Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #163
the following is a conversation with eric weinstein his fourth time on the podcast both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind and the result is a complicated brilliant human being who i am fortunate to call a friend quick mention of our sponsors indeed hiring site theragun muscle recovery device wine access online wine store and blinkist app that summarizes books click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me ask that whenever we touch difficult topics in this or other conversations that you listen with an open mind and forgive me or the guest for a misstep and an imperfectly thought out statement to have any chance of truth i think we have to take risks and make mistakes in conversation and then learn from those mistakes please try not to close your mind and heart to others because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea try to assume that the people in this conversation or just people in general are good but not perfect and far from it but always striving to add a bit more love into the world in whatever way we know how if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with eric weinstein you often talk about getting off this planet and i think you don't often talk about extraterrestrial life intelligent life out there do you wonder about this kind of thing about intelligent civilizations out there i do but i try to not wonder about it in a particular way um in a certain sense i do find that speculating about bigfoot in the loch ness monster and space aliens is kind of a recreation for when things aren't going very well uh at least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives so i worry about you for example the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion you can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend so then you just take up an interest in in the simulation theory because that's something like what you do for your job coding i do think that in some sense the issue of aliens is a really interesting one but has been spoiled by too much sort of recreational escapism the key question that i find is let's assume that it is possible to look at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds and then go visit them if that is possible it's almost certainly possible through some uh as yet uh unknown or not accepted theory of physics beyond einstein and i mean it doesn't have to be that way but probably is if that theory exists there would be a percentage of the worlds that have life and sort of a drake equation kind of a way that would have encountered the ability to escape soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom at a minimum and whatever they have that is probably analogous to the cell on that world so assuming that life is a fairly generic thing that arises probably not carbon-based probably doesn't have dna but that something that fits the pattern of uh darwinian theory which is descent with variation um differential success and thereby constantly improving and so on that through time there will be a trajectory where there'll be something increasingly complex and fascinating and beautiful like us humans but much more they can also off gas whatever entropy it creates to give an illusion that you're defeating thermodynamics right so whatever whatever these things are probably has an analog of the bilipid layer so that cells can get rid of the chaos on one side of the barrier and keep order on the other whatever these things are that create life assuming that there is a theory to be found that allows that civilization to diversify um we would have to imagine that such a civilization might have taken an interest in its concept of the universe and have come here they would come here they would have a deep understanding of the physics of the universe sufficient to have arrived here well there's two questions whether they could arrive physically and whether their information could be sent here and whether they could gain information from us it's possible that they would have a way of looking into our world without actually reaching it i don't know but yes if my hope which is that we can escape this world is can be realized if that's if that's feasible then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true and that somebody else should be here first of all i want to say this my purpose when i come on to your show and i reframe the questions is not to challenge you i can sit inside all of those it's to give you better audio and video because i think we've been on an incredible role i really love what you do and so i am trying to honor you by being as disagreeable about frame breaking as possible i think some of your listeners don't understand that it's actually a sign of respect as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic which is i think you can play outside of some of the frames and that these are sort of offerings to get the conversation started so let me try to break that frame and give you something different beautiful i think what's going on here is that i can prove effectively that we're not thinking about this in very deep terms as soon as i say we've got to get off this planet the number of people who assume that i'm talking about faster than light travel is very high and faster than light travel assumes some sort of einsteinian paradigm that then is broken by some small adjustment and i think that that's fascinating it shows me that our failure to imagine what could be being said is profound we don't have an idea of all of the different different ways in which we might be able to visit distant worlds all we think about is okay it must be it must be einsteinian space times and then some means of exceeding the speed limit and it's just it's fascinating to me that we don't really have we've lost the ability to just realize we don't know the framework and what is what does it even mean so one of the things i think about a lot is worlds with more than one temporal dimension it's very hard to think about one more than one temporal dimension so that's a really strong mental exercise of breaking the framework in which we think because uh most of the frameworks would have a single temporal dimension right well first of all most of the frameworks in which we think would have no temporal dimension and have pure like in mathematics the differential geometry that riemann came up with in the 1800s we don't usually talk about what we would call split signature metrics or lorentzian signature in fact if it weren't for relativity this would be the most obscure topic out there almost all the work we do is an euclidean signature and then there's this one freakish case of relativity theory in physics that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions fascinating so it's usually momentary and just looking at space yes you know we have these three kinds of uh equations that are very important to us we have elliptic hyperbolic and parabolic right and so the idea is if if i'm chewing gum after eating garlic bread when i open my mouth and i've got chewing gum between my lips maybe it's going to form an elliptic object called a minimal surface then when i pop that and blow through it you're going to hear a noise that's going to travel to you by a wave equation which is going to be hyperbolic but then the garlic breath is going to diffuse towards you and you're eventually going to be very upset with me according to a heat equation which will be parabolic so those are the three basic paradigms for most of the work that we do and a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is elliptic whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case and i don't even know what to do about more than one temporal dimension because i think almost no one studies that i can't believe you just captured uh much of modern physics in the example of chewing gum i have an off-color one which i chose not to share but hopefully the kids at home can imagine okay so okay that is the place where we come from now if we want to arrive at a possibility of breaking the frameworks at with two versus zero temporal dimensions how do we even begin to think about well let's think about it as you and i getting together in new york city okay so if you tell me uh eric i want to meet you in new york city go to the corner of i don't know 34th street and third avenue and you'll find a building on the northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor right so when we have third avenue that's one coordinate 34th street that's the second coordinate and go up to the 17th and what time is that oh 12 noon all right well now imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a particular height in the building it's all flat land but i'm going to give you two temporal cords so meet me at 5 00 pm and 12 noon at the corner of 34th and 3rd that gets to be too mind-blowing i've got two separate watches and presumably that's just specifying a single point in those two different dimensions but then being able to travel along those dimensions let's let me see your right hand you have no watch on that no okay i'm very concerned lex that you're going through life without a wrist watch that is my favorite and most valued wrist watch i want you to wear it this guy is funnier than basically any human on earth that has been in my family for months it's a fitbit now what i want you to understand is lex fritman is now in a position to live in two spatial and two temporal dimensions unlike the rest of us i clearly am only fit for four four spatial dimensions so i'm frozen whereas you can double move i can double move yeah which is funny because this is set in uh austin time yes it's 4 00 p.m and this is set in los angeles times well that's just with an affine shift in mod 12 but my point is is that wouldn't that be interesting if there were two separate time skills and you had to coordinate both of those but you didn't have to worry about what floor of the building because everything was on the ground floor okay that is the confusion that we're having and if you do one more show right then they're gonna put a watch on your ankle and you're only gonna have one spatial dimension that you can move around but my claim is is that all of these are actually sectors of of my theory in case we're interested in that which is geometric unity there is a 2 2 sector and a 3 1 and a 1 3 and a 0 4 and a 4 0 and all of these sectors have some physical reality we happen to live in a 1-3 sector but that's the kind of thinking that we don't do when i say we have to get off this planet people imagine oh okay it's just einstein plus some ability to break the law by the way even though you did this for humor sake i perhaps am tempted to pull a putin uh who who i'm gonna get whacked no not quite but he was given a a super bowl ring to uh to look at and he instead of just looking at it put it on his finger and walked away with it robert robert craft that's right so [Laughter] in the same way i will if you don't mind walk away with this fitbit and taking the entirety of your life story with it because there's all these steps on it boy have you lost a lot of weight [Laughter] and where have i been exactly right that's what that's what we're talking about we're talking about you want to get into aliens let's have an interesting alien conversation let's stop having the typical free will conversation the typical alien conversation the typical agi morality conference it's like we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves because we're not making progress time to have better versions of all these conversations is there some version of the alien conversation that could incorporate the breaking of frameworks well i think so i mean the key question would be we've had the pentagon release multiple videos of strange ufos that undermined a lot of us i just think it's also really fascinating to talk about the fact that those of us who were trained to call bs on all of this stuff just had the rug pulled out from under us by the pentagon choosing to do this and you know what the effect of that is you've opened the door for every stupid theory known to man my aunt saw a ghost okay now we're gonna have to listen to well hey the pentagon used to deny it then it turned out there were ufos dude whoever is in charge of lying to the public they need a cost function that incorporates the damage and trust because i held this line that this was all garbage and all bs now i don't know what to think there's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion the breaking of frameworks that involves the release of videos from the pentagon which is almost like another dimension that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling constantly that is uh messing with my head to think about because i mean like because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that into your study of the nature of reality it's like the constant shifting of the notation the tools we use to communicate that reality and so like what am i supposed to think about these videos is it is it a complete distraction is it a kind of cosmic joke i don't know but you know what i'm tired of these people just completely tired of these the the the people on the pentagon side or the people who are interpreting the stuff on the pentagon side i'm tired of the entirety i'm tired of the authorities playing games with what we can know the fact that you and i don't do you have a security clearance some level of it for because i was finding for darpa for a while i don't have a security clearance you know i i am going to release whatever theory i have and my guess is is that there is zero interest from our own government and so the chinese will find out about at the same time our government does because lord knows what they do in these buildings i i watch crazy people walk in and out of the intelligence community walk in and out of darpa and i think wow you're talking to that person that's really fascinating to me we don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball complete lack of transparency do you think it's possible there's the government is in possession of something deeply fundamental to understanding of the world that they're not releasing so this is one one thing is this is one of the famous distractions that people play with the narrative assume that that were true of alien life forms uh spacecraft and possession that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft that's assuming that true narrative yeah i don't think the government really exists at the moment i believe and this is not an idea that was original to me there was a guy named michael teitelbaum who used to be at the sloan foundation and at some point i pointed out the us government had completely contradictory objectives when it came to the military and science and one one branch said this one branch said that i said you know i i don't understand which is true what does the government want he said do you think there's a government and i said what do you mean he said what makes you think that the people in those two offices have ever coordinated what is it that allows each office to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office and that's when i first started to understand that there are periods where the government coheres and then there are periods where the coherence just decays and i think that that's been going on since 1945 that there have been a few places where there's been increased coherence but in general everything is just getting less and less coherent and that what ward did was focus us on the need to have a government of people a mission capacity technology commitment ideology and then as soon as that was gone um you know different people those who'd been through world war ii had one set of beliefs those born in the 1950s uh you know or late 40s by the time they got to woodstock uh they didn't buy any of that so coherence is the is that the complete opposite of like per uh of bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy so coherence is efficient functional government because when you say there's no government meaning there's no uh emergent function from a collection of individuals it's just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices without any kind of efficient communication with each other on a single mission and so a a government that is truly at the epitome of what a government is supposed to be is when a bunch of people working together what are we about are we about freedom are we about growth are we about decency and fairness uh are we about the absence of a national culture so that we can all just do our own thing i've called this thing the usa and the united states of absolutely nothing these are all different visions for our country so it's possible that there's a alien spacecraft somewhere and there's of like 20 people that know about it and then they're kind of it like as you communicate further and further into the offices that information dissipates it gets distorted in some kind of way and then it's completely lost the power the possibility of that information is lost we bought a house and i had this idea that i wanted to find out what all the switches did and i quickly found out that your house doesn't keep updating its plans as people do modifications they just do the modifications and they don't actually record why they were doing what they were doing or what things lead you so they're all sorts of bizarre like there's a switch in my house that says privacy i don't know what privacy is does it turn on an electromagnetic field that is some lead shielding go over the house um that's what we have we have a system in which the people who've inherited these structures have no idea why their grandparents built them i'd be fine if there's a freedom of speech switch that you could also control and it would be perfect for well that's different because what they figured out is is that if they can just make sure that we don't have any public options for communication then hey every pri uh thing that we say to each other goes to a private company private companies can do whatever they want and this is like one of the greatest moves that we didn't really notice uh electronic and digital speech makes every other kind of speech irrelevant and because there is no public option uh guess what there's always somebody named sundar or jack or mark who controls whether or not you can speak and what it appears to be that is being said and whose stuff is weighted more highly than other it's an absolute nightmare and by the way the silicon valley intellectual elite lord knows what is going on people are so busy making money that they are not actually upholding any of the values so silicon valley is sort of maximally against it it has this kind of libertarian uh free progressive sheen to it when it goes to burning man and then it quickly just imposes rules on all of the rest of us as to what we can say to each other if we're not part of the inner elite so what do you think the ideal of the freedom of speech means well this is very interesting i keep getting lectured on social media by people who have no idea how much power the supreme court has to abstract things right now you have the concept of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and the spirit of the law would have to say that our speech that matters is free at least at the level of ideas i don't claim that i have the right to endanger your life with speech or to reveal your private information so i really am not opining about directed speech intended to smear you and that that's a different kettle of fish and maybe i have some rights to do that but i don't think that they're infinite um what i am saying is is that the freedom of speech for ideas is essential that the court abstracted and shove it down the throat of google facebook twitter amazon whoever these infrastructure companies are because it really matters which abstraction you use the the case that i really like is search and seizure if i have private data that i entered in my house that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house but i view the is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter of my house that i have the right to protect or does my password extend the perimeter of my house to the data on the server that is located outside of my house these are court our choices for the court and the court is supposed to pretend that they can divine the true intent of the framers but all of the sort of and i've taken the calling this the problem of internet hyenas people with ready-made answers and lols and you're such a these folks love to remind you it's a private company dude it can do whatever it wants no the court has to figure out what the abstractions are and just the way for example the griswold decision um found that there was a penumbra because there was too little in the constitution therefore there were all sorts of things implied that couldn't be in the document somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now that says jack cannot do whatever he wants it's really you say the courts but it's also us people who think about the world see you it's the courts but the courts don't do this we're toast but we can still think about it i mean i i'll sure but i i don't feel like going down the drain here's what i'm thinking about because it's tricky how far it should extend i mean that's an ongoing conversation don't you think the interpretation of the law i think i'm trying to say something very simple and it's just not going to be popular for a while tech dwarfs previous forms of communication print or shouting in a public park and so you know i can go to a public park and i can shout if i get a permit even there i think was in the ninth late 1980s in atlanta we came up with free speech zones where you can't protest at a convention you bet you can go to a park 23 miles out and they'll fence off a little area where you can have your free speech no speech is dangerous ideas are dangerous we are a country about danger and risk and yes i agree that targeted speech at individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of that is very different so forget a lot of that stuff but free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous and people will die as a result of free speech the idea that one life is too much is preposterous like why did we send if one life is preposterous why do we send anyone to the beaches of normandy i just don't get this so one thing that i was clearly bothered by and maybe you could be my therapist as well i thought you were mine this is this is a little bit of a miscommunication on both of our parts then uh because who's paying who for this i was really bothered by uh amazon banning parlor from aws because my assumption was that the infrastructure i drew a distinction between aws the infrastructure on which competing platforms could be created is different than the actual platforms so i the standard of the ideal of freedom of speech i in my mind in a shallow way perhaps apply differently to aws than i did to twitter it felt that we've created a more dangerous world that freedoms were violated by banning a parlor from aws which i saw as the computing infrastructure which enables the competition of tools the competition of frameworks of communication what do you think about this first of all let me give you the the internet hyena answer i understand dude just build your own amazon yeah right yes well so that's a very shallow statement but it's also one that has some legitimacy we can't completely dismiss it because uh there's levels to this to this game yes and no but if you really wanted to chase that down yeah one of the great things about a person-to-person conversation as opposed to like let's have 30 of our closest friends whenever we have a conversation with 30 of our closest friends you know what happens it's like passing light through a prism every person says something interesting and as a result it's always muddled you like nothing ever resolves well one of my conversational techniques you mentioned uh you push back is uh uh first this childlike naivete and curiosity but also you are simulated real i'm afraid real all right so in this paradigm yeah how could you not see this coming i mean this i did a show with um ashley matthews who's the woman behind riley reed and specifically about this it was about the idea that if i move away from politics and go towards sex i know that there's always a move to use the infrastructure to shut down sex workers and in this case we had operation chokepoint under the obama uh administration we have a positive passion for people who want to solve problems that they they don't like this company they don't like that company payday loans would be another one and so you have legal companies that are harassed by our financial system that her you can't you know as riley reed ashley couldn't get a mailchimp account according to her if i understand her correctly and this idea that you charge these people higher rates because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards even if their chargebacks are low yes we have an unofficial policy of harassment there's something about everybody who shows up at davos they get drunk in the swiss alps and then they come back home and they coordinate and they coordinate things like build back better we don't really understand what buildback better is but my guess is is that buildback better has to do with extremism in america how do we shut down the republican party as the source of extremism now i do think the republican party has got very extreme under trump and i do believe that that was responsive to how extreme the democratic party got under clinton first and then obama and then hillary and in all of these circumstances it's amazing how much we want to wield these things as weapons well our extremism is fine because we pretend that antifa doesn't exist and we don't report what goes on in in portland but your extremism my god that's disgusting this is the completely ridiculous place that we're in and by the way our friends in part are coked up on tech money and they don't appear to hold the courage of their convictions at a political level because it's not in keeping with shareholder value you know at some level shareholder value is the ultimate shield with which everyone can cloak themselves well on that point donald trump was banned from twitter and i'm not sure it was a good financial decision for twitter right uh but um perhaps you can correct me if i'm wrong but are you thinking locally or are you thinking if twitter refused to well if twitter refused to ban donald trump what is the odds that that the full force of the antitrust division might find them i don't know oh i see i see so there's a complicated thing well there's a look these guys are all having a discussion in very practical terms you know you can say you can imagine the sorts of conversation jack marks under really glad you're all here we're all trying to sing from the same hymnal and row in the same direction we understand free speech we're completely committed to it but we have to draw along with extremism guys we we just need we need to make sure we're all on the same page well they use the term violence too and they i think over apply it so basically anybody [Laughter] i'm i'm telling you i'm i say dumb things to uh to incentivize uh thoughtful conversation well whatever these things are there is no trace like how old are you lex you're in your mid-30s yeah to late 40s mid late 20s to late 40s yeah somewhere in there that that's the demographic i do think that partially what's happened is that your group has never seen functional institutions these institutions have been so compromised for so long you've probably never seen an adult sometimes i think elon looks like an adult i know that he has a wild lifestyle but i also see him looking like an adult what does an adult look like exactly oh you know somebody who weighs things speaks carefully thinks about the future beyond their own life's lifespan somebody was a pretty good idea of how to get things done isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions is more focused on breaking new ground than playing rent-seeking games i mean i really had a positive i was so completely jazzed when elon musk ended up as the world's richest person he was like well that's interesting back to work it's just like that's that's what it is that's what a grown-up would do and it just made you know weirdly i said something about isn't it amazing that the world's richest person knows what a lagrangian is he made a terrible lagrange joke about potentials but yeah i mean i do think that ultimately elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult and i can tell you that the internet hyenas will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is for pumping his stock price talking his book and all this stuff shut up just looking at the world seriously and rigorously you're saying that the people who are running tech companies or running the mediums on which we can exercise the idea of free speech are not adults i think not i think first of all a lot of them are silicon valley utopian businessmen where you talk a utopian line and you use it you've heard my my take which is that the idealism of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts and i believe that in many ways the idealism of silicon valley about connecting the world a world of abundance et cetera et cetera et cetera is really about the uh software eating the world as mark andreessen likes to say through all these legacy properties and by simply being a bad tech version of something that previously existed like a newspaper you could immediately start to dwarf that by aggregating newspapers in their digital versions because digital is so much more powerful as a result yes we have lots of man-children wandering around what once was the bay area and is now austin and miami and other places um maybe singapore that um all of these people that you know these are friends of ours and they're brilliant with respect to a certain amount of stuff but none of them can get off the drip it's amazing that none of them have fu money we've got billionaires who don't have fu money okay i think the argument used by jack dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence and not just that growth by everybody that was banning people and then this word violence was used as a kind of uh just like extremism and so on to uh without much reason behind it you think it's impossible for jack dorsey anybody else to be as you said an adult a grown grown-up and jack is pretty close to being the guardian he seems like he is yeah he's oh he's as he's under pressures as you've discussed he it seems that he's been on the verge of almost being quite serious and transparent and real i don't know where the jack dorsey that i met went and i worry that that must be something behind the scenes that i can't see from my perspective what i think is the stress the burden of that when people are screaming at you it's uh zen monk he really is yeah jack is an incredibly impressive person intellectually morally spiritually at least for a couple of meetings i don't know him very well but i'm very impressed by the person i'm at and i don't know where that person is and that terrifies me but do you think somebody could step up in that way no you so it does can does a human being have the capacity to be transparent about the reasoning behind the banning or do you think all banning eventually uh all banning of people from mediums of communication is eventually destructive or it's impossible for human beings to reason with ourselves about it well let's let's see what the problem is so my phone has been on airplane mode i'm going to unlock it i'm going to take a picture of lex ridden now if i can i'm going to tweet that picture out great but here's the weird part about it yeah um that picture sitting with lex today this this ladies and gentlemen is called the sausage is made okay in so doing yes i have just sent um a picture of you and a tiny piece of text all over the planet that has arrived at if statistics tell the truth just under half a million different accounts and then more from sharing and so on and we have well been some of those accounts are dead we don't really know how many places it went yeah but the key issue with that tweet is that that is a non-local phenomenon yes so i just broadcasted to an entire planet somebody in uganda is reading that at the same time as somebody in uruguay there is no known solution to have so many people with the ability to communicate non-locally because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech inside of the constitution friction locality there were all sorts of other aspects to speech so if you think about speech as a bundle i like this then it got unbundled and some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on to uh the impact of speech aren't present and we don't have the courage to say i wonder if the first amendment really applies in the modern era in the same way or we have to work through an abstraction either we probably have to amend the constitution or we have to abstract it properly and that issue is not something we're facing up to i watch us constantly look backwards we don't seem to try to come up with new ideas and new theories nobody really imagines that we're going to be able to wisely amend the constitution anymore in the inside of the united states many people abroad will say why are these guys talking about the u.s it's a u.s centric program well that's because nobody knows where this program lives the fact by the way that you and i happen to be in a physical place together is also bizarre could be anywhere it doesn't really matter that it happens to be here so the difference between logical between physical local non-local frictional non-fictional it's the same thing with firearms nobody imagined that the gatling gun was going to be present when you had to reload a musket and that's fascinating to think about i mean you you're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom that seems so foundational to the to this nation to what made this nation great and perhaps much of the world that is great made a great is changing completely can we try to reason through how the idea of freedom of speech is to be changed i mean i guess i'm struggling it feels really wrong perhaps because i wasn't paying attention to it it feels really wrong to ban donald trump now from twitter to to ban not just the president that's really wrong to me but this particular human for being uh divisive but then when there is an incitement of violence that is an overused claim but perhaps there was uh actual uh brewing of local violence happening so one of the things i know what's happening on parlor is people were uh scheduling meetings together in physical space so you're now going going back from this dynamic social large scale people from uganda people from all over the world being able to communicate you're now mapping that into now back meeting in the physical space that is uh similar to what the founding but the violence were digital if ransomware suddenly was unleashed um true the key issue is the abstractions so what was freedom of speech as a bundle and now it's and then how do we abstract the bundle into the digital era do you think we just need to raise the question talk about it do you have do you have ideas because sure i have ideas but the key point is that i'm not even welcome in mainstream media i've never seen you on mainstream media do you do mainstream media so we we exist in part of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story which i've called the gated institutional narrative and the institutions pretend that they plug their fingers uh in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of msnbc talking to cnn about what was in the new york times as covered by the washington post and so that's effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they you know the undertaker faces off against hulk hogan and rowdy roddy piper okay well that's very different than mma you've uh recently been on glenn beck's program yeah and there was this kind of one of the things you've talked about is being able to have this conversation i don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside the mainstream media but a conversation that reaches across different world views you're right having a nuanced or just like a respectful conversation that's grounded and mutual but we can't have the reality because the main model is is um the center both left and right is in the process of stealing all the wealth that we built up and they've organized the extremes uh into two larping teams that i've called magistan and wikistan and then you have everybody who isn't part of that complex all seven of us the number of us who are able to earn a living looking at all of these mad people playing this game you know there's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks are trying to look at price action and somebody says this doesn't make any sense and somebody will say it's just the locals stealing from each other and that's really what we have we have we've got the leaders of magastan and wikistan uh you know championing these two teams is sponsored by the center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver and cut the paintings out of the frames that's what we you and i are looking at so when you ask me like do you have any ideas about the abstraction for free speech i've never met mark zuckerberg i've never met sunder pichai i never met larry page i was once in a room with sergey brin i've never spoken to elon musk i hang out with peter thiel but we have a very deep relationship but i don't really speak to that many other people at you know sort of at this level we're not having any kind of smart conversation at a national level in fact it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox in which we could play together there's no place that we actually talk except long-form podcasting and by the way they've found you see what's going on with like alex stamos and the hoover institution we've you know that there's a loophole left long-form podcasting allows people to speak at levels above daytime cnn yeah it's like well why do you think they're not watching daytime cnn but you know that's that's just silly journalism they uh currently have no power to displace podcasting that's why it's so powerful rss feed i mean that's why the big challenge with joe rogan and spotify is like there's this dance that's fascinating to see is joe rogan is not part of the system and then he's also uncancelable and there's this tension that's happening well howard stern howard stern became much less relevant so if they can't control joe by bringing him in house the key question is is he going to continue like you know this joe says the thing about fu money yeah joe's one of the only people with fu money who's actually said fu yeah yeah i don't understand this i don't have fu money what what exactly is can we break apart a few money because i always thought i've been fortunate enough to have always have fu money in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary in the united states this is the stoic point which is yeah you can live on rice and beans right you're uncancelable because you're always rich relative to your needs right isn't that fu fundamental if you mind why do you say that tech billionaires don't have fu money when you need to hire private security to protect your family how do you protect your two children i don't have those yet bingo yeah my point is is that fu money insulates everything that you care about it's not just about you so you're saying as the level of responsibility grows the amount of money required for fu we have a war going on the war is on academic freedom academic freedom used to be present in the system as a in terms of the idea we we trust our elite now we have an idea like you want to be the elite you know you want a lord above us that's like first of all there's like a populist anti-elitist thing then there's the idea that we're going to defer tenure for forever then we're going to tell people stay in your lane your tenure is only good for your own particular tiny micro subject then we're going to also control your grants and we'll be able to load up your teaching load if we don't like who you are will make your life absolutely impossible we lost academic freedom and we ushered in peer review which was a disaster and then we lost funding so that people were confident that they would have the ability to do research no matter what they said and as a result what you find is is a world in which there's no ability to get people to say no i'm not going to sign your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath i won't sign any loyalty oath get the hell out of my office you a few and you you're connecting money to that but well my point is is that academic freedom is the the whole idea behind it was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire on a much smaller salary right okay we've lost that yeah the only reason in part that i wanted to go into academic academics as a profession as opposed to wanting to do physical or mathematical research the great prize was freedom and ralph gomorry uh of the sloan foundation previously of ibm research pointed it out he says if you lose freedom you lose the only thing we had to offer top minds top minds value their intellectual freedom and their physical and economic security at a different level than other human beings and so people say you know i understand dude you have the ability to do x y and z what's the problem it's like well i value my ability to raise the middle finger as an american practically above everything else i want to talk to you about freedom here in the context of something you've mentioned which is one way to take away freedom is to put a human being into a cage to create constraints the other one that worries me is something that i think you've spoken to to twitter a little bit on twitter is we bleed freedom by kind of slowly uh scaring you into not doing not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities you can as freedom so like when you ban donald trump [Music] when you uh ban uh parlor you give a little doubt in the minds of millions like me a person who's a tech person who's an entrepreneur entrepreneur there's a little that's what i'm afraid of when i look in the mirror is there now a little doubt in there sure that that limits the amount of options i will try how certain are you that the covid virus didn't come from the wuhan lab and his biosafety level four we both know that we're both supposed to robotically say the idea that the covet virus came from a lab is a discredited conspiracy theory there is no evidence that suggests that this is true the world health organization and the cdc have both opined this to say otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible and the threat of that is the thing that ultimately limits the the freedoms we feel i should be tweeting about jeff epstein all the time and you're afraid well it's awesome i mean i said it in the public yeah many times why is it we don't ask where the records are from villard house where where are the financial records where the sec filings yeah where are the questions on on the record to the intelligence uh agencies was he known to be part of the intelligence community so so we're we're not interested in asking questions like am i going to die as a result of asking the question was jeff epstein part of the intelligence community of any nation is there a reason we're not asking about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund that he didn't run just like the wuhan lab okay how do we get to the core of the jeffrey epstein the the truth behind jeffrey epstein in a sense i mean there's there's some things that are just like useless conspiracy theories around it even if they're true there's some things that get through i hate to say it you're not gonna like it look at the 1971 media pennsylvania break-in of the citizens committee to investigate the fbi those kids and by the way they weren't all kids did what had to be done they broke in they broke the law it was an incredible act of civil disobedience and god blessed judy feingold for taking to her she was going to take to her grave that she'd been part of this like the coolest thing of all time they didn't say anything for forever so civil disobedience i mean you have to we are founded on civil disobedience civil disobedience is incredibly you screw it up and you're just a vandal you screw it up you're a hooligan yeah those those cats were so disciplined it's an art form and it was an art form and they risked everything they were willing to pay with their freedom those are the sorts of people who earned the right by putting themselves at risk i would not do this i am not volunteering to break into anything i think it was uh william davidon who was a student of murray gelman and a physics professor at haverford who corralled these people and led this effort and right now what we need is somebody to blow the lid off of what is controlling everything we have i i'm happy to hear that it's a system of incentive structures that it's a system of selective pressures i'm happy to find out that it's emergent i'm happy to find that it's partially directed by our own intelligence community i'm happy to hear that uh in fact we've been penetrated by north korea iran china and russia but i need to know why people aren't like the firebombing of the courthouse in portland oregon has no explanation and somehow this is normal this is not normal to any human being we have video that people don't believe and you know i come back to the shaggy defense of it wasn't me you know so it's like um you remember that song shaggy yeah it wasn't me caught you uh banging the counter on the couch yeah exactly it wasn't me it wasn't me he says but his friend says well your strategy makes no sense at all this is what msnbc is doing you dropped him from the graphic it wasn't me it wasn't me you came up with another yang it wasn't me i will never see msnbc the same again so you've spoken about him before i think it'd be nice to maybe honor him to break it apart a little bit aaron schwartz yeah uh why was he a special human being in this ilk of what we're talking about now civil disobedience um how do we honor him now moving forward as human beings who are willing to take risks in this world well i don't know i mean are you inspired by aaron schwartz i am how do you feel about jstor let's talk about jstor first so let's let's let's say what jstor is all about we the taxpayer pay for research and then the people who do the research do all the work for a bunch of companies who then charge us thirty dollars an article to read what it is that we already paid for and if we don't cite these articles we're told that we're in violation okay i almost never call for civil disobedience because i don't really want to but jstor  elsevier springer who the are these people yeah get the smart people need to take the greedy people behind the woodshed and explain to them what science is i have a very old-fashioned idea that's so out of favor that i will immediately be seen as knuckle dragger yeah i believe in the great woman theory of history and the great man theory of history emmy nerder is fantastic as an example and i believe in editors over peer reviewers and i believe that wrong things should be allowed into the literature and i believe that the gatekeeping should go towards zero because the costs associated with distribution are very very slight i believe that um we should be looking at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly into your competitors clutches particularly if you're a young person being reviewed by an older person uh are you familiar with the the duatta senor are you familiar with the legend of the magnaya now the magnaya is the miller's daughter and the largest food fight in the entire universe i believe is held i think in italy uh it's called the battle of the oranges and it celebrates the miller's daughter who had fallen in love with her beloved and when it came time for them to marry the virginal magnaya was in fact told that the lord of the land had the right to have the first night with the bride well the magnaya had a different idea so she seemed to consent to this uh perhaps mythical right also called the the primonote the first night and by by legend she concealed a dagger underneath her robes and when it came time for the the hated lord of the manor to extract uh this right she pulled the knife out and killed him and i think it also echoes a little bit of particularly wonderful scene from game of thrones but that inspired both men and women and the magnaya is the legendary hero right now what we need to do is we need to resist the primo note the right of first look right fu you don't have to write a first look i don't want to send something blindly to my competitors i don't want to subject myself to you naming what what work i've done why why are you in my story that's my question get out of my story if i do work and then you have an idea oh well it's the matthew principle to him who has much more will be given i've gone to the national academy of sciences and talked about these things and it's funny i've been laughed at by the older people who think well eric you know science proceeds funeral by funeral that's plonk you know the matthew principle you know the matilda principle the things done by women are attributed to men these are not new you're like and you guys just live like this yeah so the revolutionary act now is to resist all of these things that we need these things that are not new so you asked me about aaron schwartz aaron schwartz was the magniah one of the things you've done very beautifully is to communicate love and i think about you know some of our conversations you got me to talk a little bit about my own experiences and 0 2 1 3 8 and 3 9. we are the product of our trauma and what people don't understand is that very often when you see people taking counter measures against what appear to be imaginary forces they're really actually replaying things that really happen to them and having been through this system and watching all of the ways in which it completely rewrites the lives of the people who i'm counting on to cure our diseases build our new industries keep us safe from our foes the amount of pressure the system is putting on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable and so my my goal is to empower somebody like aaron schwartz in memory and to talk about a jeffrey epstein situation did you know that the first person outside of me to get a look at geometric unity was jeffrey epstein how did he know i was working on this i don't know so your ideas that formed geometric community was something that uh his eyes have seen i was pushed to talk to jeffrey epstein as one of the only people who could help me no no listen to this how does this yeah how does this connect okay well first of all my old synagogue my old shule was the conservative minion at harvard hillel and i believe it's called rusofsky hall after henry rusofsky in the economics department who was a japan scholar if i'm correct and he became provost or dean of harvard i believe that that was built with jeffrey epstein's money and i wondered in part whether the jewish students at harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck of harvard hilla so that was something i found very curious but i don't know much about it i also found that jeffrey epstein hanging around scientists i don't think that either you or joe exactly i mean got me correct uh in your last interchange uh for the record for people who haven't listened to joe rogan program joe has claimed that eric weinstein was the only person who has gotten laid paid oh paid and you said you also got paid as a young man right i believe the word was laid but uh allegedly my hearing isn't so good at age 55. yeah all right leaving that aside yes um what was jeffrey epstein doing hanging around all of these scientists i don't think that was the same program that was about compromising political leaders and business people and entertainment figures i think these are two different programs that were being run through one individual and joe seemed to think that i didn't think he was smooth i thought he was glib i think what joe is really trying to get out of is that i found his mysticism meretricious he had a ability to deflect every conversation that might go towards revealing that he didn't know what he was talking about every time you started to get close to something where the rubber hit the road the rubber wouldn't hit the road and yet can you help me untangle the the fact that you thought deeply about the physics of the nature of our universe and jeffrey epstein was interested how did he know i wasn't really talking about this stuff until you know even my close friends didn't really know what i was up to and yet you're saying he he did not have sufficient brilliance to understand when the rubber hit the road so why why did he have sufficient interest and tell me what i thought i've been waiting to find out does my government even know i exist do you have an answer to that question i have a couple times the government has reached out to me in general there is zero interest in me like less than zero interest i find that fascinating as far as you know right i mean well that's what i'm trying to say the question about not being able to see through a half-silvered mirror you don't know what's going on behind the half-silvered mirror to you it's a it's all you see is uh is your reflection but your intuition still holds like this is where i mentioned that i uh this is where i'll say naive dumb things but i still hold on to this intuition that jeff not i'm not confident in this but i i'm leaning towards that direction that jeffrey epstein is the source of evil not something that's underlying him you have you have a bias it's different than mine arbazian priors are tutored by different life experiences if i was mostly concerned like sam harris was is concerned that people fill their heads with nonsense i would have a very strong sense that people need order in the world that they take mysterious situations they build entire castles in the air and then they go move in if they really get crazy you know the old saying is that neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics move in coming from a progressive family we had a different experience it's really weird when the government is actually out to get you when they actually send a spy when they actually engage in disinformation campaigns when they smear you and if you've ever had that brought to bear on your family you have a howard zinn sort of understanding of the country which is different than having a wow do people believe crazy stuff because they watch too much tv and both of these things have some merit to them but it's a question of regulated expression when do you want to express more sam harris and when do you want to express more howard zinn and you can express both correct the one human being can just pass both sure but there's a trade-off between them in other words most of most people like the michael shermers of the world are going to tilt very strongly to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence you're going to have that kind of energy and then somebody else is going to say how many times do i have to get hit on uh you know how many times i have to hammer my own thumb before i realize that there's a problem so you know my feeling about this is yes people see patterns in clouds they see faces and scripture and all sorts of things and it's just random cloud patterns and it's also the case that there's tremendous pressure not to see conspiracies when conspiracies are relatively more common than the people who shout conspiracy theory will claim so both of these things are true and you have to ask when do you express your inner zen and when you're in harris and those are different one fundamental difference you and i biases aside is you've actually met jeffrey epstein and i'm uh listening to like reverberations years later of stories and narratives throughout the story luckily i only met him once and i i think i had one or perhaps two phone conversations with him other than the one meeting you can learn a lot in just a few words right from a human being well that's true but i think that the bigger issue was i saw something that i don't hear much remarked upon which is jeffrey epstein is all there that there is in other words there's the national science foundation national institute of health howard hughes there's all this stuff that kind of has the same feel to it a little bit of variation and difference department of energy if you fall outside of that there's just jeffrey epstein that's what you're told yes that's not quite true there's kavli maybe jim simons is now in the game peter thiel has done some stuff you had yuri milner and mark zuckerberg try so there is other money running around templeton but very strongly there was a belief that if you're doing something really innovative and the system can't fund it because it's we've become jeffrey epstein's your guy because this funnel that you're supposed to go through that's right and the idea is that you get called to the great man's house and you know the sort of uh lubricious version of ralph lauren you know takes you in and asks you bizarre questions and maybe he has an island maybe he has a plane and you know when you're starved uh you know somebody showing you a feast or when you're dehydrated in a death's door and somebody says oh you know i have a well you know that's what it is and so the thought is wow can you can somebody get some effing money into the science system so that we don't have super creeps uh trying to learn all of our secrets ahead of time wtf what is your problem with transparency and taxpayer dollars just all of you you wouldn't have a country you'd be speaking german so essentially you believe that human beings would not be able to in the when the money is lacking in the system like on research produce public goods you and i are meant to produce public goods now i sell athletic greens and i sell theragan and i sell unagi scooters and chili pad i can't be honest i love these products but i didn't get into this game for the purpose of selling i'm trying to figure out how do you have an fu lifestyle but you know something lex i don't know why you built this channel it's kind of a mystery wait i don't know why i'll tell you why i built my channel the face it's gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time in an alley yeah i got rolled multiple times and my point is i didn't want to become a celebrity i didn't want to become well known but it's a lot harder to roll somebody who's getting you know i think i'm i don't know if this is mistaken but i think i'm the math phd with the largest number of followers on twitter and there was nothing you could do before i mean again to put a little responsibility on you so you've created something really special for the distribution of your own ideas i mean uh but because it's not necessarily currently scalable you also perhaps you and i have the responsibility of giving other people also a chance to spread their ideas i mean joe rogan did this very effectively for a bunch of people that that's why they're angry at him because he's a gatekeeper and he let all sorts of people through that gate from roger from roger penrose to alex jones to uh jordan peterson to i mean even first of all to you and to abby martin to abby martin to barry weiss yeah that's the problem well but you you have not successfully built up a thing that allows that to carry no no we are all vulnerable to reputational attack because what happens you see the problem lexus is that you are now an institution at some level you walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag uh the last thing is the last suit you'll ever need and um you have the reach of something like cnn to people who matter okay so now the question is how do we control something that doesn't have a board doesn't have shareholders it doesn't have to make sec files fcc so the best answer they have is well we just have to destroy reputations all it takes is for us to take something that gets said or done or alleged and i think it's incredibly important one of the things people don't understand is that i'm i'm going to fight general reputational attacks not because some people don't deserve to have their reputations drawn dragged through the mud but because it's too powerful of a tool to hand it to cnn msnbc princeton harvard the state department yes but is some of it is also jp morgan muhammad ali style being good enough at doing everything you need to do without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks not being afraid but not giving enough meat i don't see why the people who have good ideas have to lead lives that are that clean if you can do it you can be messy yeah you should be able to be messy that otherwise we're we're suppressing too many people too many two billion minds yeah can you believe elon musk smoke the blood i still people tell me this that okay i have discussions about elon and people uh the avi loeb the harvard scientist you know who's talking about omoamoa that it might be alien technology he told me his this outside the box thinker yeah when speaking to me about elon said called him the guy who smoked he smokes weed he's the blunt in a dismissive way like this guy is crazy because he smoked some weed i was looking at him i was like why wow wow i think you should be able to have consensual drug-filled orgies perfect lives yeah you should be allowed to be messy you're right i take back my statement i'm just saying respectability is the unique prison where all of the gates are open and the inmates beg to stay inside it's time to end their prison of respectability because it's too effective of a means of sidelining and silencing people including it is better that we have bad people in our system than this idea of no platforming people who are beyond the pale because it's such a simple technique so how do we uh what's the heroic action here on the well for example having ashley matthews on my program by the way she was absolutely um delightful as a guest she was she is polite in the extreme far more polite than i am and i had her right after roger penrose uh as a guest because i wanted to highlight this program can go anywhere we can talk to anyone what about social media you've started highlighting people being banned on social media how do we fight this like if you get banned from social media so you're saying nobody will stand up to me well just figure out what your incentive structure is before assume that they're assuming i get banned on social media because somebody wants to make sure that my message doesn't uh interfere with the dominant narrative okay what will happen by the way i'm very glad to be able to explain this on your show because that video will presumably be archived and they can't easily make you take it down okay so what's going to happen is that there'll be a whole bunch of very low quality bot like accounts that dog you every time you talk about me right dude it's getting old getting boring we already heard you dude that was like let it go not a good look not a good look it's one of my favorites but what about the high profile ones well then you'll get a few high-profile ones and some of the high-profile ones command armies right like at some point i had 10 000 people using exactly the same templated tweet uh tweeting at me it was just actually it got to the point where it was funny because everybody said did you did you hear that in hipster coffee shop i was like why are you all suddenly talking about hipster coffee hilarious um those things will cause you to think better of it you'll start to see your follower can't go down because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot like follows and then just pull them so i think it's pretty well known how and then maybe your account will be suspended and it can't be revoked and you know et cetera et cetera and then three days later you'll be told it was an error so let me push back i just don't see not defending you like okay so what are the things you would do that given that i can actually talk to you yeah offline that that would uh make me not defend you uh well it's first of all i can't i mean no but i can imagine some but all of us have things if somebody says do you hear what your boy lex said about you what what did lex say about me oh he said you were flawed dude oh yeah you know they so distrust because none of us want to stand behind flawed people that's why you have everybody rushing to say i neither condemn nor condone i know i don't condemn narc you know why what is that we're all trying to say for the record i said that eric is smarter than me and a brilliant human being but flawed like all humans are my point is i've now come up with a new policy which is i don't care what my friends have done i am not disavowing my friends not because they didn't do the wrong thing maybe they did do the wrong thing i don't know what's the value of friendship if you if that's not that like for example we've had the situation with brian cowan brian cowan was featured recently in the los angeles times i know nothing about the allegations i can't i didn't even know brian at the time right i've known him for roughly the time i've been in los angeles maybe a year and a half during that period of time never seen anything wrong now i'm in a situation what do you think he did do you think he didn't like you know what i don't know but i do know this everyone's entitled to have friends because we can't afford isolated people and if your friends do the wrong thing they're still your friends yeah and if they do terrible terrible things you bring that up with them privately and it's not my responsibility to disavow in public you know we've had this situation that i don't like where you know particular people that i've been close to i'm put under tremendous pressure to disavow them what do you think now about your buddy i like dave rube and all that kind of stuff here's the thing just because my friends are my friends i don't disavow my friends we all need to make a statement that we will not be brought under pressure to disavow our friends our family members because mass murderers are dangerous the more isolated they become it is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people yes and it's dangerous and so it sends a signal to everybody else to uh to fit in to be more extremely cynical about the human so my i find out you've been selling heroin to elementary school students you're still my friend and i will not be disavowing you and if i have a problem with you selling heroin to elementary school students during school hours i will bring it up with you privately because we don't need to hear my voice added to that condemnation are there things that you could do that would cause me to say actually f this guy yeah above and beyond that but simply doing the wrong thing i think we've gone down a terrible path i think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing we could have in a heavily armed society so i i deeply agree with you on brian cowell and on all these people that quote-unquote got canceled uh and i'm not saying that they i don't i don't know the truth value because we can't and even if i did know the truth value i'm not setting up an incentive structure for the personal destruction as a means of letting institutions combat the fact that individuals are the last thing that can say none of you guys make any sense i don't treat these things like you know i had a conversation where kevin spacey was at the dinner table when i came down from a hotel room and i had a very long conversation with kevin spacey i will not detail because i don't do that as to what we discussed but we talked very specifically about him being cancelled and i don't think that the world has heard that story in part because there is a very strong sense that he has to be outgrouped and as a result you know i mean do we want do we want to disavow the space program because it touched verner von braun do we want to disavow quantum mechanics because pascal jordan and werner heisenberg pass through it is erin fess theorem false because he murdered his child i mean at what point do we recognize that we are the problem humans are humans and there is no perfect there is no perfect group of people even all of the most oppressed people the supposed victims of the world who we now have fetishized into thinking that they're all oracles because their lived experience informs us and their pain is more salient than everyone else's pain those people aren't necessarily great people you know it's like none none of us we can't we can't do this in this fashion so when we sit down to have a conversation across the table from somebody you should be willing to like you should not have npr in your mind you should be willing to take the full risk and to see the good in the person without with limited information and to do your best to understand that person everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget i don't believe this is of institutions yeah okay everybody is entitled to a certain amount of screwing up in life you're entitled to a mendacity budget you're entitled to an aggression budget the idea of getting rid of everybody is you know people haven't even blown through their budgets and we're already yeah i i think about for example one person uh i'd be curious to get your thoughts about alex jones let's not talk about alex jones for a second let's talk about the national enquirer is everything the national enquirer says false uh no okay do you remember the john edwards story uh his wife sorry he had a child from an extramarital affair yes i believe that the national enquirer broke the story and then what does the new york times do the new york times i think is allowed to report that the national maguire is making a claim that way they don't have to substantiate the story so why is the new york times talking to mike cernovich or using the national enquirer as a source are they using alex jones as the source who here's the big problem that we're having why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody and other people are entitled to talk to no one i don't really understand this is an indulgence system this is how the catholic church used to do things it's hard to fight the system because the reason you don't talk to alex jones is because the platforms on which you do the communication will will de-platform but i'm not platformed i used to i used to do npr and i used to do the newshour and i used to provide stories to washington post new york times that has gone away they've circled the wagons closer and closer and more of us are unacceptable and right now i have no question that they're going through anybody who has a platform trying to say okay what do we have against that person in case we need to shut that down we have to make a different decision lex and the different decision is that it doesn't matter how many times joe said the n word yeah it doesn't matter that somebody else you know like with mathematical theorems if the worst person in the world proves a mathematical theorem like the unabomber we can't undo the theorem yeah you know and i point out charles manson's song look at your game girl is an amazing song it's a really good song i don't think it's one of the greatest songs ever but it happens that he wasn't a no talent and you know i don't know how hitler was as an artist it's actually not bad okay we've got to get past this we've got to get past this idea that we're going to purge ourselves of our badness and we're just gonna this is like i've likened it to teenage girls and cutting we're just all we're doing is destroying ourselves in search of perfection and the answer is no we're not perfect we're flawed we're screwed up and we've always been this way and we're not going to silence everyone who you can point a laser beam at and say well that person look at how bad that person is if we do that kiss the whole thing goodbye we might as well just let's learn chinese but there is an art to having those messy conversations whether with with alex or anybody else okay let's talk about alex yeah there's particular stuff that alex does that's absolutely nauseating and there's other stuff that he's doing that's funny the methodology of of the way he carries and sometimes he's talking about the truth and sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy theory his variance is incredibly high the right way to approach alex jones or james o'keefe or the national enquirer anything you don't like is to say great go long short i mean well if you invest in a mutual fund all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long but if you invest in a hedge fund you do something called relative value trade it's like well you long tech or short tech well actually i'm long microsoft and i'm short google why is that oh because i believe google got way too much attention and that microsoft has been unfairly maligned and so this is really a play on legacy tech over more modern tech okay which part of alex jones are you long and which part are you short one of the things that should be a requirement for being a reporter is like what what did donald trump do that was good nothing okay then you're not a reporter what did hitler do that was good the rosenstrasse protest non-jewish women campaign for their jewish men to be returned home to them from certain death almost in death camps it should have been that not there were no death camps it should have been that everybody was returned home but you know what the fact that the the women of the rosen straw support i mean sorry i get very emotional about you know some of the baddest ass chicks in the world got their husbands returned to them cola could vote and not i'm not celebrating hitler hitler's the worst of the worst but god damn it you know this idea that we can just say everything that person does is a lie everything that person does is evil this reflects a simplicity of mind that humanity cannot afford or is is google evil because it will sell you mind conf is amazon evil because it will sell you mind conf if you find out that mineconf rests on somebody's bookshelf do you have any idea what it means if you find out that a scholar used the n-word should that person lose their job come on grow the hell up i guess our responsibility to lead by example on that because you have to acknowledge that the fact like the the current have somebody on your podcast who you're worried about and but but yeah but do it in a principled fashion i mean in other words i'm not here to whitewash yeah everything on the other hand if somebody makes you know some allegations i don't know that i'm obligated to treat every set of allegations as if now how do you defend yourself against no allegations are so cheap to make at this moment well my sort of my standard i don't know maybe you could speak to it is i don't care like in the case of alex jones for example i don't i'm willing to have a conversation with alex jones and people like him if i know he's not going to try to manipulate me assume that he is going to try to manipulate you i can't then then we're not going to be two humans okay but lex i want you to think well of me i put on a jacket i don't usually wear a jacket okay um thank you eric all right i'm trying to manipulate you there's an entire field no there's an entire field that says that speech may be best thought of as an attempt to manipulate each other this is too simplistic everything that we keep talking through yes you know better than this i disagree i i think i think there's ways there's of course it's a gray area but there is a threshold where your intent with which you come to a meeting to an interaction is one that is not one that's grounded in like a respect for a common humanity like a love for each other as deeply messy if somebody is doing really bad stuff i expect you to try to keep them from doing really bad stuff but you know just keep in mind that when i was a younger man i saw an amazing anti-pornography document documentary and it was called rate it x and i don't know where it went but the conceit of it was we're going to get some pornographers in front of a camera because they want to talk and we're going to ask them about what they do for a living and why it's okay no commentary okay you could potentially if you really think alex jones is the worst and again i'm not intimately familiar with him you could decide to um let him talk now i have decided not to do that with particular people you know i've spoken to stefan molyneux stefan molyneux makes many good points and makes many bad points and he makes many good points in bad ways and i worry about it and i don't feel that it's it's not my obligation to make sure that stefan molyneux has a voice on the portal but i did stand up and say i didn't want him banned from social media and i do think that a lot of the people who are being banned from social media were worried that they're right rather than that they're wrong i certainly don't really think that i'm worried in some sense that some of the really wrong people are wrong but you know if you look at for example curtis yarvin there's a tremendous amount of interest is eric gonna speak to curtis jarvin curtis yarman says many interesting things and he says many horrible stupid things very provocative and i don't i haven't even i haven't invited him onto the portal but i haven't said i will never invite him on to the portal we are all in a difficult position that's what i'm saying you're making it kind of i think it's a much more difficult task that and burden will carry as people who have conversations because courtesy aaron is a good example how much work do i have to put in reading curtis's work to really understand about the problem of curtis jarvin yes because i think it's probably illustrative there's this big question is why does somebody who says such stupid ass things listened to by so many people very smart people people who are part of our daily lives discuss curtis yarvin in hush tones now let's see a question my belief is that curtis yarvin has made a number of very interesting provocative points and they associate curtis yarvin as the person who has made these points and they treat the completely asinine stuff that he says that's super dangerous as well that's curtis right right they give him the credit for he he's he's kind of like sorry to use the term first principles deep thinker about in some way in some space about the world yeah but as a result we don't actually know why curtis yarvin is knocking around so many silicon valley luminaries lives what's see see you said that he said a lot of sni stupid stuff and that's the sense i got from a few things i've read not just about it this is not just like wikipedia stuff is he he's a little like i've said before he seems to be careless i don't think he's care no no it's like jim watson jim watson wants to say very provocative things in order to prove that he's free it's not question of careless he enjoys yeah the freedom to say these things yeah and the key point is is that there's i expect something more of curtis i expect that if somebody is insightful about all sorts of things up to that point that they're going to have enough care now i for example make this point repeatedly that vaccines are not 100 safe most people who have an idea that anybody is an anti-vaxxer should be silenced are in a position where they they they probably don't say vaccines are 100 say but you keep finding that statement over and over again like believe all women vaccines are 100 safe climate science is settled science whatever this mountain bailey is where you make extraordinarily vapid blanket claims and then you retreat into something well defund the pull you know we don't want no more police actually just means we want the police to not take on mental health duties we've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society and what i'm claiming is is that i might talk to curtis yarvin but i have really very little interest to talk to a guy who seems to be kind of giddy about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves it's like why do i want to do that on the portal one first of all because just as you said that's not curtis's main thing he has a lot of ideas and uh what i've read of him which is not a huge amount is there's he's very thoughtful about the way this world works and on top of that he's an important historical figure in the birth and the development of the alt-right or what would be called our right the new reaction yeah and there's so he's just an important intellectual and so it makes sense to talk to him the question is how much work do you put in well this is the issue of fugu i'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that fugu so you have you have a puffer fish you can eat the puffer fish you can you can get a kind of a tingly sensation on your tongue if you get a little bit of the poison organ but my point is i don't know how to serve curtis yarvin yeah so that in fact i'm not worried about what happens and i believe that if somebody else was a student of the new reactionary movement that person might be in a better position to host curtis yarwin so somebody that's a really good example somebody i think you've spoken with uh that's an intermediary that's a powerful one is michael malus and he's spoken with curtis jarvin and uh michael wrote a book about by the way michael somewhat changed my mind about michael malus i'm glad he did i think i i would call him a friend and i think he's a underneath it all a really kind human being and i think your skepticism about him was initially from a surface level of what did you call him hyenas the trolls and so on i'm not happy about his it's been so long since i've seen good trolls yes so he he needs a higher quality of trolling but he aspires to that i mean it you know disagree or not i really enjoy how much care he puts into the work he does like on north korea and study of the world and how much privately but also in public love he has for people especially those who are powerless yeah just like genuine admiration for them uh for but yeah i think curtis actually does too i don't know i mean you have to appreciate the first time i met curtis he introduced to me says i'm the most right-wing person you've ever met i was just like well this is a conversation that's already over it's theatrical in a way that's not conducted to actually having a real well it just actually turned me so it turned me off because it was like you need to be the most right-wing person and so it's like i'm a troll i'm a troll yeah okay why are we doing this yeah but what i'm trying to get is different i'm trying to say that michael malus is a friend of yours if you found out something terrible you should be a friend you should still continue to be his friend and you know and michael's case is very likely that we'll find out something curtis is an acquaintance of mine because he hangs around with some people that i know i did not get it i've started to understand why the people in my life some of them are curtis yarvin fans many of them disregard the stupid stuff but my feeling is is that too much poison organ not enough fish i don't know how to serve that too intermingled i'm not your chef speaking for defending your friends staying with your friends and uh bringing the old band uh together again you uh coined the term idw intellectual dark web uh i like it it's it represents a certain group of people that are struggling with the that are almost like a challenge the norms of social and political discourse from all different angles right what do you think is the state of the idw what do you think is its future is it still a useful well it never exists is it a protocol is it a collection of people featured in an article what i learned very clearly is that there's a tremendous desire in the internet age to pin people down what do you say who's in it what are the criterion it's like i understand you want to play the demarcation game and you want to make everything that is demarcated instantly null and void no thank you so i resisted saying who was in it i resisted saying what it was i resisted saying that barry weiss's article was the definitive thing you know they chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs that we couldn't get out of i did not want those photographs taken and they decided that the pulitzer prize-winning photographer needed to take them all at twilight you know i don't know some such thing i didn't even necessarily want to do the article um barry convinced me that it was the right thing to do undoubtedly barry was right i was wrong but the key point is nothing can grow in this environment there's a reason we're not building it does not appear that we found a way to grow anything organic and good and decent that we need right now and that's kind of the key issue who's the we do you mean us as a society those of us who wish to have a future for our great grandchildren let's let's let's take the subset of people who are worried about things long after their demise but do you think it's useful to have a term like the idw to capture some set of people some set of ideas or maybe principles that capture what i think the idw okay you can say it's not supposed to mean it doesn't exist it doesn't mean anything but to the public to me okay i'll just speak to me it represented something yeah i i it uh represented i think i just said this to you it's my in my first attempt to interview the great eric weinstein uh i said that uh i spoke this about you but iew in general is trying to point out the elephant in the room or that the emperor has no clothes the set of people that do that in their own way if there are multiple elephants in the room yes the point is is that the idw was more interested in seeing the totality of elephants and trying to figure out how do we move forward as opposed to saying i can spot the other guy's elephant in the room but i can't see my own right and you know in large measure we didn't represent an institutional base and therefore it wasn't maximally important that we look at our own hypocrisy because we weren't on the institutional spectrum this is where friendship comes into play with the different figures that are loosely associated with idw is you were somehow uh responsible for you know the the exactly thing that you said did you hear what i don't know i forgive you dame oh who what sam harris said about idw yeah that that kind of thing is why chuckled lovingly or chuckled like or i was angry at some people who had said things that caused sam to say what sam said about turning his imaginary club membership into the idw people said very silly things and you know i think that there is just this confusion that um integrity means calling out your friends in in front of the world right and you know i've been pretty clear about this uh i try to choose my friends carefully and if you would like to recuse me because i'm not a source of reliable information people that i know and love the most um maybe that's reasonable for you maybe you prefer somebody who was willing to throw a friend under the bus at the first sign of trouble by all means uh exit my feed you don't have to subscribe to me if that's if that's your concept of integrity you're barking up the wrong tree what i will say is that i knew these people well enough to know that they're all flawed thank you for the call back and uh but the issue is that um i love people who are flawed and i love people who have to earn a living even if you call them a grifter and i love people who uh you know like the fact that donald trump didn't get us into new wars even if you call them alt-right i love the fact that some people believe in structural oppression and want to fight it even if they're not woke because they don't believe that structural oppression is hiding everywhere i care and love different people in different ways and i just i think that you know the overarching thing lacks that we're not getting at is that we were sold a bill of goods that you can go through life like an eliza program with pre-programmed responses well it's what about ism it's both scientism it's all right it's the looney left it's campus madness you know it's like okay why don't you just empty the entire goddamn magazine all of those pre-recorded snips now that you've done all of that now we can have a conversation your son put it really well which is we should in all things resist labels but we can't deal without labels we have to generalize but we also have to keep in mind that just the way in science you deal with an effective theory that isn't a fundamental one in science most of our theories we consider to be effective theories if i generalize about about europe about women about you know christians those things have to be understood to mean something and not to have their definitions extend so broadly that they mean nothing at all nor um that they're so rigid that their claims that clearly won't bear scrutiny lex what do you really want to talk about that's my always my question to you that always gets me that's a good thing maybe you are the therapist but like you and i could talk about anything people love up until now at least people have loved listening to the two of us in conversation and my feeling is is that we're not talking about neural nets we're not talking about geometric unity and we're not talking about where distributed computing might go and i don't think that we're really focused on some of the most exciting things we could do to transform education we're still caught in this world of other people that we don't belong i don't belong in the world as it's been created i'm trying to build a new world and i'm astounded that the people with the independent means to help build that world are so demotivated that they don't want to build new structures and the people who do want to build new structures seem to be wild-eyed while i do what do you mean by wild eyed they're not they're not i guarantee you that i will get some message in my dms it says hey eric you know i'm a third year chemistry student at uh you know south dakota state and i've got a great idea i just need funding i want to build they don't have the means so the people who have the means or the sophistication you know it's like you're looking for somebody who's proven themselves a few times to say you know i've got four billion dollars behind me that's soft circled i want to figure out what a new university would be and what it would take to protect academic freedom and who we would hire and what what are the different characteristics because i can clearly see that everything following the current model is falling apart nobody in my understanding is saying that nobody is saying um let's take that which is functioning independently and make it less vulnerable let's boost those those signals and a critical component as money you think it's not only that but it's also a kind of these people are mobbed up hands off let's imagine for the moment that sunder pichai jack dorsey and mark zuckerberg founded a university come social media entity and they said this is the purpose of this is to make sure that academic freedom will not perish from this earth because it's necessary to keep us from all going crazy we are going to lock ourselves out we've come up with this governance system and the idea is is that these people will be assigned the difficult task of making sure that society doesn't go crazy in any particular direction that we have a fact-based reality-based feasibility-based understanding we can try to figure out where our real opportunities are so it feels like everybody with a posi with the ability to do something like that and with the with the brains and experience and the resources would rather sit in the current system and hope to figure out where they can flee to if the whole thing comes apart well yeah and maybe to push back in a little bit i i agree with you but you know it feels like there some people are trying that so for example google purchased deep mind uh deepmind is a company that kind of represents a lot of radical ideas they're they've become acceptable actually agi artificial general intelligence used to be really radical of a thing to talk about and deepmind and openai are two places which has made it more acceptable i know you can now start to criticize well they're really now that it's become acceptable they're not taking the further step of being more radical but you know that was an attempt by google to say uh that let's let's try some wild stuff sort of like boston dynamics sort of like boston dynamics boston dynamics is a really good example of uh trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose whatsoever except to try to try out their ideas the idea is that innovation is like dessert you can have dessert after you solve the problem of the main course and the main course is a bunch of insoluble problems so that is we can get into innovation sure once we be once we perfect ourselves and you're you're saying that we need to make innovation the the main meal well i'm saying that there really is structural oppression i mean if you train uh a a deep learning system on exclusively white faces it's going to get confused yeah so let's not disagree that there are real issues around this in fact that's an issue of innovation and data your data should be responsive on the other hand there are things we can't do anything about that are actually you know fundamental and um those things may have to do with the fact that uh you know some of us uh taste cilantro as soap and some of us don't like there are differences between people and some of them are in the hardware some of them are in the firmware some of them are in the software that is the human mind and this completely simplistic idea that every failure of of an organization to promote each person who has particular intersexual characteristics we cannot hold progress hostage to that and you've talked about perhaps we'll save this for another time because it's such a fascinating conversation we talked about this with uh glenn beck is the whole stagnation of growth and all that kind of stuff your idea is that in as much as the current situation is a kind of ponzi scheme the current situation in the united states is a kind of ponzi scheme built on the promise of constant unending innovation we need uh we need to fund the true innovators and uh encourage them and empower them and sort of culturally say that this is what this country is about is let's put it this way the brilliant minds we're gonna kill each other if we don't grow growth is like an immune system and you always have pathogens present but if you don't have growth present you can't fight the pathogens in your society and right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere so if we don't get growth into our system fairly quickly we are in really seriously bad shape so it's very important that if i had a horrible person who was capable of building something that would give us all a certain amount of what i've called financial beta to some new technology where we all benefit let's say quantum computing comes in and everybody the dry cleaner has a quantum computing angle right yes okay that's necessary to keep this system that we built going we can try to redesign the system but our system expects growth and we've started starved it for growth and the madness that we're seeing is the failure of our immune system to be able to handle the pathogens that have always been present so people you know can say well this was always there yes it was what's changed was your immune system we have got to make sure that one we understand why diversity is potentially really important we have mined certain communities to death you and i are ashkenazi jews everyone knows that ashkenazi jews are good at technical stuff we know that the chinese are good at technical stuff the indians have many people who are good at technical stuff as the japanese i also believe that we have communities where if you think about the pareto idea of diminishing returns if you've never mined a community many of the people you're going to get at the beginning are going to be amazing because that community it's like did you drill for more oil in texas texas is pretty thoroughly picked over do you find some place that's you know completely insane maybe there's oil there who knows in particular i would like to displace our reliance on our military competitors in asia in our scientific laboratories with women with african americans with latinos people who are in different categories than we have traditionally sourced and i would like to get them the money that the market would normally give these fields were we not using visas in place of payment right now i particular i have crazy idea which is that i play you you and i both play music and i find the analytic work that i do when i'm trying to figure out chord progressions and symmetries and tritones all these sorts of things to be very similar to the work that i do when i do physics or math i believe that one of the things that is true is that the analytic contributions of african americans to music are probably fungible to science i don't know that that's true it's true i haven't done controlled research but i believe it is very important to let the people's republic of china know that they are not staffing our laboratories anymore and that we need to look to our own people and in particular we are going to get a huge benefit from making sure that women black americans latinos are in a position to take over some of these things because many of these communities have been underutilized now i don't know if that's an insane idea i want to hear somebody tell me why it's an insane idea but i believe that part of what we need to do is we need to recognize that there is there are security issues there are geopolitical issues with the funding of science and that what we've done is we've starved our world for innovation and if we don't get back to the business of innovation we should be doing diversity and inclusion out of greed rather than guilt now part of the problem with this is that a lot of the energy in behind diversity and inclusion is based on guilt and accusation yeah and what i want is i want to kick ass and my hope is is that diminishing returns favors mining the communities that have not been traditionally mined in order to extract um output from those communities unless there's a flaw in that plan if there's a flaw somebody needs to tell me if there isn't a flaw we need to get greedy about innovation rather than guilty about innovation that's really brilliantly put my biggest problem with what i see is it exactly speaks to that and in the discussion is diversity it's used when it's grounded in guilt it's then used as a hammer to shame people that don't care about diversity enough that okay so my point is i'm excited about the idea of jimi hendrix doing quantum field theory i'm excited about the idea of of uh art tatum trying to figure out uh what the neural nets figured out about protein folding i have some idea of the level of intellect of people who have not found their way into stem subjects in incredibly technically demanding areas and if there's a flaw in that theory i want somebody to present the flaw but right now my belief is is that these things are merit-based and if you really believe in structural oppression you do not want an affirmative action program you want to make sure that people have huge amounts of resources to get themselves into position i want to push out i just tried this on this clubhouse application i want to push out klein bottles as a secret sign inside of rap videos in hip-hop right i want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world and i want to get the people who hopefully i'm trying to lure into science and engineering i want to get them paid i don't want them as the cheap substitutes for the fleeing white males who have learned that they can't make any money in science and engineering yeah so the problem is is that we need we need to take over the ship lex and it doesn't need to be you and me because quite honestly i have no desire to administer i don't want to be the chief executive officer of anything what i do want is i want the baby boomers who've made this mess and can't see it to be gone they they had almost all of our universities and i want fresh blood fresh resources i want academic freedom and i want greed for our country and for the future to determine diversity inclusion as opposed to shame and guilt which is destroying our fabric that's as good of a diversity statement as i've ever heard this is a u-turn but somebody commented on the tweet you sent that as one of the top comments that i definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency so it's a u-turn but not really okay since you're an economist since you're deep not an economist you i mean i i pretend to be an economist hoping that the economists will take issue that i'm not an economist so that i can advance gauge theoretic and field theoretic economics which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge was a major innovation that happened approximately 25 years ago i don't think that economists understand what a price index is that measures inflation nor do i think economists understand what a growth index or a product a quantity index is that measures gdp i think that they don't even understand the basics of price and quantity index construction and therefore they can't possibly review field theoretic economics they can't review gauge theoretic economics they're intellectually not in a position to manage their own field you talked about there's a stagnation and growth currently i looked at from my microeconomics macroeconomics and college perspective gdp doesn't seem to capture the productivity the full the spectrum of what i think is as a functioning successful society what do you think is broken about gdp what does it need to include uh these indices like let me let me explain what they don't understand to begin with sure imagine that all prices and all quantities uh of output are the same at the end of the year as they are at the beginning and you ask what happened during that year was there inflation they meandered over the course of the year but miraculously they all came back to exactly their values the amount produced at the end of the year is the same as at the beginning in every single quantity typically the claim would be that the price index should be 1.0 and that the quantity index should be 1.0 that's clearly wrong why well it's much easier to see with it speaks to a fundamental confusion that economists have they don't understand that the economy is curved and not flat in a curved economy everything should be path dependence but they view path dependence as a problem because they are effectively the flat earth society of market analysis they don't understand that what they've called and they've actually called it the cycling problem is exactly what they need to understand to advance their field so i'll give you a very simple example okay let's imagine that we have bob and carol in one hedge fund and ted and alice in another in both cases the females that is alice and carol are the chief investment officers and bob and ted are the chief marketing officers in charge of trying to get money into the fund and trying to get people not um to in fact remove their their money from the funds okay if you in fact had uh bob and caroline's head in alice and both hedge funds were invested in assets whose prices came back to the same levels and whose exposures were in the same quantities and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds would you compensate them the same necessarily what if for example carol was killing it in terms of investments every time she bought some sort of security the price of that security went up okay but bob was the worst marketing officer and as chief marketing officer there were tons of redemptions because bob was constantly drunk bob was making off-color comments now as a result at the end of the year the fund hasn't grown in size because even though carol was crushing it in terms of the investments bob was screwing up everything be and the redemptions were legendary so people were making money and still pulling it out of the fund in the other fund alice can't seem to buy a base hit every time she gets into a security the thing plummets but ted's amazing marketing skills allowed the fund to get all sorts of new subscriptions and halted the redemptions as people hoped that the fund would get its act together okay price indices should be how carol and alice are compensated and quantity indices should be how um bob and ted are compensated so even though both funds had closed loops that come back to the original states what happened during the period that they were active tells you how people are supposed to be compensated now we know that whatever the increase in the price indus index is is compensated by a decrease in the quantity index or conversely because prices and quantities return to their original values you could have another fund where nothing much happened there were no redemptions no subscriptions prices the fund remained in cash the whole time so in that third fund you know let's call that tristan is older right that fund should have no bonuses paid because nobody did anything but nobody should be fired either now the fact that the economists don't even understand that this is what their price and quantity indices were intended to do that they don't understand that you can actually give what would be called ordinal agents the freedom to change their preferences and still have something defined as a conus cost of living adjustment they don't even understand the mathematics of their field so the indices need to be able to capture some kind of dynamics uh that we have had indices that capture these dynamics due to the work of francois division since 1925 but the economists have not even understood what divisius index truly represented what do you miss with uh with uh such crude indices then well you miss the fact that you're supposed to have a field theoretic subject the representative consumer should actually be a probability distribution on the space of all possible consumers weighted by the probability of getting any particular pull from the distribution we should not have a single gauge of inflation like what is that in 1973 dollars any more than you should be able to say it was 59 degrees fahrenheit on earth yesterday so when we get to the cryptocurrency what i'm going to say is is that because we didn't found economic theory on the proper marginal revolution because we missed the major opportunity which is is that the differential calculus of markets is gage theory it's not ordinary uh differential calculus we found that out in in finance that it was stochastic differential calculus we have the wrong version of the differential calculus underneath all of modern economic theory and part of what i've been pushing for in cryptocurrencies is the idea that we should be understanding that gold is a gauge theory just as modern economic theory is supposed to be a gauge theory and that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies and more importantly distributed computing from the problem of this unwanted global aspect which is the blockchain the thing that is most celebrated in some sense about bitcoin is in fact the reason that i'm least enthusiastic about it i'm hugely enthusiastic about what satoshi did but it's an intermediate step towards trying to figure out what should digital gold actually be if physical gold is a collection of uh up quarks and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons held together the quarks by gluons with electrons orbiting it held together by photons with the occasional weak interaction beta decay all of those are gauge theories so gold is actually coming from gage theory and markets are coming from gauge theory and the opportunity to do locally enforced conservation laws which effectively is what a bitcoin transaction is should theoretically be founded on a different principle that is not the blockchain it should be a gauge theoretic concept in which effectively the tokens are excitations on a network of computer nodes and the fact that let's imagine that this is some token by moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship effectively i pushed that glass as a gauge theory towards your region of the table we should be recognizing that gage theory is the correct differential calculus for the 21st century in fact it should have been there in the 20th century you're saying it captures these individual individual dynamics richer why should my giving you a token have to be why should we alert the global community in this token that that occurred you can talk about side chains you can talk about any means of doing this but effectively we have a problem which is if i think about this differently yeah i have a glass that is extant you have a glass that is abstinent we're supposed to call the constructor method on your glass at the same moment we call the destructor method on my glass in order to have a conservation principle it would be far more efficient to do this with the one series system that is known never to throw an exception which is nature and nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry for her underlying language we now know due to work of pia milani at harvard in economics in the mid-1990s which i was her co-author on but i i wish to promote her as as well as this being my idea we know that modern economic theory is a naturally occurring gauge theory and the failure of that community to acknowledge that that work occurred and that it was put down for reasons that make no analytic sense is important in particular due to the relatively new innovation of distributed computing and satoshi's brainchild so you're thinking we need to have the mathematics that captures that enforces cryptocurrency as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one where the blockchain says that crypto should be uh centralized the abundance economy much discussed in silicon valley or what's left of it is actually a huge threat to the planet because what it really is is that it is what marc andreessen is called software eating the world and what that means is that you're going to push things from being private goods and services into public goods and services and public goods and services cannot have price and value tied together ergo people will produce things of incredible value to to the world that they cannot command a price and they will not be able to capture the value that they have created or a significant enough fraction of it the abundance economy is a disaster it will lead to a reduction in human freedom the great innovation of satoshi is locally enforced or semi-locally enforced conservation laws where the idea is just as gold as heart you know why is gold hard to create or destroy it's because it's created not only in stars but in violent events involving stars like supernova collisions when gold is created and we transact we're using conservation laws the physics determines the custodianship whatever it is that i don't have you now have and conversely in such a situation we should be looking for the abstraction that most closely matches the physical world because the physical world is known not to throw an exception the blockchain is a vulnerability the idea that the 51 percent problem isn't solved that you could have crazy race conditions all of these things we know that they're solved inside of gage theory somehow so the important thing is to recognize that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever in the history of economic theory took place already and was essentially instantly buried and i will stand by those comments satoshi wherever you are i probably know you are you satoshi no no no i don't have that kind of ability i really don't i do other things speaking of satoshi engaged theory you've mentioned to brian keating that you may be releasing a geometric community paper this year or some other form of additional material in the topic uh what is your thinking around this what's the process you're going through now well i was very trying this i i used april 1st to try to start a tradition which i hope to use to liberate mankind the tradition is that at least one day a year you should be able to say heretical things and not have jack dorsey boot you off or mark zuckerberg your provost shouldn't call you up and say what did you say we need at some level to have a jubilee from centralized control and so my my hope is that you know what a tradition is in america something a baby boomer did twice impeachment that's very funny anyway um so when i'm i'm not a baby boomer but as an exer i've thought about whether or not april first would be a good date on which to release a printed version of what i already said in lecture form because i think it's hysterically funny that the physics community claims that it can't decode video a lecture yeah i it must be paper and you know what there will be a steady stream of new complaints up until the point that they fit it into a narrative that they like um yeah i'm thinking about april 1st uh as a date in which to release a document and it won't be perfectly complete but it'll be very complete and then they'll try to say it's wrong or you already did it or no that was dumb but what we just did on top of it is brilliant or it doesn't match experiment or who knows what they'll go through all of their usual nonsense it's time to go is there still puzzles in your own mind that need to be figured out for you to try to put it on paper i mean those are different mediums right it was a great question i did not count on something that turns out to be important when you work on your own outside of the system for a long time you probably don't think you're going to be doing this as a 55 year old man and i have been so long outside of math and physics departments and i've been occupied with so many other things as you can see that the old idea that i had was if i always did it in little pieces then i was always safe because it wouldn't be stealable and so now those pieces never got assembled completely in essence i have all the pieces and i can fit them together but there's probably a small amount of glue code like there are a few algebraic things i've forgotten how to do i may or may not figure them out between now and april 1st but it's pretty complete but that's the puzzle you're kind of uh struggling to now figure out to get it all on the glue together i can't tell you whether the theory is correct or incorrect but like you know for example there's what's the exact form of the super symmetry algebra or how what's the rule for passing a minus sign through a particular operator and all of that stuff got a lot more difficult because i didn't i didn't do it ever look you know it's a little bit like uh if you're you know if you're a violinist and you don't touch your violin regularly for 15 years you come back to it you pretty much know the pieces sort of but there's lots of stuff that's missing your tone is off and that kind of stuff i would say i've got i'll get the ship to the harbor and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in and if the tugboat doesn't show up then i'll pilot the thing right into the dock myself but it's not a big deal i think that it is essentially complete psychologically just as a human being this is uh i remember perhaps by accident but maybe there's no accidents in the universe i was tuned in i don't remember where on april 1st yeah to you uh oh i think i need discord yeah uh kind of thinking about thinking through this release i mean it wasn't like uh it wasn't obvious that you were going to do it you were thinking through it and i remember there was intellectual personal psychological struggle with this yeah right well because i did i thought it was dangerous if this turns out to be right i don't know what it unlocks i'm if it's wrong i think i understand where we are if it's wrong it'll be the first fool's gold that really looks like a theory of everything it'll be the iron pyrites of physics and we haven't even had fool's gold in my opinion yet got it so what is your intuition why this looks right to you like why it feels like it would be if if wrong i can say it very simply it's way smarter than i am can you break that apart a little more like every time you poke at it it's giving you intuitions that follow with the the currently known physics well let's put it in computer science terms yes please okay there's a concept of technical debt that computer scientists struggle with as you commit crimes you have to pay those crimes back at a later date in general most of the problem with physical theories is that as you try to do something that matches reality you usually have to go into some structure that gets you farther away and your hope is is that you're going to be able to pay back the technical debt and in general these will wind up as check hiding schemes or like you're funding a startup and they're too many pivots right so you keep adding epicycles in order to to cover things that have gone wrong my belief is is that this thing represents something like a summit to me and i'm very proud of having found a route up this summit but the route is what's due to me the summit can't possibly be due to me you know like edmund hillary and tenzing norgay did not create mount everest they know that they didn't create math they figured out a way up you got to tell me what uh mon everest is in this metaphor relative and also connected to the technical debt so technical debt is an is a negative thing that it's kind of you you'll eventually have to pay it are you saying in the in the ascent that you're seeing now the theory is you do not have much technical debt well that's right i think that what happens is that early on what i would say is i believe now that the physics community has said many things incorrectly about the current state of the universe they're not wildly off which is why like for example the claim is that there are three generations of matter i do not believe that there are three generations matter i believe that there are two generations of matter and there is a third collection that looks like a generation of matter as the first two only at low energy okay well that's not a frequent claim people imagine that there are three or more generations of matter i would claim that that's false people claim that the matter is chiral that is it knows it's left from its right i would claim that the chirality is not fundamental but it is emergent we could keep going at all these sorts of things people think that space time is the fundamental geomatic geometrical construct i do not agree i think it's something that i've termed the observers all of these different things represent a series of over-interpretations of the world that preclude progress so you you gave i think you gave uh some credit to string theory as uh string theory i think quantum gravity if i remember correctly as as like getting close to the fool's uh gold well i said that garrett lisey apparently phenomenologically gets a lot of things right he gets he's got a reason for chirality a reason for uniqueness using e8 in fact e8 uses something called vial fermions which are chiral he has a way of getting geometry to get riemann's geometry underneath general relativity to play with aerosman's geniometry which is underneath the standard model using something called cartan connections that are out of favor he's figured out something involving super connections to make sure that the fermion the matter in the system isn't quantized the same way as the bosons were which is a problem in his old theory he's got something about three generations for triality he's got a lot of phenomenological hits i don't think garrett's theory works it also has a very simple lagranges basically using the yang mills norm squared the same thing you would use as a as a cost function uh if you were doing neural nets okay the string theorists have a different selling point which is is that they may have gotten a renormalizable theory of gravity if quantum gravity was what we were meant to do and they've done some stuff with black holes that they can get some solutions correct and then they have lots of agreements with where they show mathematical truths that mathematicians didn't even know i'm very underwhelmed by string theory based on how many people have worked on it and how little is supporting the claims to it being a theory of everything but those are the two that i take quite seriously i don't yet take wolfram's quite seriously because if he really finds one of these cellular automatons that are really distinct and generative it'll be amazing but he's looking for such a thing i don't think he's found anything tegmark i view as a philosopher who is somehow taking credit for platonism which i don't see any reason for fighting with max because i like max but if it ever comes time i'm putting a post-it note that i'm not positive the mathematical universe hypothesis is really anything new um and in general uh loop quantum gravity really i think grew out of some hopes that the general relativistic community had for that they would be able to do particle theory and i don't think that they've shown any particle theoretic realism so essentially here's what i really think lex i think we didn't understand how big the difference between an effective theory and a theory of everything is conceptually maybe it's not mathematically that different but conceptually trying to figure out what a theory of every how does the universe and i've compared it to escher's drawing hands how do two hands draw themselves into existence that's the puzzle that i think has just been wanting and i i'll be honest i'm really surprised that the theoretical physics community didn't even get up on their high horse and say this is the most stupid nonsense imaginable because clearly i'm i always say i'm not a physicist so i'm just a i'm i'm i'm an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors so in your journey of releasing this and i'm sure that further maybe uh it will be another american tradition on april 1st that will continue for years uh in my uh there's sort of uh crumbs along the way that i'm hoping to uh collect in my naive view of things of the beauty that in your geometric view of the universe so uh one question i'd like to ask is um if you were to challenge me to visualize something beautiful something important about geometric community in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty from the outsider's perspective what would that be thing be interesting question perhaps we can both have a journey towards april first take a look at that some kind of a scrunchie that i picked up on melrose not melrose montana in santa monica now you'll notice that all of those discs rotate independently yes if you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous but not uniform everywhere what you're doing is the so-called gauge transformation on the torus seen as a u1 bundle over a u1 space time so the concept of space-time here in a very simplified case isn't four-dimensional but it's one-dimensional it's just a circle and there's a circle above every point in the circle represented by those little discs imagine if you will that we took a rubber band and placed it around here and decided that that was a function from the circle into this circle that is representing a y-axis that's wrapped around itself well you would have an idea of what it means for a function to be constant if it just went all around the outside but what happens if i turn this a little bit then the function would be mostly constant it would have a little place where it dipped and it went back it turns out that you can transform that function and transform the derivative that says that function is equal to zero when i take its derivative at the same time that's what a gauge transformation is amazing to me that we don't have a simple video visualizing things that i've already had built and that i can clearly demonstrate when you do that taurus who's the code of the taurus is itself generating yeah this is a u1 principle bundle and the world needs to know what a gauge theory is not by analogy not with lawrence krauss saying it's like a checkerboard if you change some of the colors this way not saying you know that it it's it's a local symmetry involving it's none of those things it's a theory of differential calculus where the functions and the derivatives are both subject to a particular kind of change so that if a function was constant under one derivative then the new function is constant under the new derivative transformed in the same fashion and would you put that under the category of just gauge transformations yes that would be gauge transformations applied to sections and connections where connections are the derivatives in the theory this is easily explained it is pathological that the community of people who understand what i'm saying have never bothered to do this in a clear fashion for the general public you and i could visualize this overnight this is not hard the public needs to know in some sense that let's say quantum electrodynamics the theory of photons and electrons more or less electrons are functions and photons are derivatives now there's some you can object in some ways but basically a gauge theory is the way in which you can translate uh a shift in the definition of the functions and the shift of the definition of the derivatives so that the underlying physics is not harmed or changed so you have to do both at the same time now you and i can visualize that so if what you wanted to do rather than going directly to geometric unity is that i could sit down with you and i could say here are the various components of geometric unity and if the public needs a visualization in order to play along we've got a little over two months and i'd be happy to work with you i love that as a challenge and i'll take it on and i hope we do make it happen and david goggins if lex doesn't do some super macho thing because he's got to work uh to get some of this stuff down done you'll understand he'll be available to you after april thank you for the thank you for the escape clause i really needed that escape clause i'm glad that i'm worried 48 miles in 48 hours by the way i just want to say how much i admire your willingness to keep this kind of hardcore attitude um i know that russians have it and russian jews have it in spades but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy and that's weak and that's lazy and the fact that you bring so much heart to saying i'm going to bring this to jiu jitsu i'm going to bring this to guitar i'm going to bring this to ai i'm going to bring this to podcasting it comes through loud and clear i just find it completely and utterly inspiring that you keep this kind of hardcore aspect at the same time that you're the guy who's extolling the virtue of love in a modern society and doing it at scale thank you that means a lot i don't know why i'm doing it but i'm just following my heart on it and just going with the gut it seems to make sense somehow i i personally think we better get tougher or we're going to get in a world of pain and i i do think that when it comes time to lead uh it's great to have people who you know don't crack under pressure do you mind if we talk about love and what it takes to be a father for a bit sure do you mind if zev joins us i'd be an honor so eric i've talked to your son zev who's an incredible human being but let me uh ask you this might be difficult because you're both sitting together what advice do you have for him as he makes his way in this world especially given that as we mentioned before on joe rogan you're flawed in that just like all humans you're mortal well at some level i guess one of my issues is that i've got to stop giving quite so much advice uh early on i was very worried that i could see zeb's abilities and i could see his challenges and i saw them in terms of myself so a certain amount of zev rhymes with whatever i went through as a kid and i don't want to doom him to the same outcomes that that sufficed for me i think that he's got a much better head on his shoulders at age 15 he's much better adjusted and in part it's important for me to recognize that because i think i did a reasonably decent job early on i don't need to get this part right and you know i'm looking at at zev's trajectory and saying you're going to need to be incredibly even pathologically self-confident the antidote for that is going to be something you're going to need to carry on board which is radical humility and you're going to have to have those in a dialectical tension which is never resolved which is a huge burden you are going to have to forgive people who do not appreciate your gifts because your gifts are clearly evident and many people will have to pretend not to see them because if they see your gifts then they're gonna have to question their entire approach to education or employment or critical thinking and what my hope is is that you can just forgive those who don't see them and who complicate and frustrate your life and realize that you're gonna have to take care of them too seth let me ask you the more challenging question because the guy is sitting right here what advice do you have for your dad since uh after talking to you i realize you're the uh the more brilliant aside from the the better looking uh member of the family um odd question yeah um sorry i could say anything you want is the last time we're gonna be seeing left awkward drive home [Laughter] i think sort of a new perspective i've taken on parenting is that it is a task for which no human is really supposed to be prepared you know there are in jewish tradition for example there are myriad analogies in the torah and the talmud that compare the role of a parent to the role of a god right no human is prepared to play god and create and guide a life but somehow we're forced into it as as people um and i think sometimes it's hard for uh children to understand that however their their parents are failing um is is something for for which we must budget because our parents play a role in our lives uh of which they're they're not worthy and they devote themselves to uh regardless because that becomes who they are in a certain sense so i hope to um i hope to have realistic realistic expectations of you as a human because i think too often it's easy to have godly expectations of people who are far from such a role and i think i'm really happy that you've been as open as you have with me about the fact that um you know you really you don't pretend to be a god in my life you you are a guide who allows me to see myself and that's been very important considering the fact that by your self-teaching paradigm i will have to i will have to guide myself and being able to see it and see myself accurately has been one of the greatest gifts that you've you've given me so i'm very appreciative and uh i want you to know that i don't buy into the the role that you're you're supposed to um sort of fake your way through uh in my in my life but i i'm unbelievably happy with uh a more realistic connection that we've been able to build in lieu of it so i think it's been easier on you actually as you come to realize what i don't know what i can't do and that there's been a period of time i guess that's fascinating to me where you're sort of surprised that i don't know the answer to a certain thing as well as you do and that i remember going through this with a particular mathematician who i held and i still hold in awe named david kajdan and you know he famously said to him and weirdly our family knew his family in the soviet union but he said you know eric i always appreciate you coming to my office because i always find what you have to say interesting but you have to realize that in the areas that you're talking about you are no longer the student you are actually my teacher and i wasn't prepared to hear that and there are many ways in which as i was just saying with the mozart i am learning at an incredible rate from you i used to learn from you because i didn't understand what was possible you were you were very much i mean this is the weird thing there used to be this thing called harvey the invisible rabbit this guy could had a rabbit that was like six feet tall that only he could see maybe he was talking and that was like you at age four as you were saying batshit crazy things that were all totally sensible and nobody else could put them together and so what's wonderful is that the world hasn't caught on but enormous numbers of people are starting to and i really do hope that that genuineness of spirit and that outside the box intellectual commitment serves you well as the world starts to appreciate that i think you're a very trustworthy voice you don't get everything right but the idea that we have somebody at your age who's embedded in your generation who can tell us something about what's happening is really valuable to me and i do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice more than just at the dinner table i apologize for saying this four-letter word but do you love i was really worried it was going to be another four-letter word there's so many easy choices it doesn't even rise to the level of a question i mean i just there are a tiny number of people with whom you share so much life that you can't even think of yourself in their absence and and i don't know if that would find that but it's you can have a kid and never make this level of connection i think i think even right down to the fact that you know when when zev chooses boogie woogie piano for his own set of reasons why i would choose boogie woogie piano if i could play in any style um it's a it's a question about a decrease in loneliness you know like my grandfather played the mandolin and i had to learn some mandolin because otherwise that instrument would go silent you don't expect that you get this much of a chance to leave this much of yourself in another person who is choosing it and recreating it rather than it being directly instilled and my proudest achievement is in a certain sense having not taught him and and have having shared this much so you know it's not even love it's like well beyond so you mentioned love for you making a less lonely world i think i speak for i would argue probably millions of people that you eric because this is a conversation with you have made for many people from me a less lonely world and i can't wait to see how user developed as an intellect but also i'm so heartwarned by the optimism and the hopefulness that was in you that i hope develops further and lastly i'm deeply thankful that you eric are my friend and would give me would honor me with this watch it means more than words can say thanks guys thanks for talking today thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with eric weinstein and thank you to our sponsors indeed hiring site theragun muscle recovery device wine access online wine store and blinkist app that summarizes books click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from socrates to find yourself think for yourself thanks for listening and hope to see you next time