make sense and it looks silly but that's exactly the kind of fight where it's fighting but it's it's the kind of it's for the same reason that i went on brett's unity 2020 thing when i didn't think it had a hope in hell and people were you know are making fun of it we got to do things that make that make us feel dumb and silly and childish that possibly have a hope of working okay so everybody should do something my version of this i'm the most hopeful about because i wouldn't have chosen to do if i thought that daniel schmochtenberger's wisdom project was a better hope i'd do that it's more down to earth in a certain way i just think that it's more probable look we got from powered flight with the wright brothers and wind tunnels to sending back images from the surface of titan via huygens cassini in less than a century okay what we can do if we can change the laws of physics is something we can't even conceive of it may be that it buys us nothing and at least we'll we will know why we died on this planet as a small aside i think this is not the right time to take the full journey but i feel like you'll guide me like master uh did and i'm the kung fu panda at some they only have one conversation we're on our like we didn't well we're we're we're jews and they weren't so we talk too much but the guy doesn't have to be with words uh you don't think poe is jewish it's debatable we'll have to go back to the really like yeah okay is there um that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source code the source code of our universe can you comment on where since we last spoke where your thinking has been has roamed around geometric community around that work in physics in this fight i'm trying to figure out when to release it and how i mean i've released the video and the video quite honestly i think it has a very bizarre reaction i think one of the things that i've learned from the video because the video is coming up on half a million views on youtube alone to say nothing of the um the audio but yeah it produced a very strange reaction one of the things i don't think that i properly understood is that most physicists don't talk in this geometric language i thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds bundles differential forms connections curvature tensors etc and i i saw a lot of the comments would say things like i have a phd in theoretical physics and i'm not even familiar with all of these concepts and i think that was probably a distortion coming from living in cambridge massachusetts for almost 20 years so what's the solution to that well i mean translated into i can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to my problem is it's you know my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge the same people have these perverse incentives on them where they've invested in these programs that didn't work so they're extremely hostile and kind of difficult to deal with the fact that i'm not a physicist has its own set of issues which is that effectively it's like the hermit kingdom they don't get any visitors and they don't necessarily want somebody you know rolling up and saying i know how to do physics so i'm i'm always very clear i'm not a physicist [Music] that said if i wait too long i don't know that theoretical physics is really going to exist after the boomers because everyone in you i think you had wolfram on your program i don't remember whether he said this to you or brian keating but he said something like everybody got discouraged it was too hard we can't do that guys we cannot do that there's something about the renormalization revolution that innervated the physics community because it taught them just because you can see in this energy regime doesn't mean you can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how you know coupling constants run and what kind of uv fixed points exist blah blah blah somehow that discouraged people from guessing from believing everything became an effective theory the beauty of the effective theory wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe just the beauty of an energy level so i think that renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened in science and also its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic well the story i'm telling myself is that in part i'm waiting for them to get weaker but on the other hand i don't know that we have any time left and so are you also thinking about ways of uh you know you know the the podcast medium is revolutionary for public for discourse for what i mean i don't even know the right words for it are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for re-energizing the physics community so basically for communicating everything look i have a fantasy okay my fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem and it goes back to this thing that i read about in in feynman's uh books about tartaglia they asked him this question like what's the greatest thing that ever happened in math he says tartaglia's solution to the cubic it's just like the weirdest answer so you're like okay i'll bite why is it ugly a solution to the cubic and he said because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound that the ancients had failed to do i was like oh i got it it's the thing that opens up new psychology that says maybe things are possible again send you orchard you orchard new farmers new people who can find fruit that they can pick and once you have one person do that very often you get many like one of the things that we're talking about with eddie van halen the reason that he created a revolution and somebody like roy buchanan did not is that you could follow eddie van gaal you couldn't pioneer it and maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly and as fast and as inventively but you could follow once you understand that there is a tapping principle it was just the beginning of something called percussive guitar my belief is that once we start innovating in the present everything will come because everything that around us is screwed up on that let me with one last question bring back master oogway the probably the most famous quote of his right with the yesterday's history tomorrow's a mystery but today is a gift that is why it is called the present it's very beautiful although i would have gone with quit don't quit noodles don't noodles i feel i feel like people need to know way too much context for that to make sense how is that it's your audience just to hell with context yep they they'll figure it out well let me ask what are you grateful for today what is your present we've talked about a lot of dark things but what do you brings you joy to your heart that i can't believe i'm lucky enough to have this no nyla and zeb uh my wife pia um the fact that we've got our health all the the little things saying grace after meals you're coming over for friday night shabbat dinner so we'll say we'll we'll bench together and say grace it's important to just like this bottle of water in front of me i made a point um of just thinking about how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle that happens to be placed in front of me because somebody cared yeah you know so that small thing made a difference to me um i still have strength for the fight so far i think that's something i'm grateful for i can't believe that i'm not more beaten down after all of this nonsense um i have the most interesting set of friends i really do i mean i'm not that rich by monetary standards but if there were friend billionaires forbes would be all over my ass i just can't believe who i can talk to you know at the drop of a hat and i'm really grateful i think this is the end of something profound and it's the beginning of whatever is next and whatever is next could be terminal whatever's next could be amazing whatever's next could be a return to the horrors of the early 20th century that doesn't manage to go totally catastrophic but you know takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process i'm grateful to having half of my life in the rear view mirror it maybe it took place in a bubble and maybe it was unsustainable but it was it was nice to be able to move around the world without a mask uh it was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world even if it was from a a cot in a hostel in some country um to fall in love absolutely i mean it was a good life find the last indian jewish girl left who knew uh you're a lucky guy well let me just say actually there's something i wanted to just say before you get to that yes i forgot to say something falling in love with an intellectual collaborator is a special thing that not everybody gets a chance to do like i think when i met pia i felt deeply in love with her all her normal characteristics and i she and i had an antagonistic relationship around uh geometry and economics and then weirdly you know just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film they hate each other um the two fields like we're fighting with each other cats and dogs and finally you know the sexual tension clearly was so so thick you could cut it with a knife and we came up with geometric marginalism which is this other theory not geometric unity which allowed me to inhabit space with somebody who i already knew intimately and had fallen in love with and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play into dance it's sort of the intellectual version of the tango um one of the most romantic periods of my life that doesn't fall into most people's experience there was a chance to see something totally unexpected haven't really had it since because she doesn't want to revisit the material but something i'm super grateful for that's very particular and unique but to flip the tables on you for hundreds of thousands i think millions of people i can speak me and them are really grateful one that you exist and too sorry for your podcast and i do hope your voice in some form continues to to uh reverberate i think in the at least in the 2021s and and beyond even if it takes a brief pause we're pausing at the moment we've recorded some for future episodes and i'm recording for you i really appreciate that i mean it's earnestness uh trades at a discount at the moment because it's easy to make fun of it one of the things i like best about you is that you and i are both fairly earnest we made we made joke and jeb but honestly there's a project here in a world to win as they say um the thing that uh i want my and your listeners to know is that i'm not stepping away from the podcast because i don't appreciate that people really want more it's not you know this is hugely financially costly to me i want to make sure you guys are getting the best that i can do and destroying myself right in front of an election i think lex is incorrect i think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren't any planes in the sky that aren't either colored red or colored blue is a big danger given how angry i am at the system and i don't want to be removed from the chess board because if nobody's going to talk about jeff epstein there need to be people if nobody's going to talk about various things that we've talked about on these programs i want to make sure that i'm there do i think that this is potentially an existential election yes do i am i positive that i know that my way to bed is the right way out no i'm not i don't know people i just don't know and where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms of how it is chewing up smart people that i decided it's really not about cowardice because i it's hard for me to restrain myself i have so many reactions every day this is really about trying to plan for all of our futures to make sure that i'm around i had a huge concern that what happened to brett's articles of unity was going to happen to brett what's going to happen to the youtube channels i want to make sure that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket so if something goes wrong over there so you know that's the whole idea of the intellectual dark web which is at some level a loose confederation it can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work it can dissolve so that there really isn't anything um the thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately when the hit pieces come they don't come for what it is that they're angry at you about they come for when where they can get you and so it's very important that right in front of an election um yeah i think that the the desire of the old system to defend itself uh through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects of the new america and we have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions keeping individuals with podcasts and the ability to reach millions like through substance out of their domain i don't surrender this domain to them they have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us and i believe that they could remove you or me in an instant by the end of today if they wanted us off the chessboard we would be off the chess board i know that's not your perspective my goal is to stay here as long as possible to make sure that you have enough of a counterbalancing set of ideas and to let and help other podcasters start and my hope is is that that works but you know long heroism short martyrdom is a good uh motto for anyone and i try to remember the short martyrdom part of that first of all beautifully put second of all way to end the conversation and the disagreement which is how you hook them for the next conversation to be continued when lex says eric it's a huge honor thank you once again lex really appreciate every time we get together thanks buddy thanks for listening to this conversation with eric weinstein and thank you to our sponsors grammarly a service i use in my writing to check spelling grammar sentence structure and readability sunbasket a meal delivery service i use to add healthy variety into my culinary life sem rush the most advanced seo optimization tool i've ever come across i don't like looking at numbers but someone should it helps you make good decisions and finally expressvpn the vpn i've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with 5 stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from leonard cohen in a song titled hallelujah well maybe there's a god above but all i've ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you and it's not a cry that you're here at night it's not somebody who's seen the light it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 1,532,589

Keywords: eric weinstein, artificial intelligence, agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence podcast, lex fridman, lex podcast, lex mit, lex ai, lex jre, mit ai

Id: o2nG7-eXxko

Length: 171min 50sec (10310 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheSmashingPumpkinss]

Yeah...great podcast from Eric's perspective but I just don't understand the hype around Lex.

I've never had a lightbulb moment listening to him speak, he's never surprised me with acerbic insight; au contraire, often I'm like "...really dude?"

"They're just words Eric, they can't hurt you".

Given he's credentialed and buddy buddy with some impressive people I assume I'm missing something, just not sure what it is at this stage.

[u/ThrowawayTostado]

On a lighter note, "You don't think Po was jewish?" is among my all-time favorite Eric-insights.

[u/[deleted]]

Is it just me or Eric trying to tell us something? Lol I'm not trying to sound crazy but the way he said

"Something went wrong at Twitter"

made me open my eyes and sit up. Like bruh what is going on?

[u/[deleted]]

Someone posted a good criticism of Lex Fridman here awhile back, like a “change my mind” post (ed: can’t find it).

I keep waiting for Lex to amaze me, but the banal drivel that comes out of his mouth astounds me. No serious intellectual would say the things Lex does, because no serious intellectual would THINK them. He babbles on about love and spiritual nonsense like a punch drunk frat boy.

Eric tipped a card at one point, too. When he said that he should thank Joe for “what he did for you (lex)”. Seems to confirm that all these podcast grifters huff each other’s supply to gain credibility.

Lex’s admiration of Eric is so simplistic that it diminishes both of them. I even caught Eric giving a “wtf...” look briefly after what Lex said.

[u/cannablubber]

Love Lex. Always down for more Eric, too.

[u/BryanTaylor30]

On previous appearances, Lex has done a great job at exposing Eric's flaws. On this one, Eric struck back.

One can make the case that Eric is too pessimistic. I do not think one can make the case that Lex is not too optimistic. His wilful ignorance to the nature of man, his blind idealism, and his refusal to acknowledge any challenge to them is going to be his downfall. That's where the ego Eric mentions at the beginning comes in. Lex has a very humble demeanor, but the reality of the situation is that he rarely takes advice that he is doing or thinking wrongly, often to the point of seemingly refusing to process any ideas that challenge his worldview. Whether it's bitching to Rogan about all these issues that stem from reading the comments but refusing to quit, or refusing to answer some of the questions Eric poses in this interview, he just will not budge on any issue.

Lex seems like a great human being, he's a fantastic interviewer, and I'm sure he's a powerful mind within his field, but some day he is going to be forced to confront reality and it isn't going to be pleasant-- and I don't look forward to that day. I'm going to hate to see it.

Lex's optimism could be a good balance to the gloomier personalities in the IDW, but his inability to meet anyone part way makes that impossible-- and really excludes him from being a true IDW member for the time being given that he can't really engage with any of these social issues dialectically. I hope this is something he learns to overcome before it hits him the hard way, because I want to like Lex, but this aspect of his personality infuriates me.

In a perfect world, I would want nothing more for Lex than for him to maintain that innocence. I just don't think that is likely to be possible going forward.

[u/Ariadnepyanfar]

Thanks so much, still listening to it. We need both Lex and Eric so much, they both have very different yet such beautiful and useful lives and journeys.

[u/pastard9]

What did Eric mean by saying that Dylan, Cohen, and zevon were all exploring the idea of being a biblical scribe. “I was in the house when the house burned down” is one of my favorite zevon songs but he’s getting something from it I’m not.

[u/tre269]

I really love lex fridman