Eric Weinstein: Geometric Unity and the Call for New Ideas & Institutions | Lex Fridman Podcast #88
the following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein the second time we've spoken on this podcast he's a mathematician with the bold and piercing intelligence unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society he is the host of the portal podcast a part of which he recently released his 2013 oxford lecture on his theory of geometric unity that is at the centre of his lifelong efforts to arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics this conversation was recorded recently in the time of the coroner virus pandemic for everyone feeling the medical psychological and financial burden of this crisis I'm sending love your way stay strong we're in this together we'll beat this thing this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy subscribe on youtube review it with five stars and Apple podcasts supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman spelled Fri D ma n this show is presented by cash app the number-one finance app in the App Store when you get it use code Lex podcast cash up lets see so many friends buy Bitcoin invest in the stock market with as little as $1 since cash app does fractional share trading let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes to create the abstraction of the fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel so big props to the cash app engineers for solving a hard problem then in the end provides an easy interface that takes a step up to the next layer of abstraction over the stock market making trading more accessible to new investors and diversification much easier so again if you get cash up from the App Store Google Play and use code Lex podcasts you get $10 and cash-strapped will also donate $10 the first an organization that is helping to advanced robotics and STEM education for young people around the world and now here's my car session with Eric Weinstein action between World War two and the crisis we're living through right now sure the need for collective action reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these abstractions like everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do for himself and leave everyone else alone none of these abstractions work in a global crisis and this is just a reminder that we didn't somehow put all that behind us when I hear stories about my grandfather who was in the army and so the Soviet Union where most people die when you're in the army there's a brotherhood that happens there's a love that happens do you think that's something we're going to see here sense or none there I mean what the Soviet Union went through I mean the enormity of the war on the Russian doorstep this is different what we're going through now is not we can't talk about Stalingrad and kovat in the same breath yet we're not ready and the the sort of you know that just the sense of like the Great Patriotic War and the way in which I was very moved by the Soviet custom of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day it's like the happiest day of your life you have to say thank you to the people who made it possible we're not there where we're just restarting history we you know I've called this on the Rogen program I called it the great nap yeah 75 years with very little by historical standards and in in terms of really profound disruption and so when you called the great nap meaning lack of deep global tragedy well lack of realized global tragedy so I think the development for example of the hydrogen bomb you know was something that happened during the great nap and that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel feared and no anxiety but it was to say that most of the violent potential of human species was not realized it was in the form of potential energy and this is the thing that I've sort of taken issue with with the of Steven Pinker's optimism is that if you look at they realized kinetic variables things have been getting much better for a long time which is the great nap but it's not as if our fragility has not grown our dependence on electronic systems our vulnerability to disruption and so all sorts of things have gotten much better what other things have gotten much worse in the destructive potential of skyrocketed its tragedy the only way we wake up from the big nap well no you could also have you know jubilation about positive things but it's harder to get people's attention can you give an example of a big global positive thing well I could happen I think that when for example just historically speaking HIV went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with for a very long period of time it would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday right like all at once like you knew that things had changed and so the bleed in somewhat kills the sort of the Wednesday effect where it all happens on a particular day at a particular moment I think if you look at the stock market here you know there's a very clear moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus I think that with respect to positives the moon landing was the best example of a positive that happened at a particular time or recapitulating the Soviet American link-up in terms of Skylab and Soyuz right like that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting in orbit and so yeah there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful and amazing happens you know but it's just they're fewer that's why that's why as much as I can't imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event when you have like 30,000 people waiting and you know like she says yes that's pretty exciting so I think that we shouldn't we shouldn't discount that so how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of the global suffering that we're going to experience with this with this crisis I can't figure this one out I'm just not smart enough something is goin weirdly wrong and they're almost like two separate storylines we in one storyline we aren't taking things nearly seriously enough we see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses we hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage and that's a very terrifying story on the other hand there's this other story which says there are tons of ventilators someplace we've got lots of masks but they haven't been released we've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used and it's very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling that they both must be true simultaneously and they can't both be true in any kind of standard way well I don't know whether it's just that I'm dumb but I can't get one or the other story to quiet down so I think weirdly this is much more serious than we had understood it and it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the same time and that we're not being given the tools to actually understand well here's how to interpret the data or here's the issue with the personal protective equipment is actually a jurisdictional battle or a question of who pays for it rather than a question of whether it's present or apps I don't understand the details of it but something is wildly off in our ability to understand where we are so that's that's policy that's institutions what about do you think about the quiet suffering of millions of people they've lost their job is this a temporary thing I mean what I'm my ears not to the suffering of those people who have lost their job or the 50% possibly of small businesses that are gonna go bankrupt do you think about that sure it's suffering well and how that might arise itself could be not quiet - I mean right that's the could be a depression this could go from recession depression and depression could go to armed conflict and then to war so it's not a very abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where we can begin with quiet suffering and an anxiety and all of these sorts of things and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress and all sorts of things but look anything powerful enough to put us all in doors in a I mean think about this as an incredible experiment imagine that you proposed hey I want to do a bunch of research let's figure out what what changes in our emissions emissions profiles for our carbon footprints when we're all indoors or what happens to traffic patterns or what happens to the vulnerability of retail sales as Amazon gets stronger you know etc etc I believe that in many of those situations we're running an incredible experiment and am I worried for us all yes there are some bright spots one of which is that when you're ordered to stay indoors people are gonna feel entitled and the usual thing that people are going to hit when they hear that they've lost your job you know some there's this kind of tough [Music] tough love attitude that you see particularly in the United States like oh you lost your job poor baby well go retrain get another one I think there's gonna be a lot less appetite for that because we've been asked to sacrifice to risk to act collectively and that's the interesting thing what does that really can in us maybe the idea that we actually are Nations and then you know your fellow countrymen may start to mean something to more people certainly mean something to people in the military but I wonder how many people who aren't in the military start to think about this it's like oh yeah we are kind of running separate experiments and we are not china so you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come from my perspective we are a part of the experi but I don't feel like we have access to the full data the full data of the experiment we're just like little mice yeah in a large does this one make sense to you Lex I'm romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to World War two so I keep connecting to historical events and making sense of them through that way or reading the plague by Camus like almost kind of telling narratives and stories but my I'm not hearing the suffering that people are going through because I think that's quiet everybody's numb currently they're not realising what it means to have lost your job and to have lost your business there's kind of a I am I'm afraid how that fear well material as itself once the numbness wears out and especially if this lasts for many months then if it's connected to the incompetence of the CDC in the w-h-o and our government and perhaps the election process you know might be biggest fear is that the you know elections get delayed or something like that so the the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have that turns to panic that turns to anger that anger can I just play with that for a butcher what if in fact all of that structure that you grew up thinking about and again you grew up in two places right so when you were inside the US we tend to look at all of these things as museum pieces like how often do we amend the Constitution anymore and in some sense if you think about the Jewish tradition of Simchat Torah you've got this beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn in calligraphy that's very valuable and it's very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered and so we one day a year we dance with the Torah and we hold this incredibly vulnerable document up and we treat it as if you know it was Ginger Rogers being led by Fred Astaire well that is how you become part of your country in fact maybe the maybe the election will be delayed maybe extraordinary powers will be used maybe any one of a number of things will indicate that you're actually living through history this isn't a museum piece that you handed by your great-great grandparents but you're kind of suggesting that there might be a like a community thing that pops up lucky like as opposed to an angry revolution it might have a positive effect oh well for example are you telling me that if the right person stood up and called for us to sacrifice PPE for our nurses and our MDS who are on the front lines that like people wouldn't reach down deep in their own supply that they've been like stalking and carefully storing they just said here take it like right now an actual leader would use this time to bring out the heroic character and I'm going to just go wildly patriotic cuz I freaking love this country we've got this dormant population in the u.s. that loves leadership and country and pride in our freedom and not being told what to do and we still have this thing that binds us together and all of them the merchants of division just be gone I totally agree with you there's a I think there is a deep hunger for that leadership why isn't that why hasn't one of yours we don't have the right Surgeon General we have as guys saying you know come on guys don't buy masks they don't really work for you save them for our healthcare professionals no you can't do that you have to say you know what these masks will actually do work and they more work to protect other people from you but they would work for you they'll keep you somewhat safer if you wear them here's the deal you've got somebody who's taking huge amounts of viral load all the time because the patients are shedding do you want to protect that person who's volunteered to be on the frontline who's up sleepless nights he you just changed the message you stop lying to people you just yeah you level with them it's like it's bad absolutely but that's uh that's a little bit specific so you you have to be just honest about the facts of the situation yes but I think you were referring to something bigger than just that yes inspiring like you know rewriting the Constitution sort of rethinking how we work as a nation yeah I think you should probably you know amend the Constitution once or twice in a lifetime so that you don't get this distance from the foundational documents and you know part of the problem is that we've got two generations on top that feel very connected to the US they feel bought in and we've got three generations below it's a little bit like watching your parents riding the tricycle that they were supposed to pass on to you and it's like you're now too old to ride a tricycle and they're still whooping it up ringing the bell with the streamers coming off the handlebars and you're just thinking do you guys never get bored do you never pass a torch do you really want it we had five septuagenarians all born in the 40s running for president the United States when cloture dropped out the youngest was Warren we had Warren Biden Sanders Bloomberg and Trump for like 1949 to 1941 all who have been the the oldest president and inauguration and nobody nobody says grandma grandpa you're embarrassing us except Joe Rogan let me put it on you you have a big platform you're somewhat of an intelligent eloquent guy what what role do you somewhat what role do you play why aren't you that leader well you're I mean I would argue that you're in in ways becoming that leader so I haven't taken enough risk is that your idea what should I do or say at the moment no you're a little bit you have taken quite a big risks and we'll talk about it all right but you're also on the outside shooting in meaning you're dismantling the institution from the outside as opposed to becoming what the institution did you remember that thing you brought up when you were on the view if you I'm sorry when you were on Oprah I didn't make I didn't get the end I'm sorry when you were on Bill Maher's program what was that thing you were saying they don't know we're here they may watch us yeah they may quietly to us you know slip us a direct message but they pretend that this internet thing is some dangerous place where only lunatics play well who has the bigger platform the portal or Bill Maher's program or the view Bill Maher in the view in terms of viewership or in terms of what's the metric of size well first of all the key thing is take take a newspaper and they even imagine that it's completely fake okay and then there's very little in the way of circulation yet imagine that it's a hundred-year-old paper and that it's still part of this game this internal game of media the key point is is that those sources that have that kind of mark of respectability to the institutional structures matter in a way that even if I say something at a very large platform that makes a lot of sense if it's outside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative or gin it sort of doesn't make matter to the institutions so the game is if it happens outside of the club we can pretend that it never happened how can you get the credibility and authority from outside the gated institutional narrative I'm well first of all you you and I both share institutional credibility coming from our associations we were both at MIT yes were you at Harvard at any point nope okay well and lived in Harvard Square so did I but you know at some level it the issue isn't whether you have credentials in that sense the key question is can you be trusted to file a flight plan and not deviate from that flight plan when you are in an interview situation will you stick to the talking points I will not and that's why you're not going to be allowed in the general conversation which amplifies these sentiments but I'm still trying to see your point it would be is that we're let's say both so you've done how many Joe Rogan before I've done for two right so both of us are somewhat frequent guests the show is huge you know the power as well as I do and people are gonna watch this conversation huge number watched our last one by the way that I want to thank you for that one that was a terrific terrific conversation really did change my life lecture my life you're brilliant interviewer so thank you take care that was that you changed my life to that you gave me a chance so no no I'm so glad I did that one what I would say is is that we keep mistaking how big the audience is for whether or not you have the kiss and the kiss is a different thing yes yeah that's it doesn't it's not an acronym yet okay um it's thank you for asking it's a question of are you part of the inter interoperable institution friendly discussion and that's the discussion which we ultimately have to break into but that's what I'm trying to get at is how do we how do you how does Eric Weinstein become the president of the United States me I shouldn't become the president of the United States not interested thank you very much for us okay get into a leadership position where I guess I don't know what that means but where you can inspire millions of people to the inspire the sense of community inspire the the kind of action is required to overcome hardship the kind of hardship that we may be experiencing to inspire people to work hard and face the difficult hard facts of the realities we're living through all those kinds of things that you're talking about that leader you know cannot leader emerge from the current institutions or alternatively can it also emerge from the outside I guess that's what I was asking so my belief is is that this is the last hurrah for the elderly centrist kleptocrats can you define each of those terms okay elderly I mean people who were born at least a year before I was that's a joke you can laugh no because I'm born at the cusp of the Gen X boomer divides centrist they're pretending you know that there are two parties Democrat and Republican Party in the United States I think it's easier to think of the mainstream of both of them as part of a an aggregate party that I sometimes call the looting party which gets us to kleptocracy which is ruled by thieves and the great temptation has been to treat the us like a trough and you just have to get yours because it's not like we're doing anything productive so everybody's sort of looting the family mansion and somebody stole the silver and somebody's cutting the pictures out of the frames you know roughly speaking we're watching our elders live it up in a way that doesn't make sense to the rest of us okay so if it's let the last hoorah this is the time for leaders to step up like we're not ready yet we're not ready I call I call out you know the head of the CDC should resign should resign that the Surgeon General should resign Trump should resign Pelosi should resign de Blasio should we're not going to resign I understand that so that's why so we'll wait no but that s not how revolutions work you don't wait for people to design you step up and inspire the alternative do you remember the Russian Revolution of 1907 it's before my time but there wasn't a Russian Revolution of 1907 years think he were in 1907 that I'm saying where to work you too early but we got this you know Spanish flu came in 1718 so I would argue that there's a lot of parallels there or the one I think it's not time yet like John Prine the the songwriter just died of kovat that was a pretty big really yeah by the way you yes of course I every time we do this we discover our mutual appreciation of obscure brilliant witty yeah song right he's really he's really quite good right he's he's really good yeah he died my understanding is that he passed recently due to complications of Corona so we haven't had large enough enough large ink large enough shocking deaths yet picturesque deaths deaths of a family that couldn't get treatment there are stories that will come and break our hearts and we have not had enough of those the visuals haven't come in but I think they're coming well we'll find out but that you got a you have to be there he have to be there when they come I'm yet but we didn't get the visual for example a falling man from 9/11 right so the outside world did but Americans were not I was thought that we would be too delicate so just the way you remember pule a surprise wedding photographs from the Vietnam era you don't easily remember the photographs from all sorts of things that have happened since because something changed in our media we are incensed that we cannot feel or experience our own lives and the tragedy that would animate us to action yeah but I think there again I think there's going to be that suffering that's going to build and build and build in terms of businesses mom-and-pop shops that close and like I think for myself I think off tonight that I'm being weak and and like I feel like I should be doing something I should be becoming a leader on a small scale you can't this is not World War two and this is not Soviet Russia why not why not because our internal programming the malware that sits between our ears is much different than the propaganda is malware of the Soviet era I mean people were both very indoctrinated and also knew that it was BS they had a double mind I don't know him there must be a great word in Russian for being able to think both of those things simultaneously you don't think people are actually sick of the partisanship sick of incompetence yeah but I call for revolt the other day on Joe Rogan people found it quixotic well because I think you're not I think revolt is different I think asks like okay I'm really angry yes I'm furious I cannot stand that this is my country at the moment I am embarrassed so let's build a better one yeah that's the I mean okay so well okay so let's take over a few universities let's start running a different experiment at some of our better than universities like when I did this experiment I said what at this if this were 40 years ago the median age I believe of a university president was 51 that would have the person in Gen X and we'd have a bunch of millennial presidents a bunch of you know more than half Gen X it's almost 100% baby boom at this moment and how did that happen we can get into how they changed retirement but this generation above us does not feel for even even the older generous I love jittery I had roger penrose on my program excellent coffee and I thank you really appreciate that and I asked no question it was very important to me and I said look you're in your late 80s is there anyone you could point to as a successor that we should be watching we can get excited you know I said here's an opportunity to pass the baton and he said well let me let me hold off on that is it ever the right moment to point to somebody younger than you to keep your flame alive after you're gone and also like I don't know whether I'm just gonna admit to this people treat me like I'm crazy for caring about the world after him dead or wanting to be remembered after you're gone like well what does it matter to you you're gone it's this deeply sort of secular somatic perspective on everything we're we we don't you know that phrase in as time goes by it says it's still the same old story a fight for love and glory a case of do it I don't think people imagined then that there wouldn't be a story about fighting for love and glory and like we are so out of practice about fighting you know rivals for love and and and in fighting for glory and something bigger than yourself but the hunger is there well that was the point then right the whole idea is that Rick was you know it was like Han Solo of his time he's just like I stick my neck out for nobody you know it's like oh come on Rick you're just pretending you actually have a big soul right and so at some level that's the question do we have a big Soler's it's just all bullshit see I think I think there's huge Manhattan Project style projects whether you talk about physical infrastructure or going to Mars you know the SpaceX NASA efforts or huge huge scientific efforts well let me get back into the institutions and we need to remove the weak leadership that we have weak leaders and the weak leaders need to be removed and they need to seat people more dangerous than the people who are currently sitting in a lot of those chairs or build new institutions good luck well I one of the nice things of from the internet is for example somebody like you can have a bigger voice than almost anybody at the particular institutions we're talking about that's true but the thing is I might say something you can count on the fact that the you know Provost at Princeton isn't going to say anything what do you mean too afraid well if that person were to give an interview how are things going in in in research at Princeton well I'm hesitant to say it but they're perhaps as good as they've ever been and I think they're gonna get better oh is that right all fields yep oh yeah I don't see a weak one that's just like okay great who are you and what it even say we're just used to total nonsense 24/7 yeah what do you think might be a beautiful thing that comes out of this like what is there a hope it like a little inkling a little fire of hope you have about our time right now yeah I think one thing is coming to understand that the freaks weirdos mutants and other narrow duels sometimes referred to as grifters I like that one grifters and gadflies were very often the earliest people on the crown of iris that's a really interesting question why was that and it seems to be that they had already paid such a social price that they weren't going to be beaten up by being told that oh my god you're xenophobic you just hate China you know or wow you sound like a conspiracy theorist so if you've already paid those prices you were free to think about this and everyone in an institutional framework was terrified that they didn't want to be seen as the alarmist the Chicken Little and so that's why you have this confidence where you know de Blasio says you know get on with your lives get back in there and celebrate Chinese New Year in Chinatown despite coronavirus it's like okay really so you just always thought everything would automatically be okay if you if you adapted sorry if you adopted that posture so you think this time reveals the weakness of our institutions and reveals the strength of our gadflies and the weirdos and no not necessary the strength but the the the value of freedom like a different way of saying it would be Wow even your gadflies and your grifters were able to beat your institutional folks because your institutional folks we're playing with a giant mental handicap so just imagine like you're in the story of Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut and our smartest people were all subjected to distracting noises every seven seconds well they would be functionally much dumber because they couldn't continue a thought through all the disturbance so in some sense that's a little bit like what belonging to an institution is is that if you have to make a public statement of course the search in general is going to be the worst because they're just playing with too much of a handicap they're too many institutional players really don't screw us up and so the person has to say something wrong we're gonna back propagate a falsehood and this is very interesting some of my socially oriented friends say Eric I don't understand what you're on about of course masks work but you know what they're trying to do they're trying to get us not to buy up the masks for the doctors and I think okay so you imagine that we can just create scientific fiction at will so that you can run whatever social program you want this is what I mean my point is get out of my lab get out of the lab you don't belong in the lab you're not meant for the lab you're constitutionally incapable of being around the lab you need to leave the lab you think the CDC and whu-oh knew that masks work and we're trying to sort of imagine that people are kind of stupid and they would buy masks and in in excess if they were told that masks work is that like because this does seem to be a particularly clear example of mistakes made you're asking me this question yeah no you're not what do you think Lex well I actually probably disagree with you a little bit great let's do it I think it's not so easy to be honest with the populace when the danger of panic is always around the corner so hmm I I think the kind of honesty you exhibit appeals to a certain class of brave intellectual minds that it appeals to me but I don't know the perspective wh Oh I don't know if it's so obvious that they should be honest 100% of the time with people I'm not saying you should be perfectly transparent and 100% honest I'm saying that the quality of your lies has to be very high and asked my public spirited is there a big difference between so I'm not not a child about this yeah I'm not saying that when you're at war for example you turn over all of your plans to the enemy because it's important that you're transparent with 360 degree visibility far from it what I'm saying is something has been forgotten and I forgot who it was who told it to me it was a fellow graduate student in the harvard math department and he said you know i learned one thing being out in the workforce because he was one of the few people who had a work life in the department as a grad student and he said you can be friends with your boss but if you're going to be friends with your boss you have to be doing a good job at work and there's an analog here which is if you're going to be reasonably honest with the population you have to be doing a good job at work as the Surgeon General or as the head of the CDC so if you're doing a terrible job you're supposed to resign and then the next person is supposed to say look I'm not gonna lie to you I inherited the situation it was in a bit of disarray but I had several requirements before I agreed to step in and take the job because I needed to know I could turn it around I needed to know that I had clear lines of authority I needed to know that I had the resources available in order to rectify the problem and I needed to know that I had the ability in the freedom to level with the American people directly as I saw fit all of my wishes were granted and that's why I'm happy here on Monday morning I've got my sleeves rolled up boy do we got a lot to do so please come back in two weeks and then ask me how I'm doing then and I hope to have something to show you that's how you do it so why is that excellence and basic competence missing the big nap you see you come from multiple traditions where it was very important to remember things the Soviet tradition made sure that you remembered the sacrifices that came in that war in the Jewish tradition we're doing this on Passover right okay well every year we tell one simple story well why can't it be different every year maybe we can have a rotating series of sevens do it because it's the one story that you need it's like you know you work with the men in black group right and it's the last suit that you'll ever need this is the last story that you ever need don't think I fell for your neuralyzer last time in any event we tell one story because it's to get out of Dodge story there's a time when you need to not wait for the the bread to rise and that's the thing which is even if you live through a great nap you deserve to know what it feels like to have to leave everything that has become comfortable and and unworkable it's said that you need you need that tragedy I imagine to have the tradition of remembering it's it's sad to to think that because things have been nice and comfortable means that we can't have great competent leaders which is kind of the implied statement like can we have great leaders who take big risks or who inspire hard work who deal with difficult truth even though things have been comfortable well we know what those people sound like I mean you know if for example Jocko willing suddenly threw his hat into the ring everyone would say okay right party's over it's time to get up at 4:30 and really work hard and we've got to get back into fighting shit and yeah but Jocko is a very special I think that whole group of people by profession put themselves in the way of and into hardship on a daily basis and he's not well I don't know but he's probably not going to be okay Jocko be president okay but it doesn't have to be Jocko right like in other words if it was Kyle ne or if it was Alex Honnold from rock-climbing right but they're just serious people they're serious people who can't afford your BS yeah but why do we have serious people that do rock climbing and don't have serious people who lead the nation that that seems because that was a those skills needed in rock climbing are not good during the big nap and at the tail end of the big nap they would get you fired but I don't don't you think there's a fundamental part of human nature that desires to excel to be exceptionally good at your job yeah but what is your job I mean in other words my my point to you is if you if you're a general in a peacetime army and your major activity is playing war games what if the skills needed to win war games are very different than the skills needed to win wars because you know how the war games are scored and you've you've done Moneyball for example with wargames you figured out how to win games on paper so then the the advancement skill becomes divergent from the ultimate skill that it was proxying for yeah but you create this we're good as human beings to I mean I thought at least me I can't do a big nap so at any one moment when I finish something a new dream pops up so right going to Mars go to what do you like to do you like to do Brazilian Jujitsu well first of all I like to do every you like to play guitar guitar you do this podcast you do theory you're always you're constantly taking risks and exposing yourself all right why because you got one of those crazy I'm sorry to say it you got an Eastern European Jewish personality which I'm still tied to and I'm a couple generations more distant than you are and I've held on to that thing because it's valuable to me you don't think there's a huge percent of the populace even in the United States that's that's that oh maybe a little bit doormen but do you know Anna Hutchins from the Red Scare podcast did you interview her yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah she was great she was great right yeah it's just fun she's she's terrific but she also has the same thing going on and I made a joke in the liner notes for that episode which is somewhere on the road from Stalingrad to forever 21 something was lost like how can Stalingrad and forever 21 be in the same sentence and you know in part it's that weird thing it's like trying to remember even words like I mean Russian and Hebrew things like it's like what poem yet and this core you know these words have much more potency about memory and I don't know I do I think I think there's still a dormant populace that craves leaders on a small scan large scale and I hope to be that leader and on a small scale and I think you sir have a role to be a leader you kids go ahead without me I'm just gonna I'm gonna do a little bit of weird podcasting see see now you're you're putting on your Joe Rogan hat he says I'm just a comedian oh no I'm gonna say I'm just it's not that if I say I want to lead too much because of the big nap there's like a group a chorus of automated idiots and they're there first I was like oh I knew it it's a power grab all along why should you leave you know it's just like and so the idea is you're just trying to skirt around not stepping on all of the idiot landmines it's like okay so now I'm gonna hear that in my inbox for the next three days okay so lead by example just live no I mean large platform look we should take over the institutions there are institutions we've got bad leadership we should mutiny and we should inject a 15% 20% disagreeable dissident very aggressive loner individual mutant freaks all the people that you go to see Avengers movies about or the x-men or whatever it is and stop pretending that everything good comes out of some great giant inclusive communal 12-hour meeting it's like stop it that's not how shit happens you recently published the video of a lecture he gave at Oxford presenting some aspects of a theory theory of everything called geometric unity so this was a work of 30 30 plus years this is his life's work let me ask her of the silly old question how do you feel as a human excited scared the experience of posting it you know it's funny one of the one of the things that you you learn to feel as an academic is the great sins you can commit in academics is to show yourself to be a non-serious person to show yourself to have delusions to avoid the standard practices which everyone has signed up for and you know it's weird because like you know that those people are gonna be angry he did what you know why would he do that and and what we're referring to for example as traditions of sort of publishing incrementally certainly not trying to have a theory of everything perhaps working within the academic departments yeah all those things so that's true and so you're going outside of all of that well I mean I was going inside of all of that and we did not come to terms when I was inside and what they did was so outside to me was so weird so freakish like the most senior respectable people at the most senior respectable places were functionally insane as far as I could tell and again it's like being functionally stupid if you're the head of the CDC or something where you know you're giving recommendations out there aren't based on what you actually believe they're based on what you think you have to be doing well in some sense I think that that's a lot of how I saw the math and physics world as the physics world was really crazy and the math world was considerably less crazy just very strict and kind of dogmatic will psychoanalyze those folks but I really want to maybe linger on it a little bit longer of how you feel because yeah so it's such a such a special moment in your life I really appreciate it's a great question so that if we can pair off some of that others those other issues its new being able to say what the observer's is which is my attempt to replace space-time with something that is both closely related to space time and not space-time so I used to carry the number 14 as a closely guarded secret in my life and where 14 is really four dimensions of space and time plus ten extra dimensions of rulers and protractors or four the cool kids out there symmetric to tensors she had a geometric complicated beautiful geometric view of the world that you carry with you for a long time yeah did you did you have friends that you colleagues essentially no talk no in fact part of these part of that some of these stories are me coming out to my friends and I used the phrase coming out because I think that gays have monopolized the concept of the closet many of us are in closets haven't having nothing to do with their sexual orientation yeah I didn't really feel comfortable talking to almost anyone so this was a closely guarded secret and I think that I let on in some ways that I was up to something and probably but it was a very weird life so I did write I have a series of things that I pretended to care about so that I could use that as the stalking horse for what I really cared about and to your point I never understood this whole thing about theories of everything like if you were gonna go into something like theoretical physics isn't that what you would normally pursue like wouldn't it be crazy to do something that difficult and that poorly paid if you we're gonna try to do something other than figure out what this is all about now I have to reveal my cards my weaknesses and lack an understanding of the music of physics and math departments but there's an analogy here to artificial intelligence and often folks come in and say okay so there's a giant department working on quote-unquote artificial intelligence but why is nobody actually working on intelligence like it you're all just building little toys right you're not actually trying to understand and that breaks a lot of people and that they it confuses them it's like okay so I'm at MIT I'm at Stanford I'm at Harvard I'm here I dreamed of being what kind of artificial intelligence why is everybody not actually working on intelligence and I have the same kind of sense that that's what working on the theory of everything is that's strangely you somehow become an outcast for even but we know why this is right why well it's because let's take the artificial it's play with a GI for example yeah I think that the idea starts off with nobody really knows how to work on that and so if we don't know how to work on it we choose instead to work on a program that is tangentially related to it so we do a component of a program that is related to that big question because it's felt like at least I can make progress there and that wasn't where I was where I was in it's funny there was this book of called Friedan uhlan beck and it had this weird mysterious line in the beginning of it and I tried to get clarification of this weird mysterious line and everyone said wrong things and then I said okay well so I can tell that nobody's thinking properly because I just asked the entire department and nobody has a correct interpretation of this and so you know it's a little bit like you see a crime-scene photo and you have a different idea like there's a smoking gun and you figure that's actually a cigarette lighter I don't really believe that and then there's like a pack of cards and you think huh that looks like the blunt instrument that the person was beaten with you know so you have a very different idea about how things go and very quickly you realize that there's no one thinking about them there's a few human-sized to this and technical size both of which I'd love to try to get down to so the human side I can tell from my perspective I think it was before April 1st and April Fool's maybe the day before I forget but I was laying in bed in the middle of the night and somehow it popped up you know i am i feed somewhere that your beautiful face is speaking live and i clicked and you know it's kind of weird how the universe just brings things together in this kind of way and all sudden i realized that there's something big happening in this particular moment is strange like any day on a day like any day and all of a sudden you were thinking of you had this somber tone like you were serious like you were going through some difficult decision and it seems strange I almost thought you were maybe joking but there's a serious decision being made and it was a wonderful experience to go through with you I really appreciate it it was April 1st yeah it was it's kind of fascinating him he's just the whole experience and and and so that I want to ask I mean thank you for letting me be part of that kind of journey of decision-making that took 30 years but why now why did you think why did you struggle so long not to release it and decide to release it now Anna while the whole world is on lockdown an April Fool's is it just because you like the comedy of absurd ways that the universe comes together I don't think so I think that the Cova Depa demmick is the end of the big nap and I think that I actually tried this seven years earlier in Oxford so I and it was too early which part was too is it the the platform because your plight different now actually the Internet I remember you I read several your brilliant answers that people should read for the edge one of them was related to the Internet and it was the first one was it the first one yeah that's a called go virtual young man yeah yeah that seemed that's like forever ago now well that was ten years ago and that's exactly what I did is I decamped to the Internet which is where the portal lives the portal the portal yeah the theme that's ramen esteem music he just listened to forever I actually started recording tiny guitar licks for the audio portion not for the video portion you kind of inspired me with bringing your guitar into the story but keep going you see you thought so the Oxford was like step one you kind of yet you put your foot into the in the water to sample it but it was too cold at the time so you didn't want to step in just really disappointed what was disappointing about that experience very is it's a hard thing to talk about it has to do with the fact that and I can see this in this you know as mirrors a disappointment within myself there are two separate issues one is the issue of making sure that the idea is actually heard and explored and the other is the is the question about will I become disconnected from my work because it will be ridiculed it will it will be immediately improved it will be found to be derivative of something that occurred in some paper in 1957 when the community does not want you to gain a voice it's a little bit like a policeman deciding to weirdly and enforce all of these little-known regulations against you and you know sometimes nobody else and I think that's kind of you know this weird thing where I just don't believe that we can reach the final theory necessarily within the political economy of academics so if you think about how academics are tortured by each other and have their paid and where they have freedom and where they don't I actually weirdly think that that system of selective pressures is going to eliminate anybody who's going to make real progress so that's interesting so if you look at the story of Andrew Wiles for example with from last Last Theorem he as far as I understand he pretty much isolated himself from the world of academics in terms of the big with the bulk of the work he did and it from my perspective is dramatic and fun to read about but it seemed exceptionally stressful the first step he took the first steps he took when actually making the work public that's him to me would be hell now but it's like so artificially dramatic you know he leads up to it at a series of lectures he doesn't want to say it and then he finally says it at the end because obviously this comes out of a body of work where I mean the funny part about for Moz le'ts theorem is that wasn't originally thought to be a deep and meaningful problem it was just an easy to state one that had gone unsolved but if you think about it it became attached to the body of regular theory so he built up this body of regular theory gets all the way up to the end announces and then like there's this whole drama about okay somebody's checking the proof I don't understand what's going on on line 37 you know and like oh is this serious seems a little bit more serious than we knew I mean do you see parallels you share the concern that the year your experience might be something similar well in his case I think that if I recall correctly his original proof was unsalvageable he actually came up with a second proof with a colleague Richard Taylor and it was that second proof which carried the day so it was a little bit that he got put under incredible pressure and then had to succeed in a new way having failed the first time which is like even a weirder and stranger store has an incredible story in some sense but I mean a you I'm trying to get a sense of the kind of stress I think this is okay but I'm rejecting what I don't think people understand with me is the scale of the critique it's like I don't you people say well you must implicitly agree with this and implicitly agree it's like now try me ask before you you decide that I am mostly an agreement with the community about how these things should be handled or what these things mean keo keo and also just why this criticism matter so much here so you seem to dislike the burden of criticism that it will choke away all a lot of different kinds of criticism there's constructive criticism and there's destructive criticism and what I don't like is I don't like a community that can't first of all like if you take the physics community just the way we screwed up on masks in PPE just the way we screw it up in the financial crisis and mortgage-backed securities we screw it up on string theory can we just forget the string theory happened or sure but let if somebody should say that right somebody should say you know it didn't work out yeah but okay but you're asking this like why do you guys get to keep the prestige after failing for 35 years that's an interesting point you guys because to me where the profession look these things if there is a theory of everything to be had right it's going to be a relatively small group of people where this will be sorted out absolutely it's it's it's not tens of thousands it's probably hundreds at the top but within that within that community there's the assholes mm-hmm there's the I mean you have you always in this world have people who are kind open my mind is it's a question about okay let's imagine for example that you have a story where you believe that ulcers are definitely caused by stress and you've never questioned it or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of the blue and attacked us at Pearl Harbor right and now somebody introduces a new idea to you which is like what if it isn't stress at all or what if we actually tried to make resource start of Japan attack us somewhere in the Pacific so we could have cast a spell I to enter the Asian theater in persons original ideas like what what do you even say you know it's like two crazy well when Dirac in 1963 talked about the importance of beauty as a guiding principle in physics and he wasn't talking about the scientific method that was crazy talk but he was actually making a great point and he was using Schrodinger and I think it was Schrodinger was standing in for him and he said that if your equations don't agree with experiment that's kind of a minor detail if they have true beauty in them you should explore them because very often the agreement with experiment is that it's an issue of fine tuning of your model of the instantiation and so it doesn't really tell you that your model is wrong and of course Heisenberg told Dirac that his model was wrong because that the proton and the electron should be the same mass if they are each other's antiparticles and that was a an irrelevant kind of silliness rather than a real threat to the Dirac theory but okay so I'm amidst all this silliness hmm I'm hoping that we could talk about the journey that geometric unity has taken and will take as an idea and an idea that will see the light yeah that so first of all let's I'm thinking of writing a book called geometric unity for idiots okay and I need you as a consultant so can we first of all I hope I have the trademark on geometric units you do good can you give a basic introduction of the goals of geometric unity the basic tools of mathematics use the viewpoints in general for idiots Sharik me okay great fun so what's the goal of geometric unity the goal of geometric unity is to start with something so completely bland that you can simply say well that's a something that begins the game is as close to a mathematical nothing as possible in other words I can't answer the question why is there something rather than nothing but if there has to be a something that we begin from let it begin from something that's like a blank canvas that's even more basic so what is something what are we trying to describe okay right now we have a model of our world and it's got two sectors one of the sector's is called general relativity and the other is called the standard model so we'll call it gr for general relativity and SM for standard model what's the difference you need to what did the two describe so general relativity gives pride of place to gravity and everything else is acting is a sort of a backup singer gravity is the star of the show gravity is the star of general relativity and in the standard model the other three non-gravitational forces so if there are four forces that we know about three of the four non-gravitational that's where they get to shine great so tiny little particles and how they interact with each other so photons gluons and so-called intermediate vector bosons those are the things that the standard model showcases and general relativity showcases gravity and then you have matter which is accommodated in both theories but much more beautifully inside of the standard model so what what is a theory of everything do so about that so first of all I think that that's that that's the first place where we haven't talked enough we assume that we know what it means but we don't actually have any idea what it means and what I claim it is is that it's a theory where the questions beyond that theory are no longer of a mathematical nature in other words if I say let us take X to be a four dimensional manifold to a mathematician or physicist I've said very little I've simply said there's some place for calculus and linear algebra to to dance together and to play and that's what manifolds are they're the most natural place where that where our two greatest math theories can really intertwine which are that you own the tacos the linear algebra okay now the question is beyond that so it's sort of like saying I'm an artist and I want to order a canvas now the question is does the canvas paint itself does the can't does the canvas come up with an artist and an in paint in ink which then paint the canvas like that's the that's the hard part about theories of everything which I don't think people talk enough about okay can we just you bring up a sure and then to hand the draws itself is a the fire that lights itself or drawing hands the drawing hands yeah and every time I start to think about that my mind like shuts down no don't do that it there's a spark and this is the most beautiful part we know it's beautiful but this robots brain sparks fly so can we try to say the same thing over and over in different ways about what what would he mean by that having to be a thing we have to contend with sure like why why do you think that understand creating a theory of everything as you call the source code our understanding our source code require a view like the hand that draws itself okay well here's what goes on in the regular physics picture we've got these two main theories general relativity and the standard model right think of general relativity as more or less the theory of the canvas okay maybe you you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape maybe you've measured it so it's got length and it's got an angle but more or less it's just canvas and length and angle and that's all that there's really general relativity is but it allows the canvas to warp a bit then we have the second thing which is this import of foreign libraries where it which aren't tied to space and time so we've got this crazy set of symmetries called su 3 cross su 2 cross u 1 we've got this collection of 16 particles in a generation which are these sort of twisted spinners and we've got three copies of them then we've got this weird Higgs field that comes in and like deus ex machina solves all the problems that have been created in the play that can't be resolved otherwise that's the standard model of quantum field theory just plopped on top yes it's a problem of the the double origin story one origin story is about space and time the other origin story is about what we would call internal quantum numbers and internal symmetries and then there was an attempt to get one to follow from the other called Kaluza klein theory which didn't work out and this is sort of in that vein so you said origins story so in the hand that draws itself what is it so it's it's as if you had the canvas and then you ordered up also give me paint brushes paints pigments pencils and artists but you're saying that's fucked like if you want to create a universe from scratch the canvas should be generating the paintbrushes and the paintbrush and they are turning the canvas yeah yeah right like usually who's the artist in this analogy well this is sorry then we're gonna get to do a religious thing I don't wanna do that okay well you know my shtick which is that we are the AI we have two great stories about the simulation and artificial general intelligence in one story man fears that some program we've given birth to will become self-aware smarter than us and will take over in another story there are genius simulators and we live in their simulation and we haven't realized that those two stories are the same story in one case we are the simulator and another case we are the simulated and if you buy those and you put them together we are the AGI and whether or not we have simulators we may be trying to wake up by learning our own source code so this could be our Skynet moment which is one of the reasons I have some issues around it I think we'll talk about that because I well that's the issue of the emergent artists within the story yeah just to get back to the point okay so so now the key point is the standard way we tell the story is is that Einstein sets the canvas and then we order all the stuff that we want and then that paints the picture that is our universe so you order the the paint you order the artist you order the brushes and that then when you collide the two gives you two separate origin stories the canvas came from one place and everything else came from somewhere else so what are the mathematical tools required to to construct consistent geometric theory you know make this concrete well somehow you need to get three copies for example of generations with 16 particles each right and so the question would be like well there's a lot there's a lot of special personality in those symmetries where would they come from so for example you've got what would be called grand unified theories that sound like su5 the Georgia a theory there's something that should be called spin ten but physicists insist on calling it s o ten there's something called the petit Salam theory that tends to be called su 4 across su 2 cross su 2 which should be called spin six crust spin four I can get into all of these but what are they all accomplishing they're all taking the known forces that we see and packaging them up to say we can't get rid of the second origin story but we can at least make that origin story more unified so they're trying-- grand unification is the attempt that's a mistake in your in you've got a mistake that the problem is it was born lifeless when when Georgia and glasha first came out with the su5 theory it was very exciting because it could be tested in a South Dakota mind filled up with like cleaning fluid or something like that and they look for proton decay and didn't see it and then they gave up because in in that day when your experiment didn't work you gave up on the theory it didn't come to us born of a fusion between Einstein and and and Bohr you know and that was kind of the problem is it had this weird parenting where it was just on the Bohr side there was no Einstein Ian's contribution Lex how can I help you most I'm right here what questions you want to ask so that the most satisfying answers there's there's a there's a bunch there's a bunch of questions I want to ask I mean one and I'm trying to sneak up on you somehow to reveal in an accessible way then the nature of our universe so I can just give you a guess right like I we have to be very careful that we're not claiming that this has been accepted this is a speculation but I will I will make the speculation that what I think what you would want to ask me is how can the canvas generate all the stuff that usually has to be ordered separately all right should we do that let's go there okay so the first thing is is that you have a concept in computers called technical debt you're coding and you cut corners and you know you're gonna have to do it right before the thing is safe for the world but you're piling up some series of i/o used to yourself and your project as you're going along so the first thing is we can't figure out if you have only four degrees of freedom and that's what your canvas is how do you get at least in Stan's world Einstein says look it's not just four degrees of freedom but there need to be rulers and protractors to measure length and angle in the world you can't just have a flabby four degrees of freedom so the first thing you do is you create ten extra variables which is like if we can't choose any particular set of rulers and protractors to measure length and angle let's take the the set of all possible rulers and protractors and that would be called symmetric non-degenerate two tensors on the tangent space of the four manifold X for now because there are four degrees of freedom you start off with four dimensions then you need four rulers for each of those different directions so that's four that gets us up to eight variables and then between four original variables there are six possible angles so four plus four plus six is equal to 14 so now you've replaced x4 with another space which in the lecture I think I called you 14 but are now calling Y 14 is one of the big problems of working on something in private is every time you pull it out you sort of can't remember it you name something something new okay so you've got a fourteen dimensional world which is the original four dimensional world plus a lot of extra gadgetry for measurement and because you're not in the four dimensional world you don't have the technical debt is no now you've got a lot of technical debt because now you have to explain away a fourteen dimensional world which is a big you're taking a huge advance on your pay day check alright but aren't more dimensions allow you more freedom says I mean maybe but you have to get rid of them somehow because we don't perceive them so eventually have to collapse it down to the thing that we perceive or you have to sample a four dimensional filament within that fourteen dimensional world known as the section of a bundle ok so how do we get from the fourteen dimensional world where I imagine a lot of folate yeah you're cheating the first question was how do we get something from almost nothing like how do we get the if I've said that the who and the what in the newspaper story that is a theory of everything are bosons and fermions so let's make the who the fermions and the what the bosons think of as the players and the equipment for a game are we supposed to be thinking of actual physical things with mass or energy okay so they think about everything you see in this room so from chemistry you know it's all protons neutrons and electrons but from a little bit of not late 1960s physics we know that the protons and neutrons are all of up quarks and down quarks so everything in this room is basically up quarks down quarks and electrons stuck together with with the the what the equipment okay now the way we see it currently is we see that there are space-time indices which we would call spinners that correspond to the whoo that is the fermions the matter the stuff the up quarks the down quarks the electrons and there are also 16 degrees of freedom that come from this in the space of internal quantum numbers so in my theory in fourteen dimensions there's no internal quantum number space that figures in it's all just spin oreal so spinners in fourteen dimensions without any festooning with extra linear algebraic information there's a concept of a of spinners which is natural if you have a manifold with length and angle and y 14 is almost a manifold with length and angle it's it's so close it's in other words because you're looking at the space of all rulers and protractors maybe it's not that surprising that a space of rulers and protractors might come very close to having rulers and protractors on it itself like can you measure the space of measurements and you almost can and in a space that has length and angle if it doesn't have a topological obstruction comes with these objects called spinners now the spinners are the stuff of of our world we are made of spinners they're the most important really deep object that I can tell you about they were very surprising what is this spinner so famously there are these weird things that require 720 degrees of rotation in order to come back to normal and that doesn't make sense and be the reason for this is that there's a knotted miss in our three-dimensional world that people don't observe and then you know you can famously see it by this Dirac string trick so if you take a glass of water imagine that this was a tumbler and I didn't want to spill any of it and the question is if I rotate the cup without losing my grip on the base 360 degrees and I can't go backwards is there any way I can take a sip and the answer is this weird motion which is go over first and under second and that that's 720 degrees of rotation to come back to normal so that I can take a set well that weird principle which sometimes is known as the Philippine wineglass dance because waitresses in the Philippines apparently learned how to do this that that move defines if you will this hidden space that nobody knew was there of spinors which Dirac figured out when he took the square root of something called the klein-gordon equation which I think had earlier work incorporated from carton and killing in company in mathematics so the spinners are one of the most profound aspects of human existence and you forgive me for the perhaps dumb questions but what a spinner be the mathematical objects that's the basic unit of our universe when you when you start with a manifold which is just like something like a doughnut or a sphere circle or a Mobius band a spinner is usually the first wildly surprising thing that you found was hidden in your original purchase so you you order a manifold and you didn't even realize it's like buying a house and finding a panic room inside that you hadn't counted on it's very surprising when you understand that spinners are running around on your spaces again perhaps a dumb question but we're talking about 14 dimensions and four dimensions what is the manifold or operating under in my case it's proto space it's before it's before Einstein can slap rulers and protractors on space time and what you mean by that sorry to interrupt is space time is the 4d manifold space-time is a four dimensional manifold with extra structure most the extra structure it's called a semi Romanian or pseudo Romani and metric in in essence there is something akin to a four by four symmetric matrix from which is equivalent to length and angle so when I talk about rulers and protractors or I talk about length and angle or I talk about romani and or pseudo Romani and or semi Romani and met manifolds I'm usually talking about the same thing can you measure how long something is and what the angle is between two different rays or vectors so that's what Einstein gave us as his arena his place to play his his canvas so there's a bunch of questions I can ask here but like I said I'm working on this book geometric unity for he it's and I think what would be really nice as your editor to have like beautiful maybe even visualizations that people could try to play with try to try to reveal small little beauties about the way you're thinking about the squirrel I'll usually use the Joe Rogan program for that sometimes I have him doing the Philippine wine glass dance I had the hopf fibration the part of the problem is is that most people don't know this language about spinners bundles metrics gauge fields and they're very curious about the theory of everything but they have no understanding of even what we know about our own world is it hole is it a hopeless pursuit so like even gauge theory right just this I mean it seems to be very inaccessible is there some aspect of it that could be made accessible I'm actually go to the board right there and give you a five minute lecture on engaged theory that would be better than the official lecture engaged there you would know what gauge there was so it is it's possible to make it accessible yeah but nobody does like in other words you're gonna watch over the next year lots of different discussions of a quantum entanglement or you know the multiverse where are we now right or you know many worlds are they all equally real yeah did that right I mean yeah that that's it but you're not gonna hear anything about the hopf fibration except if it's from me and I hate that why why can't you be the one but because I'm going a different path I think that we've made a huge mistake which is we have things we can show people about the actual models we can push out visualizations where they they're not listening my analogy they're watching the same thing that we're seeing and as I've said to you before this is like choosing to perform sheet music that hasn't been performed in a long time or you know the experts can't afford orchestras so they just trade Beethoven symphonies and as sheet music and they oh wow that was beautiful but it's like nobody heard anything they just looked at the score well that's how mathematicians and physicists trade papers and ideas is that they they write down the things that represent stuff I want to at least close out the thought line that you started yes which is how does the canvas order all of this other stuff into being so I at least like I say some incomprehensible things about that and then we'll we'll have that much done all right and that just point does it have to be incomprehensible do you know what the Schrodinger equation is yes do you know what the Dirac equation is what does know mean well my point is you're gonna have some feeling that you know what the Schrodinger equation yes as soon as we get to the Dirac equation your eyes are gonna get a little bit glazed right so now why is that well the answer to me this is that you you want to ask me about the theory of everything but you haven't even digest the theory of everything as we've had it since 1928 when Dirac came out with his equation so for whatever reason and this isn't a hit on you yeah you haven't been motivated enough in all the time that you've been on earth to at least get as far as the Dirac equation and this was very interesting to me after I gave the talk in Oxford New Scientist who'd done kind of a hatchet job on me to begin with sent a reporter to come to the third version of the talk that I gave and that person had never heard of the Dirac equation so you have a person who was completely professionally not qualified to ask these questions wanting to know well how does how does your theory solve new problems like well in the case of the Dirac equation well tell me about that I don't know what that is so then the point is okay I got it you're not even caught up minimally to where we are now and that's not a knock on you almost nobody is yeah but how does it become my job to digest what has been available for like over 90 years well to me the open question is whether what's been available for over 90 years can be there could be a a blueprint of a journey that one takes to understand it not oh I want to do that with you and I I one of the things I think I've been relatively successful at for example you know when you ask other people what gauge theory is you get these very confusing responses and my response is much simpler it's oh it's a theory of differentiation where when you calculate the instantaneous rise over run you measure the rise not from a flat horizontal but from a custom endogenous reference level what do you mean by that it's like okay and then I do this thing with Mount Everest which is man Everest is how high then they give the height I say above what then they say sea level and I say which sea is that in Nepal like oh I guess there isn't a sea cuz it's landlocked it's like okay well what do you mean by sea level oh there's this thing called the geoid I'd never heard of oh that's the reference level it's a custom reference level that we imported so you all sorts of people have remembered the exact height of Mount Everest without ever knowing what it's a height from well in this case in gauge Theory there's a hidden reference level where you measure the rise in rise over run to give the slope of the line what if you have different concepts of what of where that rise should be measured from that vary within the theory that are endogenous to the theory that's what gauge theory is okay we have a video here right yeah okay I'm gonna use my phone if I want to measure my hand and its slope this is my attempt to measure it using standard calculus in other words the reference level is apparently flat and I measure the rise above that phone using my hand okay if I want to use gauge theory it means I can do this or I can do that or I can do this or I can do this or I could do what I did from the beginning okay at some level that's what gauge theory is now that is an act no I've never heard anyone describe it that way so while the community may say well who is this guy and why does he have the right to talk in public I'm waiting for somebody to jump out of the woodwork and say you know Eric's whole shtick about rulers and protractors leading to a derivative derivatives are measured as rise over run above a reference level of reference levels don't fit to get like I go through this whole shtick in order to make it accessible I've never heard anyone say it I'm trying to make the Prometheus would like to discuss fire with everybody else all right I'm gonna just say one thing to close out the earlier line which is what I think we should have continued with when you take the naturally occurring spinners the unadorned spinners the naked spinners not on this fourteen dimensional manifold but on something very closely tied to it which I've called the chimeric tangent bundle that is the the object which stands in for the thing that should have had length and angle on Abbott just missed okay when you take that object and you form spinners on that and you don't adorn them so you're still in the single origin story you get very large spin oriole objects upstairs on this 14 dimensional world y 14 which is part of the observers when you pull that information back from y 14 down to X 4 it miraculously looks like the adorned spinners the festooned spinners the spinners that we play with in ordinary reality in other words the 14 dimensional world looks like a four dimensional world plus a 10 dimensional complement so 10 plus 4 equals 14 that 10 dimensional complement which is called a normal bundle generates spin properties internal quantum numbers that look like the things that give our particles personality then make let's say up quarks and down quarks charged by negative one-third or plus two thirds you know that kind of stuff or whether or not you know some quarks feel the weak force and other quarks do not so the x4 generates Y 14 y 14 generates something called the chimeric tangent bundle chimeric tangent bundle generates unadorned spinners the unadorned spinners get pulled back from 14 down to 4 where they look like adorned spinners and we have the right number of them you thought you needed 3 you only got 2 but then something else that you've never seen before broke apart on this journey and it broke into another copy of the thing that you already have two copies of one piece of that thing broke off so now you have two generations plus an imposter third generation which is I don't know why we never talked about this possibility in regular physics and then you've got a bunch of stuff that we haven't seen which has descriptions so people always say does it make any falsifiable predictions yes it does it says that the matter that you should be seeing next has particular properties that can be read like like we guys to spend weak hypercharge like the responsiveness to the strong force the one I can't tell you is what energy scale it would happen it say you would if you can't say if those characteristics can be detected with current it may be that somebody else can I'm not a physicist I'm not a quantum field theory I can't I I don't know how you would do that the the hope for me is that there's some simple explanations for all of it Lex should we have a drink you're having fun no I'm trying to have fun with you you know I had there's a bunch of fun things to talk about here anyway that was how I got what I thought you wanted which is if you think about the fermions as the artists and the bosons as the brushes and the paint what I told you is that's how we get the artists what are the open questions for you in this what were the challenges so you're not done well there's the things that I would like to have in better order so a lot of people will say see the reason I hesitated on this is I just have a totally different view than the community so for example I believe that general relativity began in 1913 with Einstein and Grossman now that was the first of like four major papers in this line of thinking to most physicists general relativity happened when Einstein produced a divergence free gradient which turned out to be the gradient of the so-called Hilbert or Einstein Hilbert action and from my perspective that wasn't true is is that it began when Einstein said look this is about differential geometry and it's the final answer is going to look like a curvature tensor on one side and matter and energy on the other side and that was enough and then he published a wrong of it where it was the Ricci tensor not the Einstein tensor then he corrected the reach the Ricci tensor to make it into the Einstein tensor then he corrected that to add a cosmological constant I can't stand that the community thinks in those terms there's some things about which like that there's a question about which contraction do I use there's an Einstein contraction there's a Ricci contraction they both go between the same spaces I'm not sure what I should do I'm not sure which contraction I should choose this is called a Shia operator for ship-in-a-bottle and my stuff you have this big platform in many ways that inspires people's curiosity about physics yeah automatics right now and I'm one of those people and great but then you start using a lot of words that I don't understand and like I might know them but I don't understand and what's unclear to me if I'm supposed to be listening to those words or if it's just if this is one of those technical things that's intended for a very small community or if I'm supposed to actually take those words and start you know a multi-year study not not a serious study but a the kind of study when you you're interested in learning about machine learning for example or any kind of discipline that's where I'm a little bit confused so you you speak beautifully about ideas you often reveal the beauty in Mathematica matauri and I'm unclear and what are the steps I should be taking I I'm curious how can I explore how can i play with something how can i play with these ideas well and and enjoy the beauty of not necessarily understanding the depth of a theory that you're presenting but start to share in the beauty as opposed to sharing in and enjoying the beauty of just the way the passion with which you speak which is in itself fun to listen to but also starting to be able to understand some aspects of this theory that I can enjoy it too and start to build an intuition what the heck we're even talking about because you're basically saying we need to throw a lot of our ideas of views of the universe out and I'm trying to find accessible ways in okay long not in this conversation no I appreciate that so one of the things that I've done is I've picked on one paragraph from Edward Witten and I said this is the paragraph if I could only take one paragraph with me this is the one I'd take and it's almost all in prose not an equation and he says look this is this is our knowledge of the universe at its deepest level and he was writing this during the 1980s and he has three separate points that constitute our deepest knowledge and those three points refer to equations one to the Einstein field equation one to the Dirac equation and one to the yang-mills Maxwell equation now one thing I would do is take a look at that paragraph and say okay what do these three lines mean like it's a finite amount of verbiage you can write down every word that you don't know you can say what do I think done now young man yes there's a beautiful wall in Stoneybrook New York built by someone who I know you will interview named Jim silence and Jim silence and he's not the artist but he's the guy who funded an world's greatest hedge fund manager and on that wall contained the three equations that Witten refers to in that paragraph and so that is the transmission from the paragraph or graph to the wall now that wall needs an owner's manual which Roger Penrose has written called the road to reality let's call that the tome so this is the subject of the so-called graph wall tome project that is going on in our discord server and our general around the portal community which is how do you take something that purports in one paragraph to say what the deepest understanding man has of the universe in which he lives it's memorialized on a wall which nobody knows about which is an incredibly gorgeous piece of art and that was written up in a book which is has been written for no man right maybe if maybe it's for a woman I don't know but no no one should be able to read this book because either you're a professional and you know a lot of this book in which case it's kind of a refreshers to see how Roger thinks about these things or you don't even know that this book is a self-contained invitation to understanding our deepest nature so I would say find yourself in the graph wall tome transmission sequence and join the graph wall tome project if that's of interest okay beautiful now just to linger on a little longer what kind of journey do you see geometric unity taking I don't know I mean that's the thing is that first of all the professional community has to get very angry and outraged and they have to work through their feelings this is nonsense this is bullshit or like no wait a minute this is really cool actually I need some clarification over here so there's going to be some sort of weird coming back together process are you already hearing murmurings of that it was very funny officially I've seen very little so it's perhaps happening quietly yeah you often talk about we need to get off this planet yep can I try to sneak up on that by asking what in your kind of view is the difference the gap between the science of it theory and the actual engineering of building something that leverages the theory to do something like how big is that we don't know gap I mean if you have ten extra dimensions to play with that are the rulers and protractors of the world themselves can you gain access to those dimensions do you have a hunch so I don't know I don't want to get ahead of myself because the you have to appreciate I can have hunches and I can I can jaw off but one of the ways that I'm succeeding in this world is to not bow down to my professional communities nor to ignore them like I'm actually interested in the criticism I just wanted denature it so that it's not personally interpersonal and irrelevant I believe that they don't want me to speculate and I don't need to speculate about this I can centrally say I'm open to the idea that it may have engineering prospects and it may be a death sentence we may find out that there's not enough new here that even if it were right that there would be nothing new to do can't tell you that's what you mean by death sentences there would not be exciting breakthrough terrible if you couldn't like you can do new things in an Einsteinian world that you couldn't do in a Newtonian world right you know like you have twin paradoxes or Lorentz contraction of length or any one of a number of new cool things happen in relativity theory that didn't happen for Newton what if there wasn't new stuff to do at the next and final level so that would be quite sad let me ask a silly question but we'll say it with a straight face impossible so let me mention Elon Musk what are your thoughts about he's more you're more on the physics theory side of things he's more in the physics engineering side of things in terms of SpaceX efforts what do you think of his efforts to uh get off this planet well I think he's the other guy who's sent me serious about getting off this planet I think they're two of us were semi serious about getting off the planet what do you think about his methodology and yours when you look at them don't and I don't be against you because like I was so excited that like your top video was reycarts file and then I did your podcast and we had some chemistry so it's oom DUP yeah and I thought okay I'm gonna betray curse sauce so just as I'm coming up on Ray Kurzweil like and now Alex Friedman special Elon Musk and he blew me out of the water so I don't want to be petty about it I want to say that I don't could I am yeah okay because the funny part he's not taking enough risk like he's trying to get us to Mars imagine that he got us to Mars the moon and we'll throw in Titan and know we're good enough the diversification level is too low now there's a compatibility first of all I don't think he Lana's serious is about Mars I think Elon is using Mars as a narrative as a stories and to make the moon jealous it makes it I think he's using it as a story to organize us to reacquaint ourselves with our need for space our need to get off this planet it's a concrete thing he's shown that many people think that he's shown that he's the most brilliant and capable person on the planet I don't think that's what he showed I think he showed that the rest of us have forgotten our capabilities so he's like the only guy who has still kept the faith and is like what's wrong with you people so you think the lesson we should draw from Elon Musk is there's a is a capable person within within a lot of us you on make sense to me in what way he's doing what any sensible person should do he's trying incredible things and he's partially succeeding partially failing to try to solve the obvious problems before uh yeah you know but he comes up with things like you know I got it we'll come up with a battery company but batteries aren't sexy so well we'll make a car around it like great you know or any one of a number of things Elon is behaving like a same person and I view everyone else's insane and my feeling is is that we really have to get off this planet we have to get out of this we have to get out of the neighborhood tilling I know a little bit do you think that's a physics problem or an engineering problem he's a cowardice problem I think that we're afraid that we had 400 hitters of the mind like Einstein in Dirac and that that era is done and now we're just sort of copy editors so some of it money like if we become brave enough yeah go outside the solar system can we afford to financially well I think that's not really the issue the issue is look what Elon did well he amassed a lot of money and then he you know he plowed it back in and he spun he spun the wheel and he made more money and now he's got fu money now the problem is is that a lot of the people who have fu money are not people whose middle finger you ever want to see I want to see you Long's middle finger I want to see what I mean by that or like when you say fuck it I'm gonna do the biggest go see whatever the fuck you want Yeah right fuck you fuck anything that gets in his way that he can afford to push out of his way and you're saying he's not actually even doing that enough no I mean he's not going please I want to go Elon is doing fine with his money I just want him to enjoy himself have the most you know die nice you know but you're saying Mars is playing it safe he doesn't know how to do anything else he knows rockets yeah and he might know some physics at a fundamental level yeah I guess okay just let me just like go right back to you how much physics do you really how much brilliant breakthrough ideas on the physics side do you need to get off this planet I don't know and I don't know whether like in my most optimistic dream I don't know whether my stuff gets us off the planet but it's hope it's hope that there's a more fundamental theory that we can access that we don't need you know whose elegance and beauty will suggest that this is probably the way the universe goes like you have to say this weird thing which is this I believe and this I believe is a very dangerous statement but this I believe I believe that my theory points the way now Elon might or might not be able to access my theory I don't know I don't know what he knows but keep in mind why are we all so focused on you on it's really weird it's kind of creepy to what he's just a person who's just asking the the obvious questions and doing whatever he can but he makes sense to me you sent craig venter makes sense to me Jim Watson makes sense to me but we're focusing on Elon because he's he somehow is rare well that's the weird thing like we've come up with a system that eliminates all Elon from our pipeline and Elon somehow snuck through when they were quality adjusting everything you know and this this idea of of disk I distributed idea suppression complex yeah is that what's bringing the in-laws of the world down you know so funny it's like he's asking Joe Rogan like is that a joint you know it's like well what will happen if I smoke it what will happen to the stock price what will happen if I scratch myself in public what will happen if I say what I think about Thailand or kovat or who knows what and everybody's like don't say that say this go do this go do that well it's crazy-making it's absolutely crazy making and if you think about what we put through people through we need to get people who can use fu money the fu money they need to insulate themselves from all of the people who know better because the my nightmare is is that why did we only get one ilan what if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of yuan and the weird thing is like this is all that remains you're looking at like obi-wan and Yoda and it's like this is the only this is all that's left after X order 66 has been executed and that's the thing that's really upsetting to me is we used we used to have Ilan's five deep and then we could talk about Elon in the context of his cohort but this is like if you were to see a raph in the Arctic with no trees around you'd think why the long neck what a strange sight you know how do we get more lawns how do we change these so I think the useful so we know MIT yeah and Harvard so can maybe returning to our previous conversation my sense is that the Ilan's of the world are supposed to come from MIT in Harvard right and how do you change let's think of one that MIT sort of killed have any names in mind Aaron Schwartz leaps to my mind yeah okay are we MIT supposed to shield the Aaron Schwartz's from I don't know journal publishers or are we supposed to help the journal publishers so that we can throw 35 year sentences in his face or whatever it is that we did that depressed him okay so here's my point yeah I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz and if you want to send Aaron Schwartz to a state where he's looking at 35 years in prison or something like that you are my sworn enemy you are not MIT yeah you are the traitorous irresponsible middlebrow pencil-pushing green eyeshade fool that needs to not be in the seat at the presidency of MIT period the end get the fuck out of there and let one of our people sit in that chair and think that you've articulated is that the people in those chairs are not the way they are because they're evil or somehow morally compromised is that it's just that that's the distributed nature is that there's some kind of aspect of the system there's people who width emselves to the system they adapt every instinct and the fact is is that they're not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt that let me ask a silly question do you think institutions generally just tend to become that no we get some of the institution we get Caltech here's what we're supposed to have we're supposed to have Caltech we're supposed to have a read we're supposed to have Deep Springs we're supposed to have MIT we're supposed to have a part of Harvard and when the sharp elbow crowd comes after the Scheldt sharp mine crowd we're supposed to break those sharp elbows and say don't come around here again so what are the weapons that the sharp mines are supposed to use in our modern day so to reclaim MIT what is the what's the future are you kidding me first of all assume that this is being seen at MIT hey everybody is OK hey everybody try to remember who you are you're the guys who put the police car on top of the great dump you you guys came up with the great breasts of knowledge you created a Tetris game in the green building now what is your problem they killed one of your own you should make their life a living hell you should be the ones who keep the mayor memory of Aaron Schwartz alive and all of those hackers and all of those mutants you know it's like it's either our place or it isn't and if we have to throw 12 more pianos off of the roof right if Harold Edgerton is taking those photographs you know with slow-mo back in the 40s if Noam Chomsky's on your faculty what the hell is wrong with you kids you are the most creative and insightful people and you can't figure out how to defend Aaron Schwartz that's on you guys so some of that is giving more power to the young like you said you know it's a brazing towel rub taking power from the feeble and the middle Brown yeah but how do you what is the mechanism to me I don't know you you have some 9-volt batteries no copper wire I attend to you have a capacitor I tend to believe you have to create an alternative and make the alternative so much better that it makes MIT obsolete unless they change and that's what forces change so supposed took somehow okay so use projection mapping most projection mapping where you take some complicated edifice and you map all of its planes and then you actually project some unbelievable graphics rescanning a building let's say at night say okay so you want to do some graffiti art with you basically want to hack the system know when I say look listen to me Lee yeah we're smarter than they are and they you know what they say they say things like I think we need some geeks get me two PhDs right you treat phd's like that that's a bad move PhDs are capable and we act like our job is to peel grapes for our betters yeah that this is strange thing and I you speak about it very eloquently is how we treat basically the greatest minds in the world which is like at at their prime which is PhD students like that we pay them nothing we I'm done with it yeah right we gotta take what's ours so it so yeah take back MIT become uncover nerble become uncover noble and by the way when you become uncover nerble don't do it by throwing food don't do it by pouring salt on the lawn like a jerk do it through brilliance because what you Caltech and MIT can do and maybe Rensselaer Polytechnic or Wooster politic I don't know Lehigh goddamnit what's wrong with you technical people you act like you're a servant class it's unclear to me how you reclaim it except with brilliance like you said but to me that the way you were claimed it was brilliant Segal system Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class what you guys gonna do about it right if super capable people need to flex need to be individual they need to stop giving away all their power to you know is like Geist or a community or this or that you're not you're not indoor cats your outdoor cats go be outdoor cat do you think we're gonna see this this kind of asking me you know before like what about the World War two generation right when I'm trying to say is that there's a technical revolt coming here's you weren't talking about that I'm trying to lead it yeah I'm trying to see no you're not trying a lot you're trying to get a blueprint here all right Lex yeah how angry are you about our country pretending that you and I can't actually do technical subjects so that they need an army of kids coming in from four countries in Asia it's not about the four countries in Asia it's not about those kids it's about lying about us that we don't care enough about science and technology that we're incapable of it as if we don't have Chinese and Russians and Koreans and Croatians like we've got everybody here the only reason you're looking outside is is that you want to hire cheap people from the family business because you don't want to pass the family business on and you know what you didn't really build the family business it's not yours to decide you the boomers and you the Silent Generation you did your bit but you also followed a lot of stuff up and your custodians you are caretakers you were supposed to hand something what you did instead was to gorge yourself on cheap foreign labor but you then held up as being much more brilliant than your own children which was never true but I'm trying to understand how we create a better system without anger without revolution no not not by kissing and hugs and and but by I mean I don't understand within MIT what the mechanism of building a better MIT is we're not gonna pay Elsevier Aaron Schwartz was right JSTOR is an abomination but why who would then MIT who within institutions is going to do that when just like you said the people who are running the show are more senior and if Frank will check to speak out so year is basically individuals that step up I mean one of the surprising things about Elon is that one person can inspire so much he's got academic freedom it just comes from money I don't agree with that do you think money okay so yes certainly sorry an testicle you yes but those are more important than money right or guts I I think I do agree with you you speak about this a lot that because the money in the academic institutions has been so constrained that people are misbehaving in in in horrible yes but I don't think that if we reverse that and give a huge amount of money people will also behave well I think it also takes guts so you need to give people security security yeah like you need to know there you have a job yeah on Monday when on Friday you say I'm not so sure I really love diversity and inclusion and somebody's looking wait what you didn't love diverse we had a statement on diversity and you wouldn't sign are you against the inclusion part or are you against diverse do you just not like people like you like actually that has nothing to do with anything you're making this into something that it isn't I don't want to sign your goddamn stupid statement and get out of my lab right get out of my lab it all begins from the middle finger get out of my lab the administrators need to find other work yeah listen I agree with you and I I hope to seek your advice and and wisdom as we change this because I'd love to see I will visit you in prison if that's what you're asking I have no I think prison is great you get a lot of reading done and then when good working out well let me ask the something I brought up before is the Nietzsche quote of beware that when fighting monsters you yourself do not become a monster for when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss gazes into you are you worried that your focus on the flaws in the system that we've just been talking about has damaged your mind or the part of the mind of your mind that's able to see the beauty in the world in the system that because you have so sharply been able to see the flaws in the system you can no longer step back and appreciate it speeding look I'm the one who's trying to get the institutions to save themselves by getting rid of inhabitants believing the institution like a neutron bomb that removes the unworkable leadership class but leaves the structures so I equals so the leadership classes really the problem the leadership class is that the individual like the professor's Dean video scholar the professor's are gonna have to go back into training to remember how to be professors like people are cowards at the moment because if they're not cowards they're unemployed yeah that's one of the disappointing things I've encountered is to me tenure they don't nobody has tenure now why whether they do or not they certainly don't have character not the kind of character and fortitude that I was hoping to see to me but they'd be gone but see you're dreaming about the people who used to live at MIT you're dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university and if you looked at somebody like you know isadora singer is very old I don't know what state he's in but that guy was absolutely the real deal and if you look at Noam Chomsky tell me that Noam Chomsky has been muzzled right yeah now what I'm trying to get at is you're talking about younger energetic people but those people like when I say something like I'm against I'm for word inclusion and I'm for diversity but I'm against diversity and inclusion TM like the movement well I couldn't say that if I was a professor oh my god he's against our sacred document okay well in that kind of a world do you want to know how many things I don't agree with you on it like we could go on for days and days and days all of the nonsense that you've parroted inside of the institution any sane person like has no need for it they have no want or desire do you think you have to have some patience for nonsense when many people work together in a system how long a string theory go for and how long have I been patient okay so you're talking about a mid two patients I'm talking about like 36 years of modern nonsense and string theory say you can do like eight to ten years but not more I can do 40 minutes this is 30 sleeve stone now over two hours or no but I appreciate it but it's been 36 years of nonsense since the anomaly cancellation in in string theory it's like what are you talking about about patients I mean Lex you're not even acting like yourself now at what you're trying to stay in the system and I'm not sure I'm not I'm trying to see if perhaps so so my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it which you highlight and the fundamentals of the system are broken because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken then I just don't see a way for MIT to succeed like I don't see how young people take over MIT I don't see how by inspiring us you know the great part about being at MIT like when you saw the the genius in these pranks the heart the irreverence yeah it's like don't do it then we were talking about Tom Lehrer the last time Tom Lehrer was as naughty as the day is long agreed agreed was he also a genius was he well-spoken was he highly cultured he was so talented so intellectual that he could just make fart jokes morning noon and night yeah okay well in part the right to make fart jokes the right to for example put a functioning phone booth that was ringing on top of the Great Dome at MIT has to do with we are such badasses that we can actually do this stuff well don't tell me about it anymore go break the law go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not want to prosecute you may break the law in a way that lets us know that you're calling us out on our bullshit that you're filled with love and that our technical talent has not gone to sleep it's not incapable you know and if the idea is that you're gonna dig a moat around the University and fill it with tiger sharks that's awesome because I don't know how you're gonna do it but if you actually manage to do that I'm not going to prosecute you prosecute you under a reckless endangerment man that's beautifully put I hope those first of all they'll listen I hope young people and mighty will take over in this in this kind of way in the introduction to your podcast episode on Jeff Epstein you give to me a really moving story but unfortunately for me to brief about your experience with a therapist and the lasting terror that permeated your mind can you uh can you go there can you tell I don't think so I mean I appreciate what you're saying I said it obliquely I said enough there are bad people who cross our paths and the current vogue is to say oh I'm a survivor I'm a victim I can do anything I want this is a broken person and I don't know why I was sent to a broken person as a kid and to be honest with you I also felt like in that story I say that I was able to say no you know and this was like the entire weight of authority and he was misusing his position and I was also able to say no what I couldn't say no to was having him reinf lichte Din my life I see you were sent back yeah second time I tried to complain about what had happened I tried to do it in a way that did not immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself because I didn't we don't have the tools to deal with sexual misbehavior we have nuclear weapons we don't have any way of saying this is probably not a good place or a role for you at this moment as an authority figure and something needs to be worked on so in general when we see somebody who is misbehaving in that way our immediate instinct is to treat the person as you know Satan and we understand why we don't want our children to be at risk now I personally believe that I fell down on the job and did not call out the Jeffrey Epstein thing early enough because I was terrified of what Jeffrey Epstein represents and this recapitulated the old terror trying to tell the world this therapist is out of control and when I said that the world responded by saying well you have two appointments booked and you have to go for the second one so I got reinfected into this office on this person who was now convinced that I was about to tear down his career and his reputation it might have been on the verge of suicide for all I know I don't know but he was very very angry and he was furious with me that I had breached a sacred confidence of his office what kind of ripple effects does that have has that head to the rest of your life the absurdity and the cruelty of that I mean there's no sense to it well see this is the thing people don't really grasp I think there's an academic who I got to know many years ago named Jennifer fried who has a theory of betrayal which she calls institutional betrayal and her gambit is is that when you were betrayed by an institution that is sort of like a fiduciary or a parental obligation to take care of you that you find yourself in a far different situation with respect to trauma than if you were betrayed by somebody who's a peer and so I think that my in my situation I kind of repeat a particular dynamic with authority I come in not following all the rules trying to do some things not trying to do others blah blah blah and then I get into a weird relationship with authority and so I have more barians with what I would call institutional betrayal now the funny part about it is that when you don't have masks or PPE in a influenza like pandemic and you're missing ICU beds and ventilators that is ubiquitous institutional betrayal so I believe that in a weird way I was very early the idea of and this is like tough the really hard concept pervasive or otherwise Universal institutional betrayal where all of the institutions you can count on any hospital to not charge you properly for what their services are you can count on no pharmaceutical company to produce the drug that will be maximally beneficial to the people who take it you know that your financial professionals are not simply working in your best interest and that issue had to do with the way in which growth left of our system so I think that the weird thing is is that this first institutional betrayal by a therapist left me very open to the idea of okay well maybe the schools are bad maybe the hospitals are bad maybe the drug companies are bad maybe our food is off maybe our journalists are not serving journalistic ends and that was what allowed me to sort of go all the distance and say huh I wonder if our problem is that something is causing all of our sense making institutions to be off that was the big insight and that tying that to a single ideology what if it's just about growth they were all built on growth and now we've promoted people who are capable of keeping quiet that their institutions aren't working so we've the privileged silent aristocracy the people who can be counted upon not to mention a fire when a raging fire is tearing through a building but nevertheless it's how big of a psychological burden is that it's huge it's terrible I mean rushing it's it's very it's very comforting to be the parental I mean I don't know I I treasure I mean we were just talking about MIT we can until I can intellectualize and agree with everything you're saying but there's a comfort a warm blanket of being within the institution and up until him Aaron Schwartz let's say in other words now if I look at the provost and the president as mommy and daddy you did what to my big brother you did what to our family you sold us out in which way what secrets left for China you hired which workforce you did what to my wages you took this portion of my grant for what purpose you just stole my retirement through a fringe rate what did you do but can you still I mean thing is about this view you have is it often turns out to be sadly correct well this is the thing and but that let me just in this silly hopeful thing do you still have hope and institutions can you win you psycho psychologically yes I'm referring not intellectually because you have to carry this burden can you still have a hope like within you Jake that when you sit a home alone and as opposed to seeing the darkness within these institutions seeing a hope well but this is the thing I want to confront not for the purpose of a dust-up I believe for example if you've heard episode 19 that the best outcome is for Carol Greider to come forward as we discussed in episode 19 would your brother Brett honest and say you know what so I screwed up he did call he did suggest the experiment I didn't understand that it was his theory that was producing it maybe I was slow to grasp it but my bad and I don't want to pay for this bad choice on my part let's say for the rest of my career I want to own up and I want to help make sure that we do what's right with what's left and that's one little case within the institution they would like to see made I would like to see MIT very clearly come out and you know Margo O'Toole was right when she said David Baltimore's lab here produced some stuff that was not reproducible with Teresa and Minnie shakarez research I want to see the courageous people I would like to see a the Aaron Schwartz wing of the computer science department yeah wouldn't know let's think about it yeah wouldn't that be great if they said you know an injustice was done and we're gonna we're gonna write that wrong just as if this was Alan Turing which I don't think they've righted that wrong well then let's have the Turing Schwartz way to ensure they're starting a new college of computing it wouldn't be wonderful to call it the the toyish why I would like to have the Madame wooing of the physics department and I'd love to have the Emmy nerd er statue in front of the math department I mean like you want to get excited about actual diversity and inclusion yeah well let's go with our absolute best people who never got theirs because there is structural bigotry you know but if we don't actually start celebrating the beautiful stuff that we're capable of when we're handed heroes and we fumble them into the trash what the hell I mean Lex this is such nonsense we just pulling our head out you know the on everyone's cecum should be tattooed if you can read this you're too close beautifully put and I'm a dream or just like you so I don't see as much of the darkness genetically or due to my life experience but I do share the hope from my teeth as you should know we care a lot about you both do yeah and a harvard institution i don't give a damn about but you do so I love Harvard I'm just kidding i yeah i love harvard but rude and i have a very difficult relationship and part of what you know when you love a family that isn't working I don't want to trash I I didn't bring up the name of the president of MIT during the Aaron Schwartz period it's not vengeance I want the rot cleared out I don't need to go after human beings yeah just like you said with the with a disc formulation they individual human beings aren't don't necessarily carry them it's those chairs that are so powerful that in which they sit it's the chairs not the human it's not the humans without naming names can you tell the story of your struggle during your time at Harvard maybe in a way that tells the bigger story of the struggle of young bright minds that are trying to come up with big bold ideas within the institutions that we're talking about you can start I mean in part it starts with coffee with a couple of Croatians in the math department at MIT and we used to talk about music and dance and math and physics and love and all this kind of stuff as Eastern Europeans love to and I ate it up and my friend Gordana who was an instructor in the MIT math department when I was a graduate student at Harvard said to me I'm probably gonna do a bad version of her accent there we go it will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar and I said what secret seminar it don't joke I said I'm not used to this style of humor Gordon she's getting the secret seminar that your adviser is running I said what are you talking about ha ha ha you know your advisor is running a secret seminar on this aspect I think it was like the chern-simons invariants I'm not sure what the topic was again but she gave me the room number and the time and she was like not cracking a smile I've never known her to make this kind of a joke and I thought this was crazy and I was trying to have an advisor I didn't want an advisor but people said you have to have one so I took one and I went to this room at like 15 minutes early and there was not a soul inside it it was outside of the math department and was still in the same building the Science Center at Harvard and I sat there and let five minutes go by hey I let seven minutes go by ten minutes go by there's nobody I thought okay so this was all an elaborate joke and then like three minutes to the hour this graduate student walks in and like sees me and does a double take and then I start to see the professors in geometry and topology start to file in and everybody's like very disconcerted that I'm in this room and finally the person who is supposed to be my advisor walks in to the seminar and sees me and goes white as a ghost and I realized that the secret seminar is true that the department is conducting a secret seminar on the exact topic that I'm interested in not telling me about it and that these are the reindeer games that the Rudolph's of the department are not invited to and so then I realize okay I did not understand it there's a parallel department and that became the beginning of an incredible Odyssey in which I came to understand that the game that I had been sold about publication about blind refereeing about openness and scientific transmission of information was all a lie I came to understand that at the very top there's a second system that's about closed closed meetings and private communications and agreements about citation and publication that the rest of us don't understand and that in large measure that is the thing that I won't submit to and so when you ask me questions like well why wouldn't you feel good about you know talking to your critics or why wouldn't you feel the answer is oh you don't know like if you stay in a nice hotel you don't realize that there is an entire second structure inside of that hotel where like there's usually a workers cafe in a resort complex that isn't available to the people who are staying in the hotel and then there are private hallways inside the same hotel that are parallel structures so that's what I found which was in essence just the way you can stay hotels your whole life and not realize that inside of every hotel is a second structure that you're not supposed to see is the guest there is a second structure inside of academics that behaves totally differently with respect to how people get dinged how people get their grants taken away how this person comes to have that thing named after them and by pretending that we're not running a parallel structure I have no patience for that way anymore so the I got a chance to see how the game how hard ball is really played at Harvard and I'm now eager to play hardball back with the same people who played hardball with me let me ask two questions on this so one do you think it's possible so I call those people assholes but that's the technical term do you think it's possible that that's just not the entire system but a part of the system sort of that there's you can navigate you can swim in the waters and find the groups of people who do aspire to the guy who wrestled my PhD was one of the people who filed in - the secret seminar right but are there pedestrian side of this right is he an asshole well yes I was as a bad no but I'm trying to make this point which is this isn't my failure to correctly map these people it's yours you know who has a simplification that isn't gonna work I think okay as I was the wrong term I would say lacking of character and what would you have had these people do why did they do this why have a secret seminar I don't understand the exact dynamics of a secret seminar but I think the right thing to do is to I mean to see individuals like you there might be a reason to have a secret seminar but they should detect that an individual like you a brilliant mind who's thinking about certain ideas could be damaged by this I don't think they see it that way the idea is we're going to sneak food to the children we want to survive yeah so that that's highly problematic and there should be people within that road I'm trying to say this is the thing the ball is thrown back won't be caught the problem is they know that most of their children won't survive and they can't say that I see sorry to interrupt you mean that the the fact that the whole system is underfunded that they naturally have to pick favorites they live in a world which reached steady state at some level let's say you know in the early 70s and in that world before that time you have a professor like Norman's steam rod and you'd have 20 children that is graduate students and all of them were going to be professors and all of them would want to have 20 children right so you start like taking higher and higher powers of 20 and you see that the system could not it's not just about money the system couldn't survive so the way it's supposed to work now is that we should shut down the vast majority of PhD programs and we should let the small number of truly top places pop mostly teaching and research departments that aren't PhD producing we don't want to do that because we use PhD students as a labor force so the whole thing has to do with growth resources dishonesty and in that world you see all of these adaptations to a ruthless world where the key question is where are we going to bury this huge number of bodies of people who don't work out so my problem was I wasn't interested in dying so you clearly highlight that there's aspects of the system that are broken but as an individual is your role to exit the system or just acknowledge it as a game and win it my role is to survive and thrive in the public eye in other words when you have an escapee of the system like yourself such as and that person says you know I wasn't exactly finished let me show you a bunch of stuff let me show you that the theory of telomeres we never got reported properly let me show you that all of marginal economics is supposed to be redone with a different version of the differential calculus let me show you that you didn't understand the self dual yang-mills equations correctly in topology and physics because they're in fact much more broadly found and it's only the mutations that happen in special dimensions there are lots of things to say but this particular group of people like if you just take where are all the Gen X and millennial university presidents all right okay they're all they're all in a holding pattern now where why in this story you know was it a of telomeres was it an older professor and a younger graduate student it's this issue of what would be called interference competition so for example orcas try to drown minke whales by covering their blowholes so that they suffocate because the the needed resource is air okay well what are the universities do they try to make sure that you can't be viable that you need them that you need their grants you need to be zinged with overhead charges or fringe rates or all of the games that the locals love to play well my point is ok what's the cost of this how many people died as a result of these interference competition games you know when you take somebody like Douglas pressure who did green fluorescent protein and he drives a shuttle bus right because he his grant runs out and he has to give away all of his research and all of that research gets a Nobel Prize and he gets to drive a shuttle bus for $35,000 a year what do you mean by die do you mean their career their dreams their yeah holes are there as an academic Doug pressure was dead for a long period of time ok so as a person who's escaped a system yeah can't you at this because you also have in your mind a powerful theory that may turn out to be useful maybe not let's hope can't you also play the game enough like with the children so like publish and but also if you told me that this would work really what I want to do you see is I would love to revolutionize a field with an H index of zero like we have these proxies that count how many papers you've written how cited of the papers you've written all this is nonsense it's interesting it aside what do you mean by a field with an H index is a totally new H index is counts somehow how many papers have you gotten that gets so many citations yeah let's say H index undefined like for example I don't have an advisor for my PhD but I have to have an advisor as far as something called the math genealogy project that tracks who advised who who advised whom right down the line so I am my own advisor which sets up a loop right how many students do I have an infinite number your descendants they don't want to have that story so I have to be I have to have formal advisor Rowell Bhatt and my Wikipedia entry for example says that I was advised by Rahul Bhatt which is not true so you get fit into a system that says what we have to know what your h-index is we have to know you know where are you a professor if you want to apply for a grant it makes all of these assumptions what I'm trying to do is to impart to show all of this is nonsense this is proxy BS that came up in the institutional setting and right now it's important for those of us who are still vital like Elon it would be great to have you on as a professor of physics and engineering Yeah right it seems ridiculous to say but just as Charlotte just as a shot in the arm yeah you know like be great to have you on at Cal Tech even one day a week yeah one day a month okay well why can't we be in there it's the same reason why can't you be on the view why can't you be on Bill Martin we need to know what you're gonna do before we take you on the show on the show well I don't want to tell you what I'm gonna do do you think you need to be able to dance the dance a little bit I can't dance the dance floor to be on the view oh come on so you can yeah you do yeah I do that fine here's where it's the place that it goes south is there's like a set of questions that get you into this more adversarial stuff and you've in fact asks some of those more adversarial questions this setting and they're not things that are necessarily aggressive but there are things that are making assumptions right right well so when you make it I have a questions like you know Lex are you avoiding your critics you know it's just like okay well why did you frame that that way or the next question would be it's like do you think that you should have a special exemption and that you should have the right to break rules and everyone else should have to follow them like that question I find enervating yeah it doesn't really come out of anything meaningful it's just like we feel we're supposed to ask that of the other person to show that we're not captured by their madness that's not the real question you want to ask me if you want to get really excited about this you want to ask do you think this thing is right yeah weird thing I do do you think that it's going to be immediately seen to be right I don't I think it's gonna it's gonna have an interesting fight and it's gonna have an interesting evolution and well what do you hope to do with it in non-physical terms my gosh I hope it revolutionizes our relationship of well with people outside of the institutional framework and it reinforces into the institutional framework where we can do the most good to bring the institution's back to health you know it's like these are positive uplifting questions yeah if you had Frank we'll check you wouldn't say Frank let's be honest you have done very little with your life after the original huge show that you used to break onto the physics scene like we weirdly ask people different questions based on how they sit down yeah that's very strange right but you have to understand that so here's the thing I get these days a large number of emails from people with the equivalent of a theory of everything for a GI yeah and I use my own radar BFBS radar to detect on unfairly perhaps whether they're full shit or not right because I love what you're where you're going with this by the way and Mike my concern that I often think about is there's elements of brilliance and what people write to me and I and I'm trying to right now as you made it clear at the kind of judgments and assumptions we make how am I supposed to deal with you who are not an outsider of the system and think about what you're doing because my radar saying you're not full of shit you know what I'm also not completely outside of the system that's right you've danced beautifully you've actually get got all the credibility that you're supposed to get all the nice little stamps of approval not all but a large enough amount you use I mean it's hard to put into words exactly why you sound whether your theory turns out to be good or not you sound like a special human being I appreciate that and thank you in a good way all right so but what am I supposed to do with that flood of emails for me AJ why do I sound different I don't know and I would like to systemize that I don't know look you know when you're talking to people you very quickly consume eyes like am i claiming to be a physicist no I say it every turn I'm not a physicist right when I say to you when you say something about bundles you say well can you explain it differently I think you know I'm pushing around on this this area that lever over there I'm trying to find something that we can play with and engage and you know another thing is is that I'll say something at scale so if I was saying completely wrong things about bundles on the Joe Rogan program you don't think that we wouldn't hear a crushing chorus yes and it's actually you know same thing with geometric unity so I put up this this video from this oxford lecture I understand this not a standard lecture but you haven't heard you know the most brilliant people in the field said well this is obviously nonsense they don't know what to make of it yeah I'm gonna hide behind well he hasn't said enough to tale where's the paper and where's the paper I've seen the criticism yeah I've gotten the same kind of Critias I've published a few things and like especially stuff related to Tesla that we did studies and Tesla vehicles and the kind of criticism I've gotten was showed that they're completely oh right like the guy who had Elon Musk on his program twice is gonna give us an accurate assessment yeah exactly exactly it's just very low-level like without actually ever addressing you know the content you know Lex I think that in part you're trying to solve a puzzle that isn't really your puzzle I think you know that I'm sincere you don't know whether the theory is going to work or not and you know that it's not coming out of somebody who's coming out of left field like the story makes sense there's enough that's new and creative and different in other aspects where you can check me that your real concern is are you really telling me that when you start breaking the rules you see the system for what it is and it's become really vicious and aggressive and the answer is yes and I had to break the rules in part because of learning issues because I came into this field you know with a totally different set of attributes my profile just doesn't look like anybody else's remotely but as a result what that did is it showed me what is the system true to its own ideals or does it just follow these weird procedures and then when it when you take it off the rails it behaves terribly and that's really what my story I think does is it just says well he completely takes the system into new territory where it's not expecting to have to deal with somebody with these confusing sets of attributes and I think what he's telling us is he believes it behaves terribly now if you take somebody with perfect standardized tests and you know a winner of math competitions and you put them in a ph.d program they're probably going to be okay I'm not saying that the system you know breaks down for any everybody under all circumstances I'm saying when you present the system with a novel situation at the moment it will almost certainly break down with probability approaching 100 percent but to me the painful and the tragic thing is it sorry to bring out my motherly instinct but it feels like it's too much it could be too much of a burden to exist outside the system maybe by psychologically first of all I've got a podcast that I that's kind of like you've got amazing friends I have a life which has more interesting people passing through it than I know what to do with and they haven't managed to kill me off yet so so far so good speaking of which you host an amazing podcast we've mentioned several times but should mention over and over the portal where you somehow manage every single conversation is a surprise you go I mean not just the guest but just the the places you take them the the kind of ways they become challenging and how you recover from that I mean it's uh there's just it's full of genuine human moments so I really appreciate what you're it's a fun fun podcast to listen to let me ask some silly questions about it what what have you learned about conversation about human to human conversation well I have a problem and I haven't solved on the portal which is that in general when I ask people questions they usually find they're deeply grooved answers and I'm not so interested in all of the deeply grooved answers and so there's a complaint which I'm very sympathetic to actually that I talk over people that I won't sit still for the answer and I think that's weirdly sort of correct it's not that I'm not interested in hearing other voices it's that I'm not interested in hearing the same voice on my program that I could have gotten on somebody else's and I haven't solved that well so I've learned that I need a new conversational technique where I can keep somebody from finding their comfortable place and yet not be the voice talking over that person it's funny I didn't sense like your conversation with Brett I can sense you detect that the line he's going under down is you know how it's gonna end and you know you think it's a useless line so you'll just stop it right there and you take them into the direction that you think you should go but that requires interruption well and it does so far I haven't found a better way I'm looking for a better way it's not it's not like I don't hear the problem I do hear the problem I just I haven't solved the problem and you know on the on the bread episode I was insufferable it was very difficult to listen to it was so overbearing but on the other hand I was right you know it's like funny yeah you keeps that but I didn't find that me because I heard brothers like I heard a big brother yeah it was pretty bad really I think so I didn't think it was bad well a lot of people found it in subsisting and I think it also has to do with the fact that this has become a frequent experience I have several shows where somebody who I very much admire and think of as courageous you know I'm talking with them maybe we're friends and they sit down on this show and they immediately become this fake person like two seconds in there they're sort of saying why I don't to be too critical or too harsh and I want to name any names I wanted this joint here's like okay I'm gonna put my listeners through three hours of you being sweetness and light yeah like at least give me some reality and then we can decide to shelve the show and never let it here you know that the the call of freedom in the in the bigger world but I saw you break out of that a few times I've seen you to be successful that I forgot the guest but she was dressed with you worried at the end of the episode you had to nog you honor Bob Brett FMS caller yeah and Magnus color the philosopher at the University of Chicago yeah you've continuously broken out of her you guys went you know I didn't seem pretty genuine I like her I'm completely ethically opposed to what she's ethically for which she was great and she wasn't like that you're both going hard bro no yeah cuz I care about her so that was awesome yeah but you're saying that some people are difficult to break up well it's just that you know she was bringing the courage of her conviction she was sort of defending the system and I thought wow that's a pretty indefensible system that's great though she's doing that isn't it yeah I mean it made for an awesome I think it's very informative for the world yes you just hated I just can't stand the idea that somebody says well we don't care who gets paid or who gets the credit as long as we get the goodies cuz that seems like insane have you ever been afraid leading into a conversation garry kasparov really by the way I mean I know I'm just a fan taking requests but I started I started the beginning in Russian and in fact I used one word incorrectly I was terrible you know it was pretty good it's pretty good Russian what was terrible is I think he complimented to you right no did he compliment you use that me D compliment you on your Russian so he said almost perfect Russian yeah like he was bullshit that was not great Russian but there was not great Russian that was good that was hard that was you tried hard which is what matters that is so insulting I hope so but I do hope you continue I did felt like I don't know how long and when it might have been like a two-hour conversation but it felt I hope it continues like I feel like you have many your conversation with Gary yeah I would love to hear there's certain conversation I was just love to hear well you know he's coming from a very it's this issue about needing to overpower people in a very dangerous world and so Gary has that need yeah he wasn't he was interrupting you there's an interesting dynamic is an interesting dynamic to Weinstein is going into what I mean to powerhouse egos brilliant no don't say egos Minds my spirits my you don't have any good you're the most humble person I know so true no that's a complete lie do you think about your own mortality death sure are you afraid Wow death I released the theory during something that can kill door people sure I was there of course little bit of a parallel that of course of course I don't want it to die with me what do you hope your legacy is oh I hope my legacy is accurate I'd like to ride on my accomplishments rather than how my community decided to ding me while I was alive that would be great what about if it was significantly exaggerated I don't want it you wanted to be accurate I'm I've got some pretty terrific stuff and then whether it works out or doesn't that I would like it to reflect what I actually was I'll settle for accurate what would you say what is the greatest element of Eric Weinstein accomplishment in life terms of being accurate like what what are you most proud of trying the idea that we were stalled out in it in the hardest field at the most difficult juncture and then I didn't listen to that voice ever it said stop you're hurting yourself you're hurting your family hurting everybody you're embarrassing yourself you're screwing up you can't do this you're a failure you're a fraud turn back save yourself like that voice I didn't ultimately listen to it and it was going for 35 37 years very hard and I hope you never listen to that voice well it's why you're an inspiration thank you appreciate it you're the eye and just infinitely honored that you would spend time with me you've been a mentor to me almost a friend I can't imagine a better person to talk to in this world so thank you so much for talking it I can't wait till we do it again Lex thanks for sticking with me and thanks for being the most singular guy in the podcasting space in terms of all of my interviews I would say that the last one I did with you many people feel was my best and it was a non-conventional one so whatever it is that you're bringing to the game I think everyone's noticing and keep at it thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein and thank you to our presenting sponsor cash app please consider supporting the podcast by downloading cash app and using code let's podcast if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on youtube review it with five stars an apple podcast supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter and lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from eric Weinstein's first appearance in this podcast everything is great about war except all the destruction thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you