Zev Weinstein: The Next Generation of Big Ideas and Brave Minds | Lex Fridman Podcast #158
the following is a conversation with zev weinstein a young man with a brilliant bold and hopeful mind that i had the great fortune of talking to on a recent afternoon he happens to be eric weinstein's son but i invited zev not because of that but because i got a chance to listen to him speak on a few occasions and was captivated by how deeply he thought about this world at such a young age and i thought that it might be fun to explore this world of ours together with him for time through this conversation quick mention of our sponsors expressvpn grammarly grammar assistant simply safe home security and magic spoon low carb cereal so the choice is privacy grammar safety or health choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that zev acknowledges the fear associated with participating public discourse and is brave enough to join in at a young age to push forward to change his mind publicly to learn to articulate difficult nuanced ideas and grow from the conversations that follow in this i hope he leads the next generation of minds that is joining and steering the collective intelligence of this big ant colony we think of as our human civilization if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon i'll connect with me on twitter lex friedman and now here's my conversation with zev weinstein you've said that philosophy becomes more dangerous in difficult times what do you mean by that interestingly i think i mean two things by that and i think firstly i should clarify when i say philosophy i sort of mean in a very traditional sense just thinking ideation and that could be reconsidering our notions of self in a very traditional sense which we consider philosophy or that could be like technological uh innovation i think it's important to recognize all of these as philosophies that we can not question whether it's important to promote thought i think the other thing i should clarify is when i say difficult times i mean times when nothing is growing and so the risk for real conflict is much greater because people are incentivized to fight over the things which already exist i think when times are not difficult the people with the greatest power are usually the people who are very creative generating a lot and that really requires ideation or philosophy of some sort i think when times become stagnant the important successful people become the people who are very good at protecting their own pieces of the pie and taking others um i think that those people have to be very opposed to any sort of thinking that could restructure society are conventions about who should succeed and so firstly i mean by that that it becomes much more dangerous dangerous for a person to think deeply and question during a time when the important people or those concerned with making sure no one rocks the boat you know one example of this would be like socrates and his execution because everyone was happy enough to sit through his questions before uh there was war and poverty and distress and afterwards it just became too dangerous the other thing i mean by that is that the consequences of thinking deeply carry much greater potential for real catastrophe when everyone is desperate so like for example you know the communist manifesto was probably much more dangerous during early 1900s russia than it was during the 1848 revolutions because i think people were in much worse shape and desperate people are very willing to dive into anything new that might bring the future without fully calculating whatever the consequences or risks might be so it is both more dangerous for a person to have creative ideas and those ideas are more dangerous when when times are tough and by dangerous you mean it challenges the people with power who don't who want to maintain that power in times of stagnation when there's not much growth innovation creativity all that kind of stuff right and we know that if nothing new is created people have promises that they've made about what will be paid to whom what debt structure is the only possibility if stagnation lasts for long enough is really some kind of great conflict great war because people have to take from others to make good on their own promises so we know that by denying any sort of grand ideation we are accepting that there will be some kind of great catastrophe and so we have to understand that philosophy is the most important uh when we've seen too much stagnation for too long it is also very dangerous and it's dangerous for the people who are doing it and it's dangerous for the people who believe it but it's kind of our only way out ever and again by philosophy you mean the bigger this is not academic philosophy or this kind of uh games played in the in the space of just like moral philosophy and all those metaphysics all that kind of stuff you mean just thinking deeply about this world thinking from first principles i think your like twitter line involves something about like trying to piece everything together in first principles so that's that's fundamentally what uh being philosophical about this world is and that's where the people who are thinking deeply about this world are the ones who are feeding who are the catalysts of this growth in society and so on yeah i i mean i also think that the real implication of moral philosophy can be something that most would consider like a real political uh implication so i think all philosophy really ties together uh because there has to be some sort of grand structure to all thought and how it relates do you think this growth and innovation and improvement can last forever we've seen some incredible you know the things that humans have been able to accomplish over the past several hundred years is just i mean awe inspiring and every moment in that in that history it almost seemed like no more could be done like we've we've solved all the problems that are to be solved and there's just historically there's all these kind of ridiculous like bill gates style quotes or like it's obvious that we've uh this new cool thing is not going to take off and yet it does and and so there's there's a feeling of the same kind of pattern that we see in moore's law there's constant growth and different technologies in the modern day era in any kind of automation over the past 100 years do you think it's possible that we'll keep growing this way if we give power to the philosophers of our society i think the only way that we can keep growing this way is if we give power to real thinkers and there's no guarantee that that will work but we sort of don't have any other choice and i think you're entirely right that this period of both understanding the universe at a rate which has has never been seen before and invention and creativity that these past hundred years have been sort of uncharacteristic uh for the level of growth that we've seen not in all of history we've never seen anything like this and i think a lot of our a lot of our promises rest on this sort of thing continuing i think that's very that's very dangerous but the one thing that can get us out of this is philosophy and being ready to radically restructure all of our notions about what should be what is i think that's very important so you think deeply about this world you are clearly this embodiment of a think of a philosopher your dad is also one such guy eric weinstein do you just do you have big disagreements with him on this topic in particular i think now people should know he also happens to be in the room but uh the mics can't pick him up so he can uh heckle it doesn't even matter but do you have disagreements with him on this point let me um try to summarize this argument that we were actually based a lot of our american society on the belief that things will keep growing and yet it seems that however you break it apart maybe from an economics perspective that they're not growing currently and so that's where a lot of our troubles are at do you have the same sense that things there's a stagnation period that we're living through over the past couple of decades i think stagnation modern stagnation is completely undeniable particularly scientifically and i think there have been a few fields where tremendous progress has been made very recently i think my dad might feel that uh there is sort of an inevitability to the ending of this period and i'm not so certain so certain that uh the fall of this great time is completely inevitable because i don't know what thoughts we're capable of producing what we're able to reconsider i think we really have to be open to the possibility that uh all of our standard frameworks where you know like he will talk about embedded growth obligations if we continue within the same framework then we're very susceptible to the dangers of whatever these embedded growth obligations are i think if we break the frameworks we have no reason to believe that the problems we're experiencing with our current frameworks will will follow us and i think that's the importance of radical thought is we don't know what the solution is but if there is a solution it will be born from some very fundamental thinking and so i've i have great hope so you have optimism about sort of the power of a single radical idea or a single radical thinker to break our frameworks and uh break us out of this like uh spiral down due to whatever the the economic forces that are creating uh this current stagnation yeah i'm very very hopeful the optimism of youth well i share uh i share your optimism so let me let me come back to something you've also talked about you have very little stuff out there currently but the things you have out there your thoughts you could just tell how deeply you think about this world and one of the things you mentioned is as you learn about this world is that you as you read as you sort of uh go through different experiences that you um that you're open to changing your mind how often do you find yourself changing your mind do you think zev from 10 years into the future will look back at like at this conversation we're having now and uh disagree completely with everything you just said it's entirely possible and that's one of the things that scares me so much about appearing publicly i think that the internet can be very intolerant of inconsistency and i am entirely prepared to be very inconsistent because i know that whatever beliefs i have when subjected to scrutiny may change because that's that's really the only way to to form your truest most fundamental conceptions about the world around you and it would take an infinite amount of time to subject every single one of your beliefs to scrutiny and so that's a a process that must follow me throughout my entire life and i know that means that my opinions and perspectives are always to be changing i'm prepared to accept that about myself whether other people are prepared to accept that my uh public opinions may may change and vary greatly over time is something i i don't know i don't know how tolerant the the world will be but i'm very prepared to change anything i i believe in if i think deeply enough about it or a good enough argument is made so that i i might reconsider well that's there certainly is currently an intolerance and that's what the one of the problems of our age there's an intolerance towards change and i'll also ask you about labels you talked about so we like to bend each other into different categories blue or red or whatever the different categorization is but it seems like the task before you as a young person defining our future is to make a tolerance of change the the norm doing this podcast for example and then changing your mind one or two years later and doing so publicly without a big dramatic thing or maybe changing it on a daily basis uh and just being open about it and being transparent about your thought process maybe that is the beacon of hope for the philosophical way uh the path of the philosopher so that's your task in in a sense is to change your mind openly and bravely you know you're right and maybe i will just have to endure some sort of criticism for doing that but i think that's very important i think this ties back to this previous facet of our conversation where we were discussing if uh you know thinkers would win over systems that are devoted to preventing radical thought or if uh you know who will win the the systems or the or the thinkers i think it's crucial that my generation uh take up a hand in this fight and i think it's important that i'm a part of that because i know that i have some opportunity to um there is i think it is my obligation as a member of a generation whose only real hope is to think outside of a system because whatever systems exist are collapsing i think it is really my my obligation to try to play some role whatever role i can and being an instrument uh in in that change are you uh as a young mind do you have a sense of fear about just like how afraid were you to do this podcast conversation do you have a sense of fear of thinking publicly yeah i i don't even think that that fear is irrational it's very difficult to exist publicly in any form now because it's very easy for anyone to take cheap shots at something which is difficult and as i said the people who are trying to have the difficult ideas and conversations are perhaps putting others in in actual danger because everyone is so desperate that they're they're they might be they might be willing to to try anything so um there's a certain amount of responsibility which one has to take going before the public and there is a certain amount of uh ridicule which will be completely unwarranted that anyone must endure for it um and i think that it means that the one has to be afraid because they could both ruin the world and be ruined by the world in in an unwarranted and undeserved fashion um i would like to believe in myself enough to try to accept this as a task because i think people need to try or there's no getting out of this and we will end in some kind of crazy brilliant war awfully put you've said also that uh in these times we can't have labels because it holds us holds us back maybe we've already talked about a little bit but this idea of labels is really interesting uh why do you think labels hold us back well i think many underestimate the extent to which language and communication really impacts and shapes the ideas and thoughts which are being communicated and i think if we're willing to accept uh imperfect labels uh to categorize particular people or thoughts in some sense we are corrupting an abstraction in order to represent it and communicate about it and i think as we've discussed those abstractions are particularly important when everything is on fire um we should not be sacrificing uh grand thought for the ability to express it i think everyone should work much harder including myself to really be thinking abstractly in abstract terms instead of using concrete terms to discuss abstraction while ruining it slightly yeah it's uh it's kind of a skill actually so one one really difficult example of in this uh in the recent time that maybe you can comment on uh if you have been thinking about it is just politics and there's a lot of labels in politics that it takes a lot of skill to be able to communicate difficult ideas without labels being attached to you that's something i've been sort of thinking about a lot in uh trying to express for example how much i love various aspects of the foundational ideas of this country like freedom and just saying i love america as a simple statement i love the ideas that we're finding to america will often in the current time well people will try to desperately try to attach a label to me for example for saying i love america that i'm a republican a donald trump supporter and it takes elegance and grace and skill to like to like avoid those labels so that people can actually listen to the contents of your words versus uh the summarization that results from just the the labels that they can pin on you are you cognizant of the skill required there of being able to communicate without being branded the republican or democrat in this particular set of conversations i'm sure there's other dangerous labels that could be attached i don't think there's any way of avoiding that right now it might not be anyone's best effort to really try i think the thing i can say which will most speak to that which i truly believe is that participating in modern conventional politics is not being inherently political in a generative sense it's it's this it's this repeated trope where politics now is not about creating new political ideologies it's about defending ideologies which already exists so that everyone can keep what they have and that's where all of the the name calling and the labeling really comes in it's an attempt to constrict whatever may be generated to standard conversations and discussions so that arguments can be strawmanned and defeated and people can keep what they have because everyone's very very scared i want to be very political but not in a standard political sense where i'm defending a particular party or place on a on a spectrum i would like to play some role in inventing new spectrums and i think that's most important politically because above most else politics is about real power and conventional politicians have real power uh and that power will find terrible outlets if new spectrums for that power to live are not invented so so you're not afraid of politics political discourse at the deepest richest uh level of what political discourse is supposed to mean actually i'm i'm very afraid of it but once again we we have no it's not paralyzing for you that you feel like it's a responsibility you're ready to take it on yes this is a good sign this is uh you're a special human okay let's talk uh maybe fun maybe profound uh we talked about philosopher's philosophy uh who's your favorite philosopher who like somebody in your current time been either influential or you just enjoy uh his her ideas or writing or anything like that weirdly i'll i'll give an answer which sort of doesn't have much to do with whom i might imagine myself to be i like thomas aquinas at the moment i think he's very inspirational to me given what we're going through and that's not because his particular ideas of religion or god or unmoved movers are particularly uh inspirational to me and they i don't even think they were necessarily right um but he was introducing aspects of the scientific method during one of the darkest periods in human history when we had lost all hope and reason and ability to think logically so i think he was really something of a light in the dark and i think we need to look to people like that at the moment the other reason why i think i need to uh need to learn from him is that even though he was doing something which really needed needed to be done and uh introducing scientific thought and reason to a time that that lacked it um he was not saying anything that would have been offensive to whatever powers were in play during his time he was writing about you know the importance of of faith in god and how we could prove it and so it's important to remember i suppose that having ideas that shape the world and which bring the world closer to what we can prove it's supposed to be and how it's supposed to work does not always take some sort of grand contradiction of whatever is in play and the most courageous thing to do may not always be the most helpful thing to do and i think it's it's very easy for anyone with uh ideas about how everything is is broken to become very cynical and say oh the system man they're they're all wrong yeah um i think it takes another kind of discipline to be a person with real ideas and to make the world better without stepping on anyone's toes or contradicting anyone i have real respect for that so being able to be when it's within your principles to operate within the current system of thought yeah and not not offend anyone not say anything outlandish but introduce the method by which progress must be achieved i think that takes a kind of maturity which is found very rarely uh now and i really look to him for inspiration despite whatever disagreements i may have with the my new details of his philosophy yeah it takes a lot of skill a lot of character and yeah deep thinking to be able to operate within the system when needed and having the fortitude and just the boldness to step outside and to burn the system down when needed but rarely and opportune moments that would actually have impact i mean it's ultimately about impact within the society that you live in not just making a statement that has no impact yeah and we were talking about how dangerous it is to do real philosophy at dangerous broken times he was going through the most broken time in history and he questioned the the methods which made a broken system uh able to survive and he was so skilled and so graceful that he became a saint in that tradition and there's something for me to really learn from there do you draw any inspiration have any interest in the sort of more modern philosophers maybe the existentialists i mean nietzsche is one of the the early ones do you have thoughts on the guy in general or any of the other existentialists well with regard to nietzsche i think i think yates might have said that he's the worst you know he was it was certainly filled with with passionate intensity um is that a compliment he was the worst or uh or her criticism yates said this has this big line the the best lack all conviction the worst are filled with passing passionate intensity um so um i think nietzsche was was destroyed by the the horrors of everything that uh that went on around him and i think he never really recovered from it i think that's because if you think about nietzsche's philosophy he was very opposed to any sort of acceptance of what one had one should always envy those who have more and use that envy to uh to fuel their their growth and become you know accept whatever the the human condition and desires are and use use those desires to want more and more and and make use of your greed i think it's very difficult to be truly happy if the thing which you uh the thing which you pride yourself most on is uh never being satisfied and i think nietzsche was never satisfied and that was the the danger of his philosophy i think also with his immoralism you know there is no good or evil i sort of disagree with that on a pretty fundamental basis i think that um our notion of morality is by no means subjective it's really the proxy for the fitness of a society i think whatever we consider ethical like don't steal don't murder don't do this societies have a very difficult time running it's very hard to run a civilization when everyone is stealing from everyone else and people are murdering each other and committing these things which we would consider uh atrocities so i think we also we know this because i think very similar notions of morality have evolved convergently from different traditions i think good is a proxy for a civilization's fitness and the good news is that that means that evil in being anathema to that good uh must therefore be uh the opposite of stable in whatever way that it's evil and that means that good will always be more stable than evil and the only way evil can really win is like if everyone dies so um so wait uh can you say can you say that again good is a proxy for society's uh what good is a proxy for the stability and fitness of the civilization i believe and you know that's a good definition thank you so you're throwing some bombs today okay all right okay um this is exciting sorry sorry interrupt your uh flow there but just a good damn good one thank you uh so in that sense that's kind of optimistic view that if by definition good is a proxy for stability then it's going to be stable unless the entire world just blows itself up so good wins in the end by definition yeah or uh no actually well good wins unless it all goes to uh complete destruction beauty that's a beautifully put thank you on the topic of um sort of you know good in evil being human illusions you've said that uh more broadly than that about truth that it is easier in some ways to be unified under truth because it is universal than it is to be unified under belief which at times can be completely subjective so what is the nature of truth to you can can we understand the world objectively or is most of what we can understand about the world is just uh subjective opinions that we kind of all agree on in these little collectives and over time it kind of evolves completely detached from objective reality i think this is the greatest argument for objectivity uh is that something that is objectively true cannot be true to me and untrue to to you you can feel that it's that it's untrue but that would be uh unproductive and create unnecessary tension and conflict i think this is one reason for the importance of science as a tool for stability if science is the search for truth um and truth can never really be i shouldn't say that truth should never be an engine of conflict because no two people should disagree on something which is objectively true then in some sense search for truth is searching for a common ground where we can all exist and live without contradicting or attacking each other do you ever hope that there is a lot of common ground to be discovered sure i mean if we continue scientifically uh we are discovering truth and in that discovering common ground on which we can all agree that's that's one reason why i think uh caring about science if you have a culture which cares very deeply about science that's a culture which is not necessarily bound to injure unwarranted internal conflict i think that's one reason that i'm so passionate about science is its search for universal ground let me just throw out an example of a modern day philosophical thinker will keep your uh dad eric weinstein out of the picture for a sec but he does happen to be an example of one but jordan peterson is an example of another somebody who thinks deeply about this world um his ideas are by certain percent of the population sort of speaking of truth are labeled as dangerous why do you think his ideas or just ideas of these kinds of deep thinkers in general are labeled as dangerous in our modern world is it similar to what you've been discussing that in difficult times philosophers become dangerous was there something specific about these particular thinkers in our time well i think jordan peterson is very anti-establishment in a lot of his uh beliefs he's an unconventional thinker and i think we need regardless of whatever uh jordan's particular views and beliefs are and if they uh bring about more danger than uh truth or uh if if they don't it's very important to have fundamental thinkers who exist outside of a conventional framework so do i think that he's dangerous i think by existing outside of a system which is known he is dangerous and i think we have to in some sense we have to welcome danger in that capacity because it will be our only way out of this so i'm regardless of whether his beliefs are right or wrong i am pretty adamant about the fact that we need to support um thought which may rescue us and that thought can appear radical or dangerous at times but ultimately if you allow for it this is kind of the difficult discussion of free speech and so on is ultimately difficult ideas will pave the way for progress yeah and i'd actually i'd like to to slow you down there because i think like one of the issues we were discussing previously was the fact that language often destroys our ability to think um when we're talking about whether his ideas are a radical i don't know if we if we mean radical in the traditional sense of having to to do with the root of a problem or in the more modern sense of being um very extreme and i think that's completely by design i think fundamental thought which semantically would once be considered radical thought became very dangerous and now it's become synonymous with extreme or dangerous thought which means that anyone who considers themself a radical thinker is semantically also a dangerous or extreme thinker these are not helpful labels in a sense that the moment you say radical or extremist thinker then you're just uh well how do i put it you're not being you're not helping the public discourse exchange of ideas but through no fault of our own the concept of radical as having to do with a root is uh it's a it's an obvious concept for which there must be language and a lot of the attack on thought has to do with attacking language which communicates conceptually so like this is an example of how our world is becoming increasingly orwellian it's just language is being used to destroy our ability to uh to think i think i can't remember exactly what the numbers are but i read some statistic about how greatly the average english vocabulary has decreased since 1960. it was like some incredible number it really baffled me it's like how are how are people less able to to think in a time when the world is supposed to be growing at a never before seen rate it's like we can't keep on we can't sustain this growth if we destroy everyone's ability to think because the growth requires thinking and we're we're ruining the tools for it i watched your uh your podcast with noam chomsky and i i think one interesting thing which he discussed was how language is more used to develop thoughts within our own head than it is used to communicate those thoughts with others if the language doesn't change even if its usage changes then when language is destroyed in communication it also stymies our ability to to think reasonably and i'm very very worried so but the language in communication uh requires a medium and there's a lot of different mediums so there's uh social media there's twitter there's uh writing books there's blog posts there's um podcasts there's a youtube videos all of things you have uh dipped a toe in in your exploration of different mediums of communication yeah which do you see yourself this might be just a poetic way of asking are you going to do a podcast but a broad broader picture what do you think as an intellectual in this world for you personally would be the path for communicating your ideas to the world what are the mediums you you are currently drawn to out of the ones i mentioned maybe something i didn't to answer your your question concretely before uh abstractly uh i'm scared but i need i need to do a podcast you know it's it's important it is my obligation as a member of my generation i i really hope that more people my age start to do this because we will be the people in charge of new ideas which either sink or uh or swim how upset would your dad be when your podcast quickly becomes more popular than his i think he would be negatively upset also you'd be proud he's a good dad i i really think so yeah sorry to interrupt uh uh yes so but then zooming out do you think podcast are you excited by the possibility of other mediums outside of podcasting to communicate ideas i would be if people still read books or did things like that uh i'm somewhat guilty of this a lot of the books i i read are um very technical and then my to absorb like really deep modern conversations i listen to uh i listen to podcasts and i don't really read many uh books on like the matters that we're discussing for example it's fascinating because you're making me think of something um that i align with you very much of how i consume deep thinkers currently so what happens is somebody who thinks deeply about the world will write a book jordan penis an example and instead of reading their book i'll just listen to podcast conversations of them talking about the book which i find to this is really sad but i find that to be a more compelling way to think about their ideas because they're often challenged in certain ways in those conversations and they're forced to after having boiled them down and really thought to them enough to write a book so it's almost like they needed to go through the process of writing a book just so they can think through convert the language in their minds into something more concrete and then the actual exchange of ideas the actual communication of ideas with the public happens not with the book but after the book with that person going on a book tour and communicating the ideas well there are two meanings i i make of why not too many people spend much of their time reading anymore one one interpretation is that we've lost our attention spans to our phones people can't concentrate on a page if it takes them a minute to read we're too busy you know watching tech talks or whatever people do the other interpretation would be that language and verbal communication has as well as you know some amount of communication which is done through you know facial expression uh tone of voice etc these are means of communication that have evolved along with humanity over thousands and thousands of years so um we know that we are built to communicate in this way uh we have had writing for much less time it is a system that we invented not a system which evolved and is innately part of uh you know humanity or the the human mind um and so we are designed to consume conversation by our own evolution we are designed to consume writing by some process of symbols that's evolved over a couple thousand years it makes sense to me why many are much more compelled to listen to podcasts for example than they are to read books it could be that this is simply a technological uh progression which has displaced uh reading conventionally instead of some sort of maladaptation of our minds which has corrupted our attention spans and likely there's some combination which determines why people spend much less time reading but i don't think it's necessarily because we're all broken it may simply have to do with the fact that we are designed to listen and through our ears and speak through our mouths and we are not innately designed to communicate uh over a page so yeah there's an exciting coupling to me between like a few second tick tock videos that are fun and addicting and then the three four hour podcasts which are both really popular in our current time so people are both hungry for the visual stimulation of internet humor and memes a huge fan of and also slow moving deep conversations and that might you know it's there's a lot of i mean it's part of your generation to define what that looks like moving forward where a lot of people like joe rogan is one of the people that kind of uh started accidentally stumbled into the discovery that this is like a thing yeah and now people are kind of scrambling to figure out why is this a thing like why is there so much hunger for long-form conversations and how do we optimize that medium for further further expression of deep ideas and all that kind of stuff and youtube is a really interesting medium for that as well like video sharing of videos mostly youtube is used with the spirit of like the tick tock spirit if i can put in that way which is like how do i have quick moving things that even if you're expressing difficult ideas they should be quick and exciting and visual and switching but there's a lot of exploration there to see what can we do something deeper and nobody knows and you're part of the you have a youtube channel uh releasing one video every few years um so so your momentum is currently quite slow but uh perhaps it'll accelerate but you're you're uh you're one of the people that gets to define that medium is that do you enjoy that the visual the youtube medium of communication as well i know that when the the topic of conversation uh or the the means by which a conversation is is communicated or an idea is communicated if that is sufficiently interesting to me um i will read a book on it i would listen to a podcast on it i would watch a video on it i think if i'm very curious about something i will consume it however possible i think when i have to consume things which really don't interest me very much uh i'm indeed much more ready to consume them through some sort of video or discussion than i am through like a long tedious book so for the the for the breadth of uh acquiring knowledge video is good for the depth the medium doesn't matter i think it'd be fun to ask you about some big philosophical questions to see if you have an opinion on that do you think there's a free will or is free will just an illusion well i think classical mechanics would tell us that if we are if we were to know every piece of information about a system and understand the rules which govern that system we would be completely able to predict the future with complete accuracy so if something could know everything about our lives it could freeze time and and understand the position of every neuron in my mind about about to fire um no decision could be uh unpredictable there in some sense there is that sort of uh that sort of fate i think that doesn't make the decisions we make illegitimate even if some grand super computer could understand what decisions we would make beforehand with complete certainty i think we're making legitimate systems uh within a system that has no freedom we're making legitimate systems within a system that has no freedom can you explain what you mean by that yeah so if we were to have uh just a simple pendulum and i told you how long the the rope was i i we froze it at a particular uh point and i told you how high high above the ground the weight was and uh you know the motion of a of a pendulum is something which is it's easy for everyone to imagine um i could if we had all of that information you could ask me where will the what will the pendulum do six and a half minutes from now and we would have a precise answer that's like a that's an example of a very simple system with a very simple lagrangian um and we could completely predict the the future that the pendulum has no ability to do anything that would surprise us weirdly that's true of whatever this four-dimensional crazy world we live in looks like if we were to if we were to understand where every piece of this system was at any given time and we we understand the the laws of motion how everything worked if we could compute all of that information somehow which we won't never be able to do uh we would every decision you you will ever make could be predicted by that computer that doesn't mean that your decisions are illegitimate you are really making those decisions but with a completely predictable outcome so i'm just uh sort of a little bit high at the moment on the uh on this on the poetry of a system within a system that has no freedom so the human experience is the system we've created within the system there's no freedom but that system that we've created has a feeling of freedom that to us ants feels as uh much more real than the the physics as we understand it of the underlying like base system so it's almost like not important what the physics of the base system is that for the what we've created the nature of the human experience is uh there is a free will or there's something that feels uh close enough to a free will that it may not be uh worth uh spending too much time on the fact that it's something of an illusion we will never build a computer that knows everything about every piece of the universe at a given time uh and so for all intensive purposes uh our decisions are up to us we just happen to know that their outcomes could be predicted with enough information so um speaking of super computers they can predict every single thing about the uh what's going to ever happen uh what do you think about the philosophical thought experiment of us living in a simulation do you often find yourself pondering of us living in a simulation of this question do you think it is at all a useful thought experiment i think it's very easy to become fascinated with all of these possibilities and they're completely legitimate uh possibilities you know like do i is there some validity to like solipsism uh while it can never be falsified or disproven so i mean sure you could be a figment of my uh imagination uh it doesn't mean that i will act according to this possibility i'm not going to call you mean names and just to test the system uh to see how robust it is to distortions yeah so i mean all of these existential thought experiments are completely possible we could be brains and jars it doesn't mean that our experience will feel any less valid and so it doesn't make a difference to me if uh you were some number of of ones and zeros or you were a figment of my imagination which lives in a in a stored stored away brain uh it will never really change my experience knowing that that's a possibility and so i try to i try to avoid making decisions based on such contemplations you know if we take this this previous issue of free will um i could i could decide that because i have no choice in my life if i lie around in bed all day and eat chips i was destined to do that thing and if i make that decision then i was destined to do that thing it would be a really poor decision uh for me to make i have school and a a dozen commitments uh there's somebody listening to this right now probably hundreds of people sitting down eating chips and feeling terrible about themselves those are how dare you sir if they're listening to this they're purely they're clearly curious about um possibilities of of thought it's not the it's not the bed and the chips that okay it makes the man it's not the better the chips the makes man yet another quotable from zev weinstein okay uh but you don't think of it as a useful thought experiment from an engineering perspective of you know virtual reality of thinking how we can create further and further immersive worlds like would it be possible to create worlds that are so immersive that we would rather live in that world versus the real world i mean that's another possible trajectory of the world that you're growing up in is where more and more immersing ourselves into the digital world for now it's screens and looking the screens and socializing the screens but it's possible to potentially create a world that's also visually for all of our human senses as immersive as the physical world and then you know it's to me it's an engineering question of how difficult is it to create a world that's as immersive and more fun than uh the world would currently live in it's a terrifying concept and i hate to say it we might live happier lives in a virtual reality headset 30 years from now then we are currently living this future the digital future worries you it worries me on the other hand it may be it may be a better alternative to um fighting for whatever people are clinging on to in our non-virtual world or at least the world that we don't yet know is virtual so embrace the future we've been talking a lot about thinkers now in the broad definition of philosophy you kind of included innovators of all forms do you find it useful to draw a distinction between thinkers and doers i think that the most important gift we've ever been given is our ability to observe the universe and think deductively about whatever principles transcend humanity because you know as we discussed that's that's the closest thing we will ever have to um a universal experience is understanding things which must be true um everywhere in order for that so i think if if we're if we're deciding that that life is is meaningful and the human experience is meaningful uh you could make a very convincing argument that its greatest meaning will be understanding whatever transcends it um i think that's only sustainable if people are happy and well fed and things of of market value are invented and so i think we really need both to live meaningful and successful and possible lives in terms of like who who my greatest heroes are i can't decide between figures like uh einstein and newton and feynman and on the other hand figures like carrie mullis for example i think people like einstein make our lives meaningful and people like carrie mullis who's probably responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives make our make our lives possible and uh good so in terms of where i would like to find myself uh with these two different uh notions of achievement i don't know what i would more like to achieve i have an inclination that it will be something scientific because i would like to bring meaning to humanity instead of uh sustenance but i think both are very important we can't we can't sustain our lives if we don't keep growing technologically i think people like you are making that possible with uh like computing because that's one of the few things that's really moving forward in a in a clear sense um i think i think about this a great deal so i think both are very important so one example that's modern day uh inspiring figure on the on the latter part and the engineering part on the sustenance is elon musk is that somebody you draw inspiration from what are your thoughts in general about the kind of unique speck of human that's creating so much uh inspiring innovation in this world so boldly i know that we will not survive without people like that um elon is a ridiculous and sensational example of one of these figures i don't know if he's the best example or the worst example but he is he is of his own kind he is radically individualistic and those are the people who will allow us to continue uh as as humans i'm very happy that that we have people like that in this world you said this thing about if we are to say that life has meaning our life is meaningful then you could argue that it is a worthy pursuit to transcend life do you see that another just i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to go back um and sleep on that one uh do you do you draw some speaking of elon some inspiration of us uh transcending earth of us moving outside of uh this particular planet that we've called home for a long time and colonizing other planets and perhaps one day expanding outside the solar system and uh expanding colonizing our galaxy and beyond honestly i know very little about space exploration i think it makes complete sense to me why we are starting to think very seriously about it it's an amazing and baffling and innovative solution to a lot of problems we see as a world population i can't really offer very much uh of interest on the topic i think when i i'm talking about like transcending humanity and transcending earth i'm talking usually about deriving truth and that's one of the things that makes like theoretical math and physics so interesting it's like i i really really love biology for example but biology is a combination of whatever principles ensure evolution and whatever weird coincidences happened billions of years ago um so g is more interesting to understand the fundamental mechanisms of evolution for example than it is the results the messy results of its processes i can't say which is more interesting i can say which i think is more is more deep i think theory and abstraction which can be achieved completely deductively is deeper because it has nothing to do with circumstance and everything to do with uh logic and thought uh so like if we were ever to to interact with aliens for example uh we would not have our biology in common if if these were or some sort of really intelligent life form uh we would have math and physics in common because uh the laws of physics will be the same every everywhere in the universe our particular anatomy and biology pertains only to life on this on this planet and the principles may apply more ubiquitously do you ever think about aliens like what they might look like i try to when i i deal with thought experiments like these i try to keep a very abstract mindset and i notice that whenever i try to instantiate these abstractions i i corrupt whatever thoughts uh there are for which they're useful so it's kind of like the labels discussion so like the moment you try to make it concrete it's probably gonna look like some cute version of a human a big like it's the little green fellas with the eyes and so on or whatever whatever the movies uh have instilled like your cultural upbringing you're going to project onto that and the assumptions you have it's interesting so you prefer to step away and think and abstract notions of what it means to be intelligent what it means to be a living life form and all that kind of stuff i try to i almost try to pretend i'm i'm blind and i'm deaf and i'm only a mind with no inductive reasoning capacity when i'm trying to think about thought experiments like these because i know that if i incorporate whatever my eyes instruct my brain i will i will impede my ability to think as deeply as possible because once again it's the thing which shallows our thought can be the incorporation of circumstance and coincidence and for particular kinds of thought that's very important i'm not discounting the use of inductive reasoning in many humanities and in many sciences but for the deepest of thoughts once again i i feel it's important to try to transcend whatever uh methods of observation characterize human experience see but within that that's all really beautifully put i i wonder if there is a common mathematics and common physics between us and alien beings we still have to make concrete the methods of communication yeah uh and that's a fascinating question of like while remaining in these abstract fundamental ideas how do we communicate with them i mean that i suppose that question could be applied to different cultures on earth with finding a common language do you think about that kind of problem of basically communicating abstract fundamental ideas my least favorite aspect of math or physics or any of these really deep sciences is the symbolic component you know i'm i'm dyslexic i don't like looking at at symbols they're too often a source of of ambiguity and i think you're entirely right that if one thing holds us back with um communication with something that behaves or looks nothing like us i think if one thing holds us back uh it will be symbols and the communication of deep thought because as i said i think communication frequently compromises thought uh by intention or by just uh theoretical inadequacy so in this topic actually it'd be fun to see what your thoughts are uh do you think math is uh invented or discovered so you said that math we might share ideas in mathematics and physics with alien life forms so it's uniform in some sense of uniform throughout the universe what uh do you think this thing that we call mathematics is uh something that's kind of fundamental to the world we live in or is it just some kind of uh pretty axioms and theorems have come up with to try to describe the the patterns we see in the world uh i think it's completely discovered and completely fundamental to all experience i think the only component of mathematics that has been invented is the expression of it and i think in some sense there's almost uh an arrogance required to believe that whatever aspect we invent having to do with math and physics and theory there is an arrogance required to truly believe that that belongs on any sort of stage with the actual beauty of the matters being discovered so um we need our minds and in some sense are our pens to be able to play with these things and communicate about them and those hands and those are and those pens are the things which smudge the most beautiful thing that humanity can ever um experience and maybe if we interact with some intelligent life form uh they will have their own unique smudges but the canvas uh which is beautiful must be identical because that is universal and ubiquitous truth and that's what makes it deep and and meaningful is that it's so much more important than uh whatever we're programmed to enjoy as an aspect of human experience yeah that um that's really beautifully put and that's the human language is these messy smudges of trying to express something underlying that is beautiful speaking of that uh on the physics side do you think the pursuit of a theory of everything in physics as we may call it in our current times of understanding the basic fabric of reality from a physics perspective is an important pursuit i think it's essential as i've said i think ideation is our only escape from the constraints of human condition and i think that it's important that all great thoughts and ideas are bound together and i think the math is beautiful and it ensures that the things which bind great ideas which have already been had and great discoveries together it uh it it ensures that those strings will be beautiful uh i think it's very important to unify all theories that have brought us to to where we are do you think humans can do it do you think humans can solve this puzzle is it possible that we with our limited cognitive capacity will never be able to truly understand this deep like deeply understand this underlying canvas i think if not it will be people like you who invent uh some sort of i don't know we'll call it computation for now that we'll be um able to not only discover that which transcends humanity but to transcend human methods of discovering that which is above it so super intelligent systems agi and so on that that are better physicists than us i wonder if you might be able to comment so your dad does happen to be somebody who boldly seeks this kind of deep understanding of physic the underlying nature of reality from a physics perspective from a mathematical physics perspective do you have hope your dad figures it out i have great hope you know it's not it's not supposed to be my journey it's supposed to be his journey it's supposed to be his to uh express to the world obviously i'm i'm so proud that i'm connected to someone who is determined to do such a thing and on the other hand uh you know maybe in some sense i i feel bad for him for having to if he's gonna be the the thing which which discovers some sort of grand unified theory and expresses it i feel sorry that he will have to to smudge um whatever canvas this thing is because because he's human really i think i know i've seen a little bit of what i think great math and great physics looks like and it's it's unbelievably beautiful and then you have to present it to a world with you know like market constraints and all of this like messy sloppiness i feel bad um in some sense for my dad uh because he has to go back and forth between this beautiful world of math and whatever the the messiness is of his you know his human life and then the scientific community broadly with egos and tensions exactly the dynamics of our of what makes us uh human he's also very lucky that he gets to play with these sorts of things it's it's a mixed it's a mixed bag uh i both feel a little sorry for him for having to deal with the beauty as well as the uh the smudging and the sloppiness of human expression and i think it's difficult not to envy such a such a beautiful insight or life or or vision so well that's your own path as well as this kind of struggle of as you mentioned exploring the beauty of different ideas while having to communicate those ideas with the best smudges you can uh in a world that wants to put labels that wants to misinterpret that wants to uh that wants to destroy the beauty of those ideas and that's you seem to at this time with your youthful enthusiasm uh embracing that struggle uh despite the fear in the face of fear so and uh your dad also carries that same youthful enthusiasm as well but that said you know your dad eric weinstein he's a powerful voice i would say apart from intellect in public discourse is this a burden for you or an inspiration or both as a young mind yourself i think as i said there's this there's this weird contrast of um you know i know that he has ideas which i think are very beautiful and i know he has to deal with um the sort of there's there's something you you have to sacrifice in beauty uh when you bring it to a world which is not always um beautiful um and there's there's an aspect of that which sort of scares me about this kind of thing i also think that um especially since i'm trying to think about how i should appear publicly my dad has been very inspirational and that i think he's he brings a sort of fastidious care to very difficult conversations that what does facidious mean um like it's just very careful and um thoughtful um he brings that sort of attitude to um i think really difficult conversations and i know that i don't have that skill yet i don't think i'm terrible but the care the nuance and yet not being afraid to push forward yeah i would really like to to learn from my dad there i think also my dad has been very important uh to my life just because i've always been a sort of very idiosyncratic thinker um and i think i don't always know how to interact with the world for those sorts of reasons and i think my dad has always been similar and if not for my dad i don't know if i would just believe that like i was stupid or something um because i wouldn't know how to how to i don't know if i would know how to interpret uh my differences from convention so so he gave you he gave you the power to be different and use that as a superpower yeah i guess you could you could put it that way i don't know who i would believe i am if uh i didn't have my dad telling me that it wasn't my own stupidity which alienated me from certain aspects of standard life so i'm very very thankful for that is there a fond memory you have about an interaction with your dad either funny profound that kind of sticks with you now a lot part part of the reason i asked that of course it's just fascinating to see somebody as brilliant as you see how your the people that you interact with how they form the mind that you have but also to give an insight of another public uh figure like your dad to see from your perspective of um what kind of little magical moments happen in private life i would say i remember i think i just posted about this on on instagram or something i re otherwise it didn't happen if you didn't post that yeah one person who's always sort of mattered to whatever weird life and experience i've had has been this this comedian tom lehrer um do you do you know him yes yes i love him very much likewise um anyway i remember i think i was five or something my dad came home with the with the cd this tom lehrer cd and he told me to to listen to it and it was all of this like bizarre uh satirical writing about you know like prostitution and cutting up babies and like all kinds of like ridiculously vile um content for for a five-year-old i think beyond just my love of of tom lehrer i think it was a way for my dad to express that from a very young age she was he was really ready to treat me like an adult and he was ready to to trust me and share um share his his life and his enjoyments with me um in a way that was unconventional because he was willing to uh discard tradition for the chance at a really unique and meaningful uh parental relationship so trusting that the his particular brand of weirdness is something you can understand at a young age and embrace and learn from it tom lehrer we should clarify is not all about what is it murder and prostitution he's one of the wittiest most brilliant musical artists if if you haven't listened uh to his work you should he's just uh a rare intellect who's able to sort of in catchy rhyme express some really difficult ideas and sat through satire i suppose that still even though it's decades ago still resonates today some of the ideas that he expressed i will say also that um i think i am probably uh a a more cultured person having listened to tom lehrer than i would have been without i think a lot of his comedy draws upon a canon that i was really driven to to research by saying oh what does this mean i don't understand that reference there are a lot of references there to um really really inspirational things which he sort of assumes going into a lot of his songs and for many of us like like me you have to piece those things together you know looking at wikipedia pages and whatnot but um to tie this back to the original question i think um i think there's sort of uh a break it you bought it notion of parenting i think uh really if you're if you're not going to accept a standard you have to invent your own and i think in some ways that was my dad's way of telling me that if i was too unstandard as a child he wouldn't he would invent his own way of parenting me because that was worth it to him and i think that was very meaningful to me i know you're young this is a weird time to ask this question uh are you cognizant on the role of love in your relationship with your dad are you at a place uh mentally as a man yourself uh to admit that you love the guy i love my dad like i uh with the connection that i think i've had to very few things in the world i think my dad is one of the people that's allowed me to see myself and i don't know who i would imagine myself to be if not for my dad that isn't to say that i agree with him on everything but i think he's given me courage to accept myself and to believe that i can teach myself where i'm unable to to learn from convention so i have a very i love my dad very dearly yes is there ways in which you wish you could be a better son firstly i'd like to say i'm sure before i figure out exactly what those are i think if i i think whenever i come to conclusions on what that means i'm eager to uh to take them um what do you mean by that uh what what do you mean by a conclusion i have an idea for how to be a better son i think i'm i'm inclined to to try to be that person i think that's true of almost anything i think if i have uh ideas for improvement it would be wasteful not to knock to not to act on them so um i suppose one thing i could say is that um i think idealism and what could almost be considered naivete is not necessarily a a lacking of maturity but instead an obligation to those older than us who have lived lived and seen too much to fully believe in what is naive and right without um without the assistance of the young to re-inspire uh traditional idealism and so perhaps instead of trying to be uh more mature all the time i should spend some time trying to be an idealistic form of hope in the lives of people who maybe have seen too much to retain all of that original hope so that's something that's that's difficult but you know especially appearing in public as someone as as young as i am i think anything i do which is juvenile by choice will be held against me so but maybe that's the sacrifice that i i have to make i have to retain some sort of youthful hope and optimism yeah i can't i mean uh i'm gonna get teary-eyed no but i have allergies but also this is pretty powerful you're saying i certainly share your ideas it's something i struggle with of just by instinct you should read the idiot by dostoevsky by instinct um i love being naive and seeing the world from a hopeful perspective from an optimistic perspective and it is it's sad that that is something you pay price for in this world like in the academic world especially as you're coming up uh through through schooling but just actually it's a hit on your reputation throughout your life and it's a sad truth but you have to like for many things if it's a principle you hold you have to be willing to pay the costs and ultimately i believe that in part a hopeful view will help you realize the best version of yourself because optimism is a kind of optimism is productive like uh believing that the world is and can be amazing is um allows you to create a more amazing world somehow i mean i'm not sure if i'm not sure if it's a human nature or a fundamental law of physics i don't know but uh believing the impossible in the sense being optimistic about the thing it's it's it's similar like going back to what you've said is like believing that a radical that a powerful single idea that a single individual can uh revolutionize some framework that we're operating in that will change the world for the better believing that allows you to have the chance to create that and so i'm with you on the optimism but it's you may have to pay a cost of optimism and uh naive hopefulness i mean in some sense optimism limits freedom uh i think if we don't really have much choice in choosing what is perfect if it exists as is an ideal um then there isn't much room for for creativity and that's a danger of optimism as someone who uh would like to be creative i think i think it was warren's evonne said uh accepting dreams you're never really free and that's something i think about a lot um he's an interesting guy also i really like him on that topic you do have uh a bit of an appreciation and connection with music i saw you play some guitar a few months ago what what uh can you put in like a philosophical sense your connection to music uh what insights about life about just the way you see the world do you get from music i think the role music has played in my life was originally motivated by sort of wanting to to prove things to myself i really have no ear for music i have a terrible sense of pitch and i think a lot of music relies on very standard teaching if you think about uh lessons for example music lessons there's there's sort of a routine to them which is so archaic and traditional that there's no room for for d for deviation i think all of that suggested to me that i would never have a relationship with music i loved listening to music it was just it was difficult to me it sort of saddened me um i wanted to know if there was any way i could build a connection to music given who i am my own idiosyncrasies what challenges i have i decided to try to learn music theory before i touched an instrument uh i think that gave me a very unique opportunity instead of spending my time fruitlessly at the beginning on the syntax of a particular instrument this is how you this is your posture on the piano this is how you hold your fingers uh i tried instead to learn what made music work and the the wonderful thing about that was i'm pretty sure that any instrument with discreet notes is mined for the taking within a day or so of having the ability to to play with it so i think approaching music abstractly gave me the ability to instantiate it uh everywhere and i think it also taught me something about self-teaching like recently i've tried getting into into classical music because at least traditionally this is the thing which is thought to require the most rigor um and traditional uh teaching i think it's essentially taught me even if i'll never be a great classical performer that there is nothing one can't really teach themself in this in this era so i've been i've been enjoying uh whatever connection i have with with music the other thing i'll say about it is that it's a it's a very rewarding learning process we know for example that music accesses our neurochemicals very directly and if you teach yourself a little bit of theory and are able to instantiate it on an instrument without wasting your your time or spending your time uh tediously on learning the particulars of that instrument you can instantly sit down and access your own dopamine loops and so you don't really need to motive motivate yourself with music because you know like you're giving your your brain drugs you know who needs motivation to to give themselves drugs and and learn something so uh i think i think more people should be should be playing music i think a lot of people don't realize how how easy it can be to approach if you take a sort of um unstandard approach and the estimated approach in your sense was understanding the theory first and then just from the from the foundation of the theory be able to then just take on any instrument and start creating something that sounds reasonably good yeah or learning something that sounds reasonably good and then plugging into the as you call them the dopamine loops of your brain allowing yourself to enjoy the process yeah what about the uh the pain in the ass rigorous process of practice so is there something about my dopamine loops for example that enjoys doing the same thing over and over and over again and watching myself improve i think that's because music is more effective at accessing us when it's played correctly and i think you play i'm positive that you play music much more correctly than i do so if you are going to sit down and play something that you've learned that piece will be much more satisfying to your ears and to your brain than if i were to play that piece just sitting down within with an instrument uh but it's sort of a trade-off with freedom and and rigor uh because even if i should be spending more more of my time practicing rigorously i know i don't have to to make me happy so well jacob willink i think has the saying uh the discipline is freedom so maybe uh maybe the repetition of uh the disciplined repetition is actually one of the mechanisms of achieving freedom it's another way to get to freedom that it doesn't have to be a constraint but in in a sense unlocks greater sets of opportunity than results in a deeper experience of freedom maybe i mean particularly if you're thinking about uh discipline and uh method for improvisation right there are a million pieces that you could improvise with the same discipline and how to approach that improvisation so i think i think that's it's true that discipline promotes freedom if you uh insert a layer of of indirection because i think i think if you're if you're trying to learn one piece that was written 400 years ago um and you're playing it over and over again there is nothing personable sorry there's nothing personal or creative about that process even if it's beautiful and satisfying there has to be some sort of discipline applied to the creativity of self so i think that uh i think that is the the layer of indirection which reconciles both approaches to uh freedom and discipline and enjoyment of music discipline applied to the creativity of self damn zev thank you now as an aging man yourself if you were to give an advice to young folks today of how to approach life and maybe advice to yourself is there some way you could condense a set of principles a set of advices you would give to yourself and to other young folks ah of how to live life sure i would uh i would say that with the collapse of systems that have um existed for thousands of years you know like whatever is happening with universities might be an example of some system that that may or may not be um decaying i think with the destruction of of important systems there is a unique opportunity to invest in oneself and i think that is always the right approach provided that the investment one makes uh in his self is obligated towards uh humanity as a whole and i think that is that is uh the great struggle of my generation will we create our own paths that are capable of saving whatever is collapsing or will we be squashed by the debris and i hope to articulate uh what patterns i see this struggle taking over the years that my generation becomes particularly active in the world as an important force i think already we're important as a demographic to particular markets but i i should hope that our voices will matter as well uh starting very soon so i would i would try to think about that that would be my advice do you uh it's a silly question to ask perhaps but um and a bit of a russian one it's silly because you're young but i don't think it's actually silly because you're young do you ponder your mortality and are you just afraid of death in general so tying us back to our previous conversations about abstraction versus uh experience which is determining our our notions of our life and our our world death is interesting in that it is obviously hyper important to a person's life and it is something that for the most part no human will really experience and be able to um to reflect upon so our notions of death are sort of proof that if we want to make the most of our lives we have to think abstractly and relying not at all at times on experiential thought and understandings because we can't really experience death and reflect upon it hence and use it to motivate us it has to remain some sort of abstraction and i think if we have trouble comprehending uh true abstraction we tend to view our lives as you know we tend to view ourselves as nearly immortal and i think that's very dangerous so one concrete implication for my belief in abstraction would be that we all need to be aware of our our own deaths and we need to we need to understand concretely the the boundaries of our lifetimes and no amount of experience can really motivate that it has to be driven by thought and abstraction in theory that's one of the deepest elements of what it means to be human is our ability to form abstractions about our mortality versus animals i think there's just something really fundamental about our interaction with the abstractions of death and uh you know there's a lot of philosophers uh that say that that's actually core to everything we create in this world which is like us struggling with this impossible to understand idea of mortality and i mean i'm i'm drawn to this idea because um both the the mystery of it but also just from the human experience perspective it seems that you get a lot of meaning from stuff ending it's kind of sad the flip side of that to think that stuff won't be as meaningful if it doesn't end if it's not finite it seems like resources gain value from being finite and that's true for time that's true for the deliciousness of ice cream that's true for love for everything from music and so on and uh yeah it's uh it seems deeply human to to try to uh as you said concretize the abstractions of mortality even though we can never truly experience it because that's the whole point of it once it ends you can't experience it yeah again another ridiculous question okay what do you think is the meaning of it all what's the meaning of life from your uh your deep thinking about this world is there a good way to answer any of the why questions about this existence here on earth and as i said we're here in part by prince spawn in part by accident and a lot of the things which bring us joy uh are programmed to bring us joy to ensure our evolutionary success and so i would not necessarily consider uh all of the things which bring us joy uh to be meaningful i think they they play a very uh a very obvious role in a clear pattern and we don't have much choice in that i think that out rules the idea of joy being the meaning of life i think it's um i think it's a nice it's a nice thing we get to have even if it's not inherently meaningful i think the most uh the most wonderful thing that we will ever that we have ever been given um has been our ability to uh as i said observe observe what transcends us as as humans and i think to live a meaningful life is to see that and hopefully contribute to that so so to try to understand what makes us human to transcend that and in some small way contribute to it in the finite time we have here yeah uh those are some powerful words thank you you're you're a truly special human being it's really an honor to talk to you i can't i'm just uh i'm a newborn fan of yours and i can't wait to see how you push the world please uh embrace the fear you feel and be bold and i think you will do some special things in this world i'm confident if the world doesn't destroy you and i hope it doesn't be strong be brave you're an inspiration keep doing your thing and thanks for talking today thank you so much thanks for listening to this conversation with zev weinstein and thank you to our sponsors expressvpn grammarly grammar assistant simply safe home security and magic spoon low carb cereal so the choice is privacy grammar safety or health choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from aristotle knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom thank you for listening and hope to see you next time