Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society | Lex Fridman Podcast #16
 The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein. He's a mathematician, economist, physicist, and the managing director of Teal Capital. He coined the term, and you could say, is the founder of the intellectual dark web, which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast at MIT and beyond. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. Are you nervous about this? Scared shitless. Okay, ni bas bukkhlesya. You mentioned Kung Fu Panda as one of your favorite movies. It has the usual profound master student dynamic going on. So who has been a teacher that significantly influenced the direction of your thinking in life's work? So if you're the Kung Fu Panda, who was your Shifu? Oh, well, it's interesting because I didn't see Shifu as being the teacher. Who was the teacher? Uwe, Master Uwe, the turtle. Oh, the turtle, right. They only meet twice in the entire film. And the first conversation sort of doesn't count. So the magic of the film, in fact, its point, is that the teaching that really matters is transferred during a single conversation. And it's very brief. And so who played that role in my life? I would say either my grandfather, Harry Rubin, and his wife, Sophie Rubin, my grandmother, or Tom Lehrer. Tom Lehrer? Yeah. In which way? If you give a child Tom Lehrer records, what you do is you destroy their ability to be taken over by later malware. And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene, that it destroys the ability to lead a child to lead a normal life for many people. So if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted from any kind of neurotypical presentation, I'll often ask them, are you a Tom Lehrer fan? And the odds that they will respond are quite high. Now, Tom Lehrer is Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Tom Lehrer? That's very interesting. There's a small number of Tom Lehrer songs that broke into the general population. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Element Song, perhaps The Vatican Rag. So when you meet somebody who knows those songs, but doesn't know- Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you? Harshly. No, but you're Russian, so undoubtedly you know Nikolai Ivanovich Lubachevsky, that song. So that was a song about plagiarism that was in fact plagiarized, which most people don't know, from Danny Kay, where Danny Kay did a song called Stanislavsky of the Muskie Arts. And so Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job of plagiarizing a song and making it about plagiarism, and then making it about this mathematician who worked in non-Euclidean geometry. That was like giving heroin to a child. It was extremely addictive, and eventually led me to a lot of different places, one of which may have been a PhD in mathematics. And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics, I believe, at Harvard, something like that. I just had dinner with him, in fact. When my son turned 13, we didn't tell him, but his Bar Mitzvah present was dinner with his hero Tom Lehrer. And Tom Lehrer was 88 years old, sharp as a tack, irreverent and funny as hell, and just, you know, there are very few people in this world that you have to meet while they're still here, and that was definitely one for our family. So that wit is a reflection of intelligence in some kind of deep way, like where, that would be a good test of intelligence, whether you're a Tom Lehrer fan. So what do you think that is about wit, about that kind of humor, ability to see the absurdity in existence? Do you think that's connected to intelligence, or are we just two Jews on a mic that appreciate that kind of humor? No, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence. You can see it, there's a place where Tom Lehrer decides that he's going to lampoon Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever, meaningless wordplay. And he has, forget the, well, let's see. He's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan wrote it, and he says, that I misster depressed your young sister, nay, mister, this mister depester she tried. Pestering sisters, if festering blister, you best to resist her, say I. The sister persisted, the mister resisted, I kissed her all loyalty slipped, when she said I could have her, her sister's cadaver must surely have turned in its crypt. That's so dense, it's so insane, that that's clearly intelligence, because it's hard to construct something like that. If I look at my favorite Tom Lehrer lyric, there's a perfectly absurd one, which is once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then. That is a different kind of intelligence. You know, you're taking something that is so horrific, and you're sort of making it palatable and funny, and demonstrating also just your humanity. I mean, I think the thing that came through, as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible, horrible lines, was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was, who was channeling pain through humor and through grace. I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia, that same kind of humor emerged from the generation of World War II. It seemed like that humor is required to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering that that war created. Well, you do need the environment to create the broad Slavic soul. I don't think that many Americans really appreciate Russian humor, how you had to joke during the time of, let's say, Article 58 under Stalin. You had to be very, very careful. You know, the concept of a Russian satirical magazine like Crocodile doesn't make sense. So you have this cross-cultural problem that there are certain areas of human experience that it would be better to know nothing about. And quite unfortunately, Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them, which makes the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky so potent. The prose of Pushkin, whatever it is, you have to appreciate the depth of the Eastern European experience. And I would think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time of the Civil War or maybe under slavery and Jim Crow or even the harsh tyranny of the coal and steel employers during the labor wars. But in general, I would say it's hard for us to understand and imagine the collective culture unless we have the system of selective pressures that, for example, Russians were subjected to. Yeah, so if there is one good thing that comes out of war, it's literature, art, and humor, music. Oh, I don't think so. I think almost everything is good about war except for death and destruction. Right. Without the death, it would bring the romance of it. The whole thing is nice. Well, this is why we're always caught up in war. We have this very ambiguous relationship to it is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful and at an unacceptable price, and the price has never been higher. So to jump into AI a little bit, in one of the conversations you had or one of the videos, you described that one of the things AI systems can't do and biological systems can is self-replicate in the physical world. Oh, no, no. In the physical world. Well, yes, the physical robots can't self-replicate. But there's a very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we've been able to create that's really complex that has an analog of our reproductive system is software. But nevertheless, software replicates itself if we're speaking strictly for the replication in this kind of digital space. So let me just to begin, let me ask a question. Do you see a protective barrier or a gap between the physical world and the digital world? Let's not call it digital. Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world. Why logical? Well, because even though we had, let's say Einstein's brain preserved, it was meaningless to us as a physical object because we couldn't do anything with what was stored at a logical level. And so the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically are not necessarily, we don't always benefit from synonymizing. I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis to the logical world, but that it does warrant identification with a separate layer that need not invoke logic gates and zeros and ones. And so connecting those two worlds, the logical world and the physical world or maybe just connecting to the logical world inside our brain, Einstein's brain, you mentioned the idea of out, out-telligence. Artificial out-telligence. Artificial out-telligence. Yes, this is the only essay that John Brockman ever invited me to write that he refused to publish in Edge. Why? Well, maybe it wasn't well-written, but I don't know. The idea is quite compelling. It's quite unique and new, and at least from my view of a standpoint, maybe you can explain it. Sure. What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial general intelligence when in fact, artificial life is terrifying in and of itself and it's already here. So in order to have a system of selective pressures, you need three distinct elements. You need variation within a population, you need heritability, and you need differential success. So what's really unique, and I've made this point I think elsewhere about software, is that if you think about what humans know how to build, that's impressive. So I always take a car and I say, does it have an analog of each of the physiological systems? Does it have a skeletal structure? That's its frame. Does it have a neurological structure? It has an onboard computer. It has a digestive system. The one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system. But if you can call spawn on a process, effectively you do have a reproductive system. And that means that you can create something with variation, heritability, and differential success. Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was where do we see inanimate, non-intelligent life, outwitting intelligent life? And I have two favorite systems, and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted. One of which is the ophrys orchid subspecies, or subclade, I don't know what to call it. Is it a type of flower? Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males into engaging, it was called pseudo-copulation, with the fake female, which is usually represented by the lowest petal. And there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating opportunity. But the flower doesn't have to give up energy in the form of nectar as a lure because it's tricking the males. The other system is a particular species of mussel, lampicillus in the clear streams of Missouri. And it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young. And when the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that the bass like to eat, the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the bass and also use the bass to redistribute them as they eventually release. Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent dupe being fooled by a lower life form. And what is sculpting these convincing lures? It's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies. So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, those weaker mimics fall off. They have terminal lines and only the better ones survive. So it's an arms race between the target species that is being parasitized getting smarter and this other less intelligent or non-intelligent object getting as if smarter. And so what you see is that artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence is not needed to parasitize us. It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves. So you could have a program, let's say, one of these Nigerian scams that writes letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin to figure out which aspects of the program should be kept, which should be varied and thrown away. And you don't need it to be in any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario of being parasitized by something that has no idea what it's doing. So you phrased a few concepts really eloquently. So let me try to, as a few directions this goes. So one, first of all, in the way we write software today, it's not common that we allow it to self-modify. But we do have that ability now. We have the ability. It's just not common. It's not just common. So your thought is that that is a serious worry if there becomes a reason. But self-modifying code is available now. So there's different types of self-modification, right? There's personalization, your email app, your Gmail is self-modifying to you after you log in or whatever, you can think of it that way. But ultimately, all the information is centralized. But you're thinking of ideas where you're completely, this is a unique entity operating under selective pressures and it changes. Well, if you think about the fact that our immune systems don't know what's coming at them next, but they have a small set of spanning components, and if it's a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape or binding region can be approximated with the Lego that is present, then you can have confidence that you don't need to know what's coming at you because the combinatorics are sufficient to reach any configuration needed. So that's a beautiful, well, terrifying thing to worry about because it's so within our reach. Well, whenever I suggest these things, I do always have a concern as to whether or not I will bring them into being by talking about them. So there's this thing from OpenAI, so next week to talk to the founder of OpenAI, this idea that their text generation, the new stuff they have for generating text is they didn't wanna bring it, they didn't wanna release it because they're worried about the concept. I'm delighted to hear that, but they're going to end up releasing it. Yes, so that's the thing is I think talking about it, well, at least from my end, I'm more a proponent of technology preventing, so further innovation preventing the detrimental effects of innovation. Well, we're sort of tumbling down a hill at accelerating speed, so whether or not we're proponents or it doesn't really matter. It may not matter. But I do feel that there are people who've held things back and died poorer than they might've otherwise been. We don't even know their names. I don't think that we should discount the idea that having the smartest people showing off how smart they are by what they've developed may be a terminal process. I'm very mindful in particular of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller of all people wrote to Leo Szilard where Szilard was trying to figure out how to control the use of atomic weaponry at the end of World War II. And Teller rather strangely, because many of us view him as a monster, showed some very advanced moral thinking talking about the slim chance we have for survival and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable. I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut what it is we are playing with when we are working on technical problems. And I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it a movie called The Bridge on the River Kwai about, I believe, captured British POWs who just in a desire to do a bridge well end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors. Well, now you're making me question the unrestricted open discussion of ideas in AI. I'm not saying I know the answer. I'm just saying that I could make a decent case for either our need to talk about this and to become technologically focused on containing it or our need to stop talking about this and try to hope that the relatively small number of highly adept individuals who are looking at these problems is small enough that we should in fact be talking about how to contain them. Well, the way innovation happens, what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus, whether if he was silent, the idea would emerge elsewhere, well, in the case of Newton, of course. But in the case of AI, how small is the set of individuals out of which such ideas would arise? Well, the ideas of the researchers we know and those that we don't know but may live in countries that don't wish us to know what level they're currently at are very disciplined in keeping these things to themselves. Of course, I will point out that there's a religious school in Kerala that developed something very close to the calculus, certainly in terms of infinite series in I guess religious prayer and rhyme and prose. So it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back, and I don't really believe that we have an ability to hold it back. I do think that we could change the proportion of the time we spend worrying about the effects of what if we are successful rather than simply trying to succeed and hope that we'll be able to contain things later. Beautifully put. So on the idea of intelligence, what form, treading cautiously, as we've agreed as we tumbled down the ladder, treading cautiously as we've agreed as we tumbled down the hill, what form- Can't stop ourselves, can we? We cannot. What form do you see it taking? So one example, Facebook, Google, do want to, I don't know a better word, you want to influence users to behave a certain way. And so that's one kind of example of our intelligence is systems perhaps modifying the behavior of these intelligent human beings in order to sell more product of different kinds. But do you see other examples of this actually emerging in- Just take any parasitic system. Make sure that there's some way in which that there's differential success, heritability, and variation. And those are the magic ingredients. And if you really wanted to build a nightmare machine, make sure that the system that expresses the variability has a spanning set so that it can learn to arbitrary levels by making it sufficiently expressive. That's your nightmare. So it's your nightmare, but it could also be, it's a really powerful mechanism by which to create, well, powerful systems. So are you more worried about the negative direction that might go versus the positive? So you said parasitic, but that doesn't necessarily need to be what the system converges towards. It could be, what is it? Parasitism, the dividing line between parasitism and symbiosis is not so clear. That's what they tell me about marriage. I'm still single, so I don't know. Well, yeah, we could go into that too, but. No, I think we have to appreciate, you know, are you infected by your own mitochondria? Right. Yeah. So, you know, in marriage, you fear the loss of independence, but even though the American therapeutic community may be very concerned about co-dependence, what's to say that co-dependence isn't what's necessary to have a stable relationship in which to raise children who are maximally case-elected and require incredible amounts of care, because you have to wait 13 years before there's any reproductive payout, and most of us don't want our 13-year-olds having kids. That's a very tricky situation to analyze, and I would say that predators and parasites drive much of our evolution, and I don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them. Well, ultimately, I mean, nobody knows the meaning of life or what even happiness is, but there is some metrics. That they didn't tell you? They didn't, that's why all the poetry and books are about, you know, there's some metrics under which you can kind of measure how good it is that these AI systems are roaming about. So you're more nervous about software than you are optimistic about ideas of, yeah, self-replicating larceny. I don't think we've really felt where we are. You know, occasionally we get a wake-up. 9-11 was so anomalous compared to everything else we've experienced on American soil that it came to us as a complete shock that that was even a possibility. What it really was was a highly creative and determined R&D team deep in the bowels of Afghanistan, showing us that we had certain exploits that we were open to that nobody had chosen to express. I can think of several of these things that I don't talk about publicly, that just seem to have to do with how relatively unimaginative those who wish to cause havoc and destruction have been up until now. The great mystery of our time, of this particular little era, is how remarkably stable we've been since 1945 when we demonstrated the ability to use nuclear weapons in anger. And we don't know why things like that haven't happened since then. We've had several close calls, we've had mistakes, we've had brinksmanship. And what's now happened is that we've settled into a sense that, oh, it'll always be nothing. It's been so long since something was at that level of danger that we've got a wrong idea in our head. And that's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro show, I talked about the need to resume above ground testing of nuclear devices, because we have people whose developmental experience suggests that when, let's say, Donald Trump and North Korea engage on Twitter, oh, it's nothing, it's just posturing. Everybody's just in it for money. There's a sense that people are in a video game mode, which has been the right call since 1945. We've been mostly in video game mode. It's amazing. So you're worried about a generation which has not seen any existential... We've lived under it. You see, you're younger. I don't know if, and again, you came from Moscow. Yeah. There was a TV show called The Day After that had a huge effect on a generation growing up in the US, and it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange. We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively where we've thought about this, and I think it's one of the most irresponsible things that the elders among us have done, which is to provide this beautiful garden in which the thorns are cut off of the rose bushes and all of the edges are rounded and sanded, and so people have developed this totally unreal idea, which is everything's going to be just fine. And do I think that my leading concern is AGI or my leading concern is thermonuclear exchange or gene drives or any one of these things? I don't know. But I know that our time here in this very long experiment here is finite because the toys that we've built are so impressive, and the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized. And I think we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945. We had a lot of dangerous skilled players on the world stage who nevertheless, no matter how bad they were, managed to not embroil us in something that we couldn't come back from. The Cold War. Yeah, and the distance from the Cold War. I'm very mindful of, there was a Russian tradition actually of on your wedding day going to visit a memorial to those who gave their lives. Can you imagine this? Where on the happiest day of your life you go and you pay homage to the people who fought and died in the Battle of Stalingrad? I'm not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say, but there were a couple of things that the Russians did that were really positive in the Soviet era. And I think trying to let people know how serious life actually is, the Russian model of seriousness is better than the American model. And maybe, like you mentioned, there was a small echo of that after 9-11. But we wouldn't let it form. We talk about 9-11, but it's 9-12 that really moved the needle. When we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak. We witnessed something super serious and we didn't want to run to our computers and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings. And it was profound because we woke up briefly. I talk about the gated institutional narrative that sort of programs our lives. I've seen it break three times in my life. One of which was the election of Donald Trump. Another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns wasn't that important knew that Lehman Brothers met AIG was next. And the other one was 9-11. And so if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times that the global narrative was really interrupted, that tells you how much we've been on top of developing events. I mean, we had the Murrow Federal Building explosion, but it didn't cause the narrative to break. It wasn't profound enough. Around 9-12, we started to see that we were starting to wake up out of our slumber. And the powers that be did not want to coming together. The admonition was go shopping. And the powers that be was what is that force as opposed to blaming individuals? We don't know. So whatever that. Whatever that force is, there's a component of it that's emergent and there's a component of it that's deliberate. So give yourself a portfolio with two components. Some amount of it is emergent, but some amount of it is also an understanding that if people come together, they become an incredible force. And what you're seeing right now, I think, is there are forces that are trying to come together and there are forces that are trying to push things apart. And one of them is the globalist narrative versus the national narrative, where to the globalist perspective, nations are bad things in essence, that they're temporary, they're nationalistic, they're jingoistic, it's all negative, to people more in the nationality. And they're saying, look, this is where I pay my taxes. This is where I do my army service. This is where I have a vote. This is where I have a passport. Who the hell are you to tell me that because you've moved into some place that you can make money globally, that you've chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special and elevated duty? And I think that these competing narratives have been pushing towards the global perspective from the elite and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised people are saying, hey, I actually live in a place and I have laws and I speak a language, I have a culture, and who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some faraway land, that my obligations to my fellow countrymen are so much diminished? So these tensions between nations and so on, ultimately you see being proud of your country and so on, which creates potentially the kind of things that led to wars and so on, they ultimately, it is human nature and it is good for us for wake-up calls of different kinds. Well, I think that these are tensions. And my point isn't, I mean, nationalism run amok is a nightmare. And internationalism run amok is a nightmare. And the problem is we're trying to push these pendulums to some place where they're somewhat balanced, where we have a higher duty of care to those who share our laws and our citizenship, but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system. I would think this is elementary, but the problem that we're facing concerns the ability for some to profit by abandoning their obligations to others within their system. And that's what we've had for decades. You mentioned nuclear weapons. I was hoping to get answers from you since one of the many things you've done is economics. Maybe you can understand human behavior and why the heck we haven't blown each other up yet. But okay, so we'll get back. I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, it's really important to say that we really don't know. A mild uptick in wisdom. A mild uptick in wisdom. Well, Stephen Pinker, who I've talked with, has a lot of really good ideas about why. I don't trust his optimism. Listen, I'm Russian, so I never trust a guy who's that optimistic. No, no, no, it's just that you're talking about a guy who's looking at a system in which more and more of the kinetic energy, like war, has been turned into potential energy, like unused nuclear weapons. Wow, beautifully put. And now I'm looking at that system and I'm saying, okay, well, if you don't have a potential energy term, then everything's just getting better and better. Yeah, wow, that's beautifully put. Only a physicist could. Okay. I'm not a physicist. Is that a dirty word? No, no, I wish I were a physicist. Me too, my dad's a physicist. I'm trying to live up that probably for the rest of my life. He's probably gonna listen to this too. He did. He did. He did. So your friend Sam Harris worries a lot about the existential threat of AI, not in the way that you've described, but in the more. Well, he hangs out with Elon. I don't know Elon. So are you worried about that kind of, you know, about the, about either robotic systems or, you know, traditionally defined AI systems essentially becoming super intelligent, much more intelligent than human beings and getting. Well, they already are. And they're not. When seen as a collective, you mean? Well, I mean, I can mean all sorts of things, but certainly many of the things that we thought were peculiar to general intelligence do not require general intelligence. So that's been one of the big awakenings that you can write a pretty convincing sports story from stats alone without needing to have watched the game. So, you know, is it possible to write lively prose about politics? Yeah, no, not yet. So we were sort of all over the map. One of the things about chess, there's a question I once asked on Quora that didn't get a lot of response, which was, what is the greatest brilliancy ever produced by a computer in a chess game? Which was different than the question of what is the greatest game ever played? So if you think about brilliancies as what really animates many of us to think of chess as an art form, those are those moves and combinations that just show such flair, panache, and soul. Computers weren't really great at that. They were great positional monsters. And recently we've started seeing brilliancies. A few grandmasters have identified with AlphaZero that things were quite brilliant. Yeah, so that's an example of something. We don't think that that's AGI, but in a very restricted set of rules like chess, you're starting to see poetry of a high order. And so I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI. AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives in the same way that I don't think a worm should be, you know, the C. elegans shouldn't be treated as non-conscious because it only has 300 neurons. It maybe just has a very low level of consciousness because we don't understand what these things mean as they scale up. So am I worried about this general phenomena? Sure, but I think that one of the things that's happening is that a lot of us are fretting about this in part because of human needs. We've always been worried about the golem, right? Well, the golem is the artificially created. Life, you know. It's like Frankenstein type character. Yeah, sure, it's a Jewish version. Frankenberg, Frankenstein. Yeah, that makes sense. That's right. But we've always been worried about creating something like this, and it's getting closer and closer. And there are ways in which we have to realize that the whole thing that we've experienced or the context of our lives is almost certainly coming to an end. And I don't mean to suggest that we won't survive. I don't know. And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow. Could be 300, 500 years. But there's no plan that I'm aware of if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit that are sensible within current technological dreams, the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. And we have a very competitive civilization that is still forced into violence to sort out disputes that cannot be arbitrated. It is not clear to me that we have a long-term future until we get to the next stage, which is to figure out whether or not the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken. And that requires our source code. Our source code, the stuff in our brains to figure out what do you mean by our source code? The source code of the context, whatever it is that produces the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos. Our source code, I got it. So this is- No, you're talking about stuff that's written in a higher level language. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You're talking about the low level bits or lower. That's what is currently keeping us here. We can't even imagine. We have harebrained schemes for staying within the Einsteinian speed limit. Maybe if we could just drug ourselves and go into a suspended state, or we could have multiple generations. I think all that stuff is pretty silly. But I think it's also pretty silly to imagine that our wisdom is going to increase to the point that we can have the toys we have, and we're not going to use them for 500 years. Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough when I realized you're just one letter away from the guy. Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein. It's, well, you get to pick. Okay, so unified theory. You know, you've worked, you enjoy the beauty of geometry. I don't actually know if you enjoy it. You certainly are quite good at it. I tremble before it. Tremble before it. If you're religious, that is one of the- I don't have to be religious. It's just so beautiful. You will tremble anyway. I mean, I just read Einstein's biography, and one of the things you've done is try to explore a unified theory, talking about a 14-dimensional observer that has the 4D space-time continuum embedded in it. I'm just curious how you think, philosophically, at a high level about something more than four dimensions. How do you try to, what does it make you feel? Talking in the mathematical world about dimensions that are greater than the ones we can perceive. Is there something that you take away that's more than just the math? Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me. Okay. Now, on the front of that tongue, there was a sweet receptor. And next to that were salt receptors on two different sides, a little bit farther away. There was a little bit farther back. There were sour receptors. And you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue where your bitter receptor was. Show the good side always. Okay, but that was four dimensions of taste receptors. But you also had pain receptors on that tongue and probably heat receptors on that tongue. So let's assume that you had one of each. That would be six dimensions. So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza and it's got some hot pepper on it, maybe some jalapeno. You're having a six dimensional experience, dude. Do you think we overemphasize the value of time as one of the dimensions or space? Well, we certainly overemphasize the value of time because we like things to start and end, or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to. Well, what if you flipped one of the spatial dimensions into being a temporal dimension? And you and I were to meet in New York City and say, well, where and when should we meet? And say, how about I'll meet you on 36th and Lexington at two in the afternoon and 11 o'clock in the morning? That would be very confusing. Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time. We happen to be in a delicious situation in which we have three dimensions of space and one of time and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade off a little space for a little time, but we still only have one dimension that is picked out relative to the other three. It's very much Gladys Knight and the Pips. So which one developed for who? Do we develop for these dimensions or did the dimensions, or were they always there and it doesn't? Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place where there are four temporal dimensions or two and two of space and time or three of time and one of space? And then would time not be playing the role of space? Why do you imagine that the sector that you're in is all that there is? I certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise. I mean, I haven't done ayahuasca or any of those drugs that I'd hoped to one day, but- Instead of doing ayahuasca, you could just head over to building two. That's where the mathematicians are? Yeah, that's where they hang. Just to look at some geometry. Well, just ask about pseudo-Romani and geometry. That's what you're interested in. Okay. Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru. And then some extra money for that trip. Yeah, but you won't be able to do any calculations if that's how you choose to go about it. Well, a different kind of calculation. So to speak. Yeah. One of my favorite people, Edward Frankel, Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math, great title for a book, said that you are quite a remarkable intellect to come up with such beautiful original ideas in terms of the unified theory and so on, but you are working outside academia. So one question in developing ideas that are truly original, truly interesting, what's the difference between inside academia and outside academia when it comes to developing such ideas? Oh, it's a terrible choice, terrible choice. So if you do it inside of academics, you are forced to constantly show great loyalty to the consensus and you distinguish yourself with small, almost microscopic heresies to make your reputation in general. And you have very competent people and brilliant people who are working together, who form very deep social networks and have a very high level of behavior, at least within mathematics and at least technically within physics, theoretical physics. When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people. Mad men, and these are people who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position and almost always lose their way. And the key question is, will progress likely come from someone who has miraculously managed to stay within the system and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy that is sort of unthinkable, in which case that will be fascinating? Or is it more likely that somebody will maintain a level of discipline from outside of academics and be able to make use of the freedom that comes from not having to constantly affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field? So you've characterized in ways that academia in this particular sense is declining. You posted a plot, the older population of the faculty is getting larger, the younger is getting smaller and so on. So which direction of the two are you more hopeful about? Well, the baby boomers can't hang on forever. First of all, in general, true, and second of all, in academia. But that's really what this time is about. Is the baby boomers control. We're used to financial bubbles that last a few years in length and then pop. The baby boomer bubble is this really long lived thing and all of the ideology, all of the behavior patterns, the norms, for example, string theory is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomena. It was something that baby boomers were able to do because it required a very high level of mathematical ability. So you don't think of string theory as an original idea? Oh, I mean, it was original to Veneziano, probably is older than the baby boomers. And there are people who are younger than the baby boomers who are still doing string theory. And I'm not saying that nothing discovered within the large string theoretic complex is wrong. Quite the contrary, a lot of brilliant mathematics and a lot of the structure of physics was elucidated by string theorists. What do I think of the deliverable nature of this product that will not ship called string theory? I think that it is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and geometrically talented baby boomer physicists so that they can say that they're working on something within the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity. Now there are other schemes, there's like asymptotic safety. There are other things that you could imagine doing. I don't think much of any of the major programs, but to have inflicted this level of loyalty through a shibboleth, well, surely you don't question X. Well, I question almost everything in the string program. And that's why I got out of physics. When you called me a physicist, it was a great honor. But the reason I didn't become a physicist wasn't that I fell in love with mathematics. As I said, wow, in 1984 and 1983, I saw the field going mad. And I saw that mathematics, which has all sorts of problems, was not going insane. And so instead of studying things within physics, I thought it was much safer to study the same objects within mathematics. There's a huge price to pay for that. You lose physical intuition. But the point is that it wasn't a North Korean reeducation camp either. Are you hopeful about cracking open the Einstein unified theory in a way that has, I mean, really, really understanding whether this uniting everything together with quantum theory and so on? I mean, I'm trying to play this role myself. To do it to the extent of handing it over to the more responsible, more professional, more competent community. So I think that they're wrong about a great number of their belief structures. But I do believe, I mean, I have a really profound love-hate relationship with this group of people. I think- On the physics side. Oh yeah. Because the mathematicians actually seem to be much more open-minded and- Well, they are and they aren't. They're open-minded about anything that looks like great math. Right. Right, they'll study something that isn't very important physics, but if it's beautiful mathematics, then they'll have, they have great intuition about these things. As good as the mathematicians are, and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level give them the edge, the theoretical physics community is bar none the most profound intellectual community that we have ever created. It is the number one, there is nobody in second place as far as I'm concerned. Look, in their spare time, in the spare time, they invented molecular biology. What was the origin of molecular biology? You're saying physics- Well, somebody like Francis Crick. I mean, a lot of the early molecular biologists- Were physicists? Yeah, I mean, Schrodinger wrote What is Life? And that was highly inspirational. I mean, you have to appreciate that there is no community like the basic research community in theoretical physics. And it's not something, I'm highly critical of these guys. I think that they would just wasted the decades of time with a near religious devotion to their misconception of where the problems were in physics. But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse ever witnessed within academics. You see it as a collapse or just a lull? Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality. We can't afford to pay these people. We can't afford to give them an accelerator just to play with in case they find something at the next energy level. These people created our economy. They gave us the rad lab and radar. They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II. They created the semiconductor and the transistor to power our economy through Moore's law. As a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the World Wide Web. And we have the insolence to say, why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars? No, the question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars? Right, these guys signed the world's worst licensing agreement. And if they simply charged for every time you used a transistor or a URL or enjoyed the peace that they have provided during this period of time through the terrible weapons that they developed or your communications devices, all of the things that power our economy, I really think came out of physics, even to the extent the chemistry came out of physics and molecular biology came out of physics. So first of all, you have to know that I'm very critical of this community. Second of all, it is our most important community. We have neglected it, we've abused it. We don't take it seriously. We don't even care to get them to rehab after a couple of generations of failure. I think the youngest person to have really contributed to the standard model of theoretical level was born in 1951, right? Frank Wilczek. And almost nothing has happened that in theoretical physics after 1973, 74, that sent somebody to Stockholm for theoretical development that predicted experiment. So we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves. Now with that said, these guys have behaved abysmally, in my opinion, because they haven't owned up to where they actually are, what problems they're really facing, how definite they can actually be. They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries which are desperately needed in other fields, like gauge theory, which at least the mathematicians can share, which is an upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz. And they haven't shared the importance of renormalization theory, even though this should be standard operating procedure for people across the sciences dealing with different layers and different levels of phenomena. And by shared you mean communicated in such a way that it disseminates throughout the different sciences. These guys are sitting, both theoretical physicists and mathematicians are sitting on top of a giant stockpile of intellectual gold, right? They have so many things that have not been manifested anywhere. I was just on Twitter, I think I mentioned the Habermann switch pitch that shows the self-duality of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism. Now this is like a triviality and it makes an amazing toy that's built a market, hopefully a fortune for Chuck Habermann. Well, you have no idea how much great stuff that these priests have in their monastery. So it's truly a love and hate relationship for you. Yeah, well, it sounds like it's more on the love side. This building that we're in right here is the building in which I really put together the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation through the Government University Industry Research Roundtable to destroy the bargaining power of American academics using foreign labor. With the microfeatures in the base. Oh yeah, that was done here in this building. Isn't that weird? And I'm truly speaking with a revolutionary in a radical. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. At an intellectual level, I am absolutely garden variety. I'm just straight down the middle. The system that we are in, this university is functionally insane. Harvard is functionally insane. And we don't understand that when we get these things wrong, the financial crisis made this very clear. There was a long period where every grownup, everybody with a tie who spoke in baritone tones, with the right degree at the end of their name, was talking about how we banished volatility. We were in the great moderation. Okay, they were all crazy. And who was right? It was like Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini. Now what happens is that they claimed the market went crazy, but the market didn't go crazy. The market had been crazy. And what happened is that it suddenly went sane. Well, that's where we are with academics. Academics right now is mad as a hatter. And it's absolutely evident. I can show you graph after graph. I can show you the internal discussions. I can show you the conspiracies. Harvard's dealing with one right now over its admissions policies for people of color who happen to come from Asia. All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going. What we're talking about, just while we're on the topic of revolutionaries, is we're talking about the danger of an outbreak of sanity. Yeah, you're the guy pointing out the elephant in the room here. The elephant has no clothes. Is that how that goes? I was gonna talk a little bit to Joe Rogan about this when I had time. But I think you have some, just listening to you, you could probably speak really eloquently to academia on the difference between the different fields. So you think there's a difference between science, engineering, and then the humanities and academia in terms of tolerance that they're willing to tolerate? So from my perspective, I thought computer science and maybe engineering is more tolerant to radical ideas, but that's perhaps innocent of me. Because I always, all the battles going on now are a little bit more on the humanities side than gender studies and so on. Have you seen the American Mathematical Society's publication of an essay called Get Out the Way? I have not. The idea is that white men who hold positions within universities and mathematics should vacate their positions so that young black women can take over, something like this. That's in terms of diversity, which I also wanna ask you about, but in terms of diversity of strictly ideas, do you think, because you're basically saying physics as a community has become a little bit intolerant to some degree to new radical ideas, or at least you said that- It's changed a little bit recently, which is that even string theory is now admitting, okay, this doesn't look very promising in the short term. So the question is what compiles, if you wanna take the computer science metaphor, what will get you into a journal? Will you spend your life trying to push some paper into a journal, or will it be accepted easily? What do we know about the characteristics of the submitter and what gets taken up and what does not? All of these fields are experiencing pressure because no field is performing so brilliantly well that it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking, in the ways in which we've become accustomed. But don't you think, even in theoretical physics, a lot of times, even with theories like string theory, you can speak to this, it does eventually lead to what are the ways that this theory would be testable? Ultimately, although look, there's this thing about Popper and the scientific method that's a cancer and a disease in the minds of very smart people. That's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out, it's how it gets checked. And there is a dialogue between theory and experiment, but everybody should read Paul Dirac's 1963 American, Scientific American article, where he, you know, it's very interesting, he talks about it as if it was about the Schrodinger equation and Schrodinger's failure to advance his own work because of his failure to account for some phenomena. The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off, it won't agree with experiment, but it doesn't mean that the theory is actually wrong. But Dirac could as easily have been talking about his own equation in which he predicted that the electrons should have an antiparticle. And since the only positively charged particle that was known at the time was the proton, Heisenberg pointed out, well, shouldn't your antiparticle, the proton have the same mass as the electron and doesn't that invalidate your theory? So I think that Dirac was actually being quite, potentially quite sneaky in talking about the fact that he had been pushed off of his own theory to some extent by Heisenberg. But look, we've fetishized the scientific method and pauper and falsification because it protects us from crazy ideas entering the field. So it's a question of balancing type one and type two error and we're pretty maxed out in one direction. The opposite of that, let me say what comforts me, sort of biology or engineering, at the end of the day, does the thing work? Yeah. You can test the crazies away. The crazy, well see, now you're saying, but some ideas are truly crazy and some are actually correct. Well, there's precorrect currently crazy. Yeah. Right. And so you don't wanna get rid of everybody who's precorrect and currently crazy. The problem is that we don't have standards in general for trying to determine who has to be put to the sword in terms of their career and who has to be protected as some sort of giant time suck, pain in the ass who may change everything. Do you think that's possible, creating a mechanism of those selected? Well, you're not gonna like the answer, but here it comes. Oh, boy. It has to do with very human elements. We're trying to do this at the level of rules and fairness. It's not gonna work. Because the only thing that really understands this, you ever read The Double Helix? It's a book. Oh, you have to read this book. Not only did Jim Watson half discover this three-dimensional structure of DNA, he was also one hell of a writer before he became an ass. No, he's tried to destroy his own reputation. I knew about the ass. I didn't know about the good writer. Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living. And as I've said before, Jim Watson is too important a legacy to be left to Jim Watson. That book tells you more about what actually moves the dial. And there's another story about him, which I don't agree with, which is that he stole everything from Rosalind Franklin. I mean, the problems that he had with Rosalind Franklin are real, but we should actually honor that tension in our history by delving into it rather than having a simple solution. Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick being a pain in the ass that everybody secretly knew was super brilliant. And there's an encounter between Chargaff, who came up with the equimolar relations between the nucleotides, who should have gotten the structure of DNA, and Watson and Crick. And he talks about missing a shiver in the heartbeat of biology. And this stuff is so gorgeous. It just makes you tremble even thinking about it. Look, we know very often who is to be feared, and we need to fund the people that we fear. The people who are wasting our time need to be excluded from the conversation. You see, and maybe we'll make some errors in both directions, but we have known our own people. We know the pains in the asses that might work out, and we know the people who are really just blowhards who really have very little to contribute most of the time. It's not 100%, but you're not gonna get there with rules. Right, it's using some kind of instinct. I mean, to be honest, I'm gonna make you roll your eyes for a second, but the first time I heard that there is a large community of people who believe the Earth is flat actually made me pause and ask myself the question. Why would there be such a community? Yeah, is it possible the Earth is flat? So I had to like, wait a minute. I mean, then you go through a thinking process that I think is really healthy. It ultimately ends up being a geometry thing, I think. It's an interesting thought experiment, at the very least. Well, I do a different version of it. I say, why is this community stable? Yeah, that's a good way to analyze it. Well, interesting that whatever we've done has not erased the community. So they're taking a long shot bet that won't pan out. Maybe we just haven't thought enough about the rationality of the square root of two and somebody brilliant will figure it out. Maybe we will eventually land one day on the surface of Jupiter and explore it. These are crazy things that will never happen. So much of social media operates by AI algorithms. You talked about this a little bit, recommending the content you see. So on this idea of radical thought, how much should AI show you things you disagree with on Twitter and so on? In a Twitter verse, in the web internet. I hate this question. Yeah? Yeah. Because you don't know the answer? No, no, no, no. Look, they've pushed out this cognitive Lego to us that will just lead to madness. It's good to be challenged with things that you disagree with. The answer is no. It's good to be challenged with interesting things with which you currently disagree, but that might be true. So I don't really care about whether or not I disagree with something or don't disagree. I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing is being pushed out. Is it because it's likely to be true? Is it because, is there some reason? Because I can write a computer generator to come up with an infinite number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at. So please, before you push things at me that are disagreeable, tell me why. There is an aspect in which that question is quite dumb, especially because it's being used to almost, very generically by these different networks to say, well, we're trying to work this out. But basically, how much, do you see the value of seeing things you don't like, not you disagree with, because it's very difficult to know exactly what you articulated, which is the stuff that's important for you to consider that you disagree with. That's really hard to figure out. The bottom line is the stuff you don't like. If you're a Hillary Clinton supporter, you may not wanna, it might not make you feel good to see anything about Donald Trump. That's the only thing algorithms can really optimize for currently. They really can't. Yeah, they can do better. This is, we're- You think so? No, we're engaged in some moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people who are capable of building Google, Facebook, Twitter, are having us in these incredibly low-level discussions. Do they not know any smart people? Do they not have the phone numbers of people who can elevate these discussions? They do, but this, they're optimizing for a different thing and they're pushing those people out of those rooms. They're optimizing for things we can't see. And yes, profit is there. Nobody's questioning that. But they're also optimizing for things like political control or the fact that they're doing business in Pakistan and so they don't wanna talk about all the things that they're going to be bending to in Pakistan. So we're involved in a fake discussion. You think so? You think these conversations at that depth are happening inside Google? You don't think they have some basic metrics under user engagements? You're having a fake conversation with us, guys. We know you're having a fake conversation. I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation. You know how to cool these units. You know high availability like nobody's business by Gmail never goes down, almost. So you think just because they can do incredible work on the software side with infrastructure, they can also deal with some of these difficult questions about human behavior, human understanding, you're not. I've seen the developers screens that people take shots of inside of Google. And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple. We're not, we're engaged, they're engaging us in the wrong conversations. We are not at this low level. Here's one of my favorite questions. Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase in tech space equipped as a listening device? Where's my physical shutter to cover my lens? We had this in the 1970s. It cameras that had lens caps, you know. How much would it cost to have a security model? Pay five extra bucks. Why is my indicator light software controlled? Why when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on by putting it as something that cannot be bypassed? Why have you set up all my devices at some difficulty to yourselves as listening devices and we don't even talk about this? This thing is total fucking bullshit. I hope these discussions are happening about privacy. Is there more difficult than you're giving credit for? It's not just privacy. It's about social control. We're talking about social control. Why do I not have controls over my own levers? Just have a really cute UI where I can switch, I can dial things or I can at least see what the algorithms are. You think that there is some deliberate choices being made here. There's emergence and there is intention. There are two dimensions. The vector does not collapse onto either axis. But the idea that anybody who suggests that intention is completely absent is a child. That's really beautifully put. And like many things you've said is gonna make me think. Can I turn this around slightly? Yeah. I sit down with you and you say that you're obsessed with my feed. I don't even know what my feed is. What are you seeing that I'm not? I was obsessively looking through your feed on Twitter because it was really enjoyable because it was the Tom Lehrer element, is the humor in it. By the way, that feed is Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter. It's great. Eric R. Weinstein. No, but seriously, why? Why did I find it enjoyable? Or what was I seeing? What are you looking for? Why are we doing this? What is this podcast about? I know you've got all these interesting people. I'm just some guy who's sort of a podcast guest. Sort of a podcast. You're not even wearing a tie. I mean, it's not even a serious interview. I'm searching for meaning, for happiness, for a dopamine rush, so short term and long term. And how are you finding your way to me? What is, I don't honestly know what I'm doing to reach you. The representing ideas which feel common sense to me and not many people are speaking. So it's kind of like the intellectual dark web folks. These folks, from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson to yourself, are saying things where it's like, you're like saying, look, there's an elephant. He's not wearing any clothes. And I say, yeah, yeah, let's have more of that conversation. That's how I'm finding you. I'm desperate to try to change the conversation we're having. I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020. I don't think we can afford four more years of a misinterpreted message, which is what Donald Trump was. And I don't want the destruction of our institutions. They all seem hell bent on destroying themselves. So I'm trying to save theoretical physics, trying to save the New York Times, trying to save our various processes. And I think it feels delusional to me that this is falling to a tiny group of people who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out that everything they say will be misinterpreted and that their lives will be ruined through the process. I mean, I think we're in an absolutely bananas period of time and I don't believe it should fall to such a tiny number of shoulders to shoulder this weight. So I have to ask you on the capitalism side, you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism or it has effects that are, well, not unintended, but not what economists would predict or speak of capitalism creating. I just wanna talk to you about in general the effect of even then artificial intelligence or technology automation taking away jobs and these kinds of things and what you think is the way to alleviate that, whether the Andrew Ng presidential candidate with the universal basic income, UBI, what are your thoughts there? How do we fight off the negative effects of technology? You're a software guy, right? A human being is a worker is an old idea. A human being has a worker is a different object, right? So if you think about object-oriented programming as a paradigm, a human being has a worker and a human being has a soul. We're talking about the fact that for a period of time, the worker that a human being has was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has. However, we have two separate claims on the value in society. One is as a worker and the other is as a soul and the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity, it needs meaning, it needs purpose. As long as your means of support is not highly repetitive, I think you have a while to go before you need to start worrying. But if what you do is highly repetitive and it's not terribly generative, you are in the crosshairs of for loops and while loops. And that's what computers excel at, repetitive behavior. And when I say repetitive, I may mean things that have never happened through combinatorial possibilities, but as long as it has a looped characteristic to it, you're in trouble. We are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address the fact that a worker may not be able to make claims, a relatively undistinguished median member of our society still has needs to reproduce, needs to have to dignity. And when capitalism abandons the median individual or the bottom 10th or whatever it's going to do, it's flirting with revolution. And what concerns me is that the capitalists aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand this. You really want to court authoritarian control in our society because you can't see that people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the marginal product of their labor was too low to feed their dignity as a soul. So my great concern is that our free society has to do with the fact that we are self-organized. I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan when Lehman Brothers collapsed and thinking, who's going to tell all these people that they need to show up at work when they don't have a financial system to incentivize them to show up at work? So my complaint is, first of all, not with the socialists, but with the capitalists, which is you guys are being idiots. You're courting revolution by continuing to harp on the same old ideas that, well, you know, try harder, bootstrap yourself. Yeah, to an extent that works, to an extent. But we are clearly headed in a place that there's nothing that ties together our need to contribute and our need to consume. And that may not be provided by capitalism because it may have been a temporary phenomena. So check out my article on anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy. I think people are late getting the wake-up call and we would be doing a better job saving capitalism from itself because I don't want this done under authoritarian control. And the more we insist that everybody who's not thriving in our society during their reproductive years in order to have a family is failing at a personal level. I mean, what a disgusting thing that we're saying. What a horrible message. Who the hell have we become that we've so bought into the Chicago model that we can't see the humanity that we're destroying in that process? And I hate the thought of communism. I really do. My family has flirted with it decades past. It's a wrong, bad idea. But we are going to need to figure out how to make sure that those souls are nourished and respected and capitalism better have an answer. And I'm betting on capitalism, but I gotta tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with my team. So you're still on the capitalism team. You just, there's a theme here. Well, radical, radical capitalism. Hyper capitalism, yeah. Look, I want, I think hyper capitalism is gonna have to be coupled to hyper socialism. You need to allow the most productive people to create wonders. And you gotta stop bogging them down with all of these extra nice requirements. Nice is dead. Good has a future. Nice doesn't have a future because nice ends up with gulags. Damn, that's a good line. Okay, last question. You tweeted today a simple, quite insightful equation saying imagine that every unit F of fame you picked up has stalkers and H haters. So I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame, perhaps a little bit. Well, it's not as simple. People always take these things literally when you have like 280 characters to explain yourself. So you mean that that's not a mathematical? No, there's no law. Oh, okay. All right. I put the word imagine because I still have a mathematician's desire for precision. Imagine that this were true. But it was a beautiful way to imagine that there is a law that has those variables in it. And you've become quite famous these days. So how do you yourself optimize that equation with the peculiar kind of fame that you have gathered along the way? I wanna be kinder. I wanna be kinder to myself. I wanna be kinder to others. I wanna be able to have heart. Compassion, these things are really important. And I have a pretty spectrumy kind of approach to analysis. I'm quite literal. I can go full Rain Man on you at any given moment. No, I can, I can. It's facultative autism, if you like. And people are gonna get angry because they want autism to be respected. But when you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics, I speak with speech apnea. Be right down to dinner. We have to try to integrate ourselves in those tensions between, it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul. Many of us are optimizing one at the expense of the other. And I struggle with social media and I struggle with people making threats against our families. And I struggle with just how much pain people are in. And if there's one message I would like to push out there, you're responsible, everybody, all of us, myself included, with struggling. Struggle mightily because it's nobody else's job to do your struggle for you. Now with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure out how to better yourself and where you've failed and where you've let down your family, your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break. You know, if it's not working out, I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success. There's been no period of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another. And I do wish to say that a lot of times people think this is glamorous. I'm about to go do a show with Sam Harris. People are gonna listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage. It's completely crazy. I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum value and that's why I'm doing this podcast. Just give yourself a break. You owe us your struggle. You don't owe your family or your coworkers or your lovers or your family members success. As long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up, recognize that this new situation with the economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions has caused the people who've risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel. Everybody is lying at the moment. Nobody's really a truth teller. Try to keep your humanity about you. Try to recognize that if you're failing, if things aren't where you want them to be and you're struggling and you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, what you could do, it's not necessarily all your fault. We are in a global situation. I have not met the people who are honest, kind, good, successful. Nobody that I've met is checking all the boxes. Nobody's getting all 10s. So I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough. Either people wanna hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable. You have to struggle, you have to try. Or they wanna say you're 100% responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense. Beautifully put. Eric, thank you so much for talking today. Thanks for having me, buddy.
 The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein.
 He's a mathematician, economist, physicist,
 and the managing director of Teal Capital.
 He coined the term, and you could say,
 is the founder of the intellectual dark web,
 which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals
 that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson,
 Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others.
 This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence
 podcast at MIT and beyond.
 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes,
 or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman,
 spelled F-R-I-D.
 And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
 Are you nervous about this?
 Scared shitless.
 Okay, ni bas bukkhlesya.
 You mentioned Kung Fu Panda as one of your favorite movies.
 It has the usual profound master student dynamic going on.
 So who has been a teacher that significantly influenced
 the direction of your thinking in life's work?
 So if you're the Kung Fu Panda, who was your Shifu?
 Oh, well, it's interesting because I didn't see Shifu
 as being the teacher.
 Who was the teacher?
 Uwe, Master Uwe, the turtle.
 Oh, the turtle, right.
 They only meet twice in the entire film.
 And the first conversation sort of doesn't count.
 So the magic of the film, in fact, its point,
 is that the teaching that really matters
 is transferred during a single conversation.
 And it's very brief.
 And so who played that role in my life?
 I would say either my grandfather, Harry Rubin,
 and his wife, Sophie Rubin, my grandmother, or Tom Lehrer.
 Tom Lehrer?
 Yeah.
 In which way?
 If you give a child Tom Lehrer records,
 what you do is you destroy their ability
 to be taken over by later malware.
 And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene,
 that it destroys the ability to lead a child
 to lead a normal life for many people.
 So if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted
 from any kind of neurotypical presentation,
 I'll often ask them, are you a Tom Lehrer fan?
 And the odds that they will respond are quite high.
 Now, Tom Lehrer is Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Tom Lehrer?
 That's very interesting.
 There's a small number of Tom Lehrer songs
 that broke into the general population.
 Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Element Song,
 perhaps The Vatican Rag.
 So when you meet somebody who knows those songs,
 but doesn't know-
 Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you?
 Harshly.
 No, but you're Russian, so undoubtedly you know
 Nikolai Ivanovich Lubachevsky, that song.
 So that was a song about plagiarism
 that was in fact plagiarized,
 which most people don't know, from Danny Kay,
 where Danny Kay did a song called
 Stanislavsky of the Muskie Arts.
 And so Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job
 of plagiarizing a song and making it about plagiarism,
 and then making it about this mathematician
 who worked in non-Euclidean geometry.
 That was like giving heroin to a child.
 It was extremely addictive, and eventually led me
 to a lot of different places,
 one of which may have been a PhD in mathematics.
 And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics,
 I believe, at Harvard, something like that.
 I just had dinner with him, in fact.
 When my son turned 13, we didn't tell him,
 but his Bar Mitzvah present was dinner
 with his hero Tom Lehrer.
 And Tom Lehrer was 88 years old, sharp as a tack,
 irreverent and funny as hell, and just,
 you know, there are very few people in this world
 that you have to meet while they're still here,
 and that was definitely one for our family.
 So that wit is a reflection of intelligence
 in some kind of deep way, like where,
 that would be a good test of intelligence,
 whether you're a Tom Lehrer fan.
 So what do you think that is about wit,
 about that kind of humor,
 ability to see the absurdity in existence?
 Do you think that's connected to intelligence,
 or are we just two Jews on a mic
 that appreciate that kind of humor?
 No, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence.
 You can see it, there's a place where Tom Lehrer
 decides that he's going to lampoon Gilbert
 of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert
 with clever, meaningless wordplay.
 And he has, forget the, well, let's see.
 He's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan wrote it,
 and he says, that I misster depressed
 your young sister, nay, mister,
 this mister depester she tried.
 Pestering sisters, if festering blister,
 you best to resist her, say I.
 The sister persisted, the mister resisted,
 I kissed her all loyalty slipped,
 when she said I could have her, her sister's cadaver
 must surely have turned in its crypt.
 That's so dense, it's so insane,
 that that's clearly intelligence,
 because it's hard to construct something like that.
 If I look at my favorite Tom Lehrer lyric,
 there's a perfectly absurd one,
 which is once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
 but that couldn't happen again.
 We taught them a lesson in 1918,
 and they've hardly bothered us since then.
 That is a different kind of intelligence.
 You know, you're taking something that is so horrific,
 and you're sort of making it palatable and funny,
 and demonstrating also just your humanity.
 I mean, I think the thing that came through,
 as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible, horrible lines,
 was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was,
 who was channeling pain through humor and through grace.
 I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia,
 that same kind of humor emerged
 from the generation of World War II.
 It seemed like that humor is required
 to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering
 that that war created.
 Well, you do need the environment
 to create the broad Slavic soul.
 I don't think that many Americans
 really appreciate Russian humor,
 how you had to joke during the time of, let's say,
 Article 58 under Stalin.
 You had to be very, very careful.
 You know, the concept of a Russian satirical magazine
 like Crocodile doesn't make sense.
 So you have this cross-cultural problem
 that there are certain areas of human experience
 that it would be better to know nothing about.
 And quite unfortunately,
 Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them,
 which makes the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky so potent.
 The prose of Pushkin, whatever it is,
 you have to appreciate the depth
 of the Eastern European experience.
 And I would think that perhaps Americans
 knew something like this around the time of the Civil War
 or maybe under slavery and Jim Crow
 or even the harsh tyranny of the coal and steel employers
 during the labor wars.
 But in general, I would say it's hard for us
 to understand and imagine the collective culture
 unless we have the system of selective pressures
 that, for example, Russians were subjected to.
 Yeah, so if there is one good thing that comes out of war,
 it's literature, art, and humor, music.
 Oh, I don't think so.
 I think almost everything is good about war
 except for death and destruction.
 Right.
 Without the death, it would bring the romance of it.
 The whole thing is nice.
 Well, this is why we're always caught up in war.
 We have this very ambiguous relationship to it
 is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful
 and at an unacceptable price,
 and the price has never been higher.
 So to jump into AI a little bit,
 in one of the conversations you had
 or one of the videos, you described that one of the things
 AI systems can't do and biological systems can
 is self-replicate in the physical world.
 Oh, no, no.
 In the physical world.
 Well, yes, the physical robots can't self-replicate.
 But there's a very tricky point,
 which is that the only thing that we've been able to create
 that's really complex that has an analog
 of our reproductive system is software.
 But nevertheless, software replicates itself
 if we're speaking strictly for the replication
 in this kind of digital space.
 So let me just to begin, let me ask a question.
 Do you see a protective barrier or a gap
 between the physical world and the digital world?
 Let's not call it digital.
 Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world.
 Why logical?
 Well, because even though we had,
 let's say Einstein's brain preserved,
 it was meaningless to us as a physical object
 because we couldn't do anything with what was stored
 at a logical level.
 And so the idea that something may be stored logically
 and that it may be stored physically
 are not necessarily, we don't always benefit
 from synonymizing.
 I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis
 to the logical world, but that it does warrant identification
 with a separate layer that need not invoke logic gates
 and zeros and ones.
 And so connecting those two worlds,
 the logical world and the physical world
 or maybe just connecting to the logical world
 inside our brain, Einstein's brain,
 you mentioned the idea of out, out-telligence.
 Artificial out-telligence.
 Artificial out-telligence.
 Yes, this is the only essay that John Brockman
 ever invited me to write that he refused to publish in Edge.
 Why?
 Well, maybe it wasn't well-written, but I don't know.
 The idea is quite compelling.
 It's quite unique and new,
 and at least from my view of a standpoint,
 maybe you can explain it.
 Sure.
 What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting
 to be terrified by artificial general intelligence
 when in fact, artificial life is terrifying
 in and of itself and it's already here.
 So in order to have a system of selective pressures,
 you need three distinct elements.
 You need variation within a population,
 you need heritability, and you need differential success.
 So what's really unique, and I've made this point
 I think elsewhere about software,
 is that if you think about what humans know how to build,
 that's impressive.
 So I always take a car and I say,
 does it have an analog of each
 of the physiological systems?
 Does it have a skeletal structure?
 That's its frame.
 Does it have a neurological structure?
 It has an onboard computer.
 It has a digestive system.
 The one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system.
 But if you can call spawn on a process,
 effectively you do have a reproductive system.
 And that means that you can create something
 with variation, heritability, and differential success.
 Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was
 where do we see inanimate, non-intelligent life,
 outwitting intelligent life?
 And I have two favorite systems,
 and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted.
 One of which is the ophrys orchid subspecies,
 or subclade, I don't know what to call it.
 Is it a type of flower?
 Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female
 of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males
 into engaging, it was called pseudo-copulation,
 with the fake female, which is usually represented
 by the lowest petal.
 And there's also a pheromone component to fool the males
 into thinking they have a mating opportunity.
 But the flower doesn't have to give up energy
 in the form of nectar as a lure
 because it's tricking the males.
 The other system is a particular species of mussel,
 lampicillus in the clear streams of Missouri.
 And it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip
 that contain its young.
 And when the bass see this fleshy lip,
 which looks exactly like a species of fish
 that the bass like to eat,
 the young explode and clamp onto the gills
 and parasitize the bass and also use the bass
 to redistribute them as they eventually release.
 Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent dupe
 being fooled by a lower life form.
 And what is sculpting these convincing lures?
 It's the intelligence of previously duped targets
 for these strategies.
 So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy,
 those weaker mimics fall off.
 They have terminal lines and only the better ones survive.
 So it's an arms race between the target species
 that is being parasitized getting smarter
 and this other less intelligent or non-intelligent object
 getting as if smarter.
 And so what you see is that artificial intelligence,
 artificial general intelligence
 is not needed to parasitize us.
 It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves.
 So you could have a program, let's say,
 one of these Nigerian scams that writes letters
 and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin
 to figure out which aspects of the program should be kept,
 which should be varied and thrown away.
 And you don't need it to be in any way intelligent
 in order to have a really nightmarish scenario
 of being parasitized by something
 that has no idea what it's doing.
 So you phrased a few concepts really eloquently.
 So let me try to, as a few directions this goes.
 So one, first of all, in the way we write software today,
 it's not common that we allow it to self-modify.
 But we do have that ability now.
 We have the ability.
 It's just not common.
 It's not just common.
 So your thought is that that is a serious worry
 if there becomes a reason.
 But self-modifying code is available now.
 So there's different types of self-modification, right?
 There's personalization, your email app,
 your Gmail is self-modifying to you after you log in
 or whatever, you can think of it that way.
 But ultimately, all the information is centralized.
 But you're thinking of ideas where you're completely,
 this is a unique entity operating
 under selective pressures and it changes.
 Well, if you think about the fact that our immune systems
 don't know what's coming at them next,
 but they have a small set of spanning components,
 and if it's a sufficiently expressive system
 in that any shape or binding region can be approximated
 with the Lego that is present,
 then you can have confidence that you don't need to know
 what's coming at you because the combinatorics
 are sufficient to reach any configuration needed.
 So that's a beautiful, well, terrifying thing to worry about
 because it's so within our reach.
 Well, whenever I suggest these things,
 I do always have a concern as to whether or not
 I will bring them into being by talking about them.
 So there's this thing from OpenAI,
 so next week to talk to the founder of OpenAI,
 this idea that their text generation,
 the new stuff they have for generating text
 is they didn't wanna bring it,
 they didn't wanna release it
 because they're worried about the concept.
 I'm delighted to hear that,
 but they're going to end up releasing it.
 Yes, so that's the thing is I think talking about it,
 well, at least from my end,
 I'm more a proponent of technology preventing,
 so further innovation preventing
 the detrimental effects of innovation.
 Well, we're sort of tumbling down a hill
 at accelerating speed,
 so whether or not we're proponents or it doesn't really matter.
 It may not matter.
 But I do feel that there are people who've held things back
 and died poorer than they might've otherwise been.
 We don't even know their names.
 I don't think that we should discount the idea
 that having the smartest people showing off
 how smart they are by what they've developed
 may be a terminal process.
 I'm very mindful in particular of a beautiful letter
 that Edward Teller of all people wrote to Leo Szilard
 where Szilard was trying to figure out
 how to control the use of atomic weaponry
 at the end of World War II.
 And Teller rather strangely,
 because many of us view him as a monster,
 showed some very advanced moral thinking
 talking about the slim chance we have for survival
 and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable.
 I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut
 what it is we are playing with
 when we are working on technical problems.
 And I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it
 a movie called The Bridge on the River Kwai
 about, I believe, captured British POWs
 who just in a desire to do a bridge well
 end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors.
 Well, now you're making me question
 the unrestricted open discussion of ideas in AI.
 I'm not saying I know the answer.
 I'm just saying that I could make a decent case
 for either our need to talk about this
 and to become technologically focused on containing it
 or our need to stop talking about this
 and try to hope that the relatively small number
 of highly adept individuals
 who are looking at these problems is small enough
 that we should in fact be talking about
 how to contain them.
 Well, the way innovation happens,
 what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus,
 whether if he was silent,
 the idea would emerge elsewhere,
 well, in the case of Newton, of course.
 But in the case of AI, how small is the set of individuals
 out of which such ideas would arise?
 Well, the ideas of the researchers we know
 and those that we don't know
 but may live in countries that don't wish us to know
 what level they're currently at
 are very disciplined in keeping these things to themselves.
 Of course, I will point out
 that there's a religious school in Kerala
 that developed something very close to the calculus,
 certainly in terms of infinite series
 in I guess religious prayer and rhyme and prose.
 So it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back,
 and I don't really believe
 that we have an ability to hold it back.
 I do think that we could change the proportion
 of the time we spend worrying about the effects
 of what if we are successful
 rather than simply trying to succeed
 and hope that we'll be able to contain things later.
 Beautifully put.
 So on the idea of intelligence,
 what form, treading cautiously,
 as we've agreed as we tumbled down the ladder,
 treading cautiously as we've agreed
 as we tumbled down the hill,
 what form-
 Can't stop ourselves, can we?
 We cannot.
 What form do you see it taking?
 So one example, Facebook, Google,
 do want to, I don't know a better word,
 you want to influence users to behave a certain way.
 And so that's one kind of example of our intelligence
 is systems perhaps modifying the behavior
 of these intelligent human beings
 in order to sell more product of different kinds.
 But do you see other examples of this
 actually emerging in-
 Just take any parasitic system.
 Make sure that there's some way in which
 that there's differential success,
 heritability, and variation.
 And those are the magic ingredients.
 And if you really wanted to build a nightmare machine,
 make sure that the system
 that expresses the variability has a spanning set
 so that it can learn to arbitrary levels
 by making it sufficiently expressive.
 That's your nightmare.
 So it's your nightmare, but it could also be,
 it's a really powerful mechanism by which to create,
 well, powerful systems.
 So are you more worried about the negative direction
 that might go versus the positive?
 So you said parasitic, but that doesn't necessarily
 need to be what the system converges towards.
 It could be, what is it?
 Parasitism, the dividing line between parasitism
 and symbiosis is not so clear.
 That's what they tell me about marriage.
 I'm still single, so I don't know.
 Well, yeah, we could go into that too, but.
 No, I think we have to appreciate,
 you know, are you infected by your own mitochondria?
 Right.
 Yeah.
 So, you know, in marriage, you fear the loss of independence,
 but even though the American therapeutic community
 may be very concerned about co-dependence,
 what's to say that co-dependence isn't what's necessary
 to have a stable relationship in which to raise children
 who are maximally case-elected
 and require incredible amounts of care,
 because you have to wait 13 years
 before there's any reproductive payout,
 and most of us don't want our 13-year-olds having kids.
 That's a very tricky situation to analyze,
 and I would say that predators and parasites
 drive much of our evolution,
 and I don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them.
 Well, ultimately, I mean, nobody knows the meaning of life
 or what even happiness is, but there is some metrics.
 That they didn't tell you?
 They didn't, that's why all the poetry and books
 are about, you know, there's some metrics under which
 you can kind of measure how good it is
 that these AI systems are roaming about.
 So you're more nervous about software
 than you are optimistic about ideas of, yeah,
 self-replicating larceny.
 I don't think we've really felt where we are.
 You know, occasionally we get a wake-up.
 9-11 was so anomalous compared to everything else
 we've experienced on American soil
 that it came to us as a complete shock
 that that was even a possibility.
 What it really was was a highly creative
 and determined R&D team deep in the bowels of Afghanistan,
 showing us that we had certain exploits that we were open to
 that nobody had chosen to express.
 I can think of several of these things
 that I don't talk about publicly,
 that just seem to have to do with how relatively unimaginative
 those who wish to cause havoc and destruction
 have been up until now.
 The great mystery of our time,
 of this particular little era,
 is how remarkably stable we've been since 1945
 when we demonstrated the ability
 to use nuclear weapons in anger.
 And we don't know why things like that
 haven't happened since then.
 We've had several close calls, we've had mistakes,
 we've had brinksmanship.
 And what's now happened is that we've settled into a sense
 that, oh, it'll always be nothing.
 It's been so long since something was
 at that level of danger
 that we've got a wrong idea in our head.
 And that's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro show,
 I talked about the need to resume above ground testing
 of nuclear devices, because we have people
 whose developmental experience suggests
 that when, let's say, Donald Trump and North Korea
 engage on Twitter, oh, it's nothing, it's just posturing.
 Everybody's just in it for money.
 There's a sense that people are in a video game mode,
 which has been the right call since 1945.
 We've been mostly in video game mode.
 It's amazing.
 So you're worried about a generation
 which has not seen any existential...
 We've lived under it.
 You see, you're younger.
 I don't know if, and again, you came from Moscow.
 Yeah.
 There was a TV show called The Day After
 that had a huge effect on a generation growing up
 in the US, and it talked about what life would be like
 after a nuclear exchange.
 We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively
 where we've thought about this,
 and I think it's one of the most irresponsible things
 that the elders among us have done,
 which is to provide this beautiful garden
 in which the thorns are cut off of the rose bushes
 and all of the edges are rounded and sanded,
 and so people have developed this totally unreal idea,
 which is everything's going to be just fine.
 And do I think that my leading concern is AGI
 or my leading concern is thermonuclear exchange
 or gene drives or any one of these things?
 I don't know.
 But I know that our time here
 in this very long experiment here is finite
 because the toys that we've built are so impressive,
 and the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized.
 And I think we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945.
 We had a lot of dangerous skilled players
 on the world stage who nevertheless,
 no matter how bad they were,
 managed to not embroil us in something
 that we couldn't come back from.
 The Cold War.
 Yeah, and the distance from the Cold War.
 I'm very mindful of, there was a Russian tradition actually
 of on your wedding day going to visit a memorial
 to those who gave their lives.
 Can you imagine this?
 Where on the happiest day of your life you go and you pay
 homage to the people who fought and died
 in the Battle of Stalingrad?
 I'm not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say,
 but there were a couple of things that the Russians did
 that were really positive in the Soviet era.
 And I think trying to let people know
 how serious life actually is,
 the Russian model of seriousness is better
 than the American model.
 And maybe, like you mentioned,
 there was a small echo of that after 9-11.
 But we wouldn't let it form.
 We talk about 9-11, but it's 9-12
 that really moved the needle.
 When we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak.
 We witnessed something super serious
 and we didn't want to run to our computers
 and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings.
 And it was profound because we woke up briefly.
 I talk about the gated institutional narrative
 that sort of programs our lives.
 I've seen it break three times in my life.
 One of which was the election of Donald Trump.
 Another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers
 when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns
 wasn't that important knew that
 Lehman Brothers met AIG was next.
 And the other one was 9-11.
 And so if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times
 that the global narrative was really interrupted,
 that tells you how much we've been on top
 of developing events.
 I mean, we had the Murrow Federal Building explosion,
 but it didn't cause the narrative to break.
 It wasn't profound enough.
 Around 9-12, we started to see
 that we were starting to wake up out of our slumber.
 And the powers that be did not want to coming together.
 The admonition was go shopping.
 And the powers that be was what is that force
 as opposed to blaming individuals?
 We don't know.
 So whatever that.
 Whatever that force is,
 there's a component of it that's emergent
 and there's a component of it that's deliberate.
 So give yourself a portfolio with two components.
 Some amount of it is emergent,
 but some amount of it is also an understanding
 that if people come together, they become an incredible force.
 And what you're seeing right now, I think,
 is there are forces that are trying to come together
 and there are forces that are trying to push things apart.
 And one of them is the globalist narrative
 versus the national narrative,
 where to the globalist perspective,
 nations are bad things in essence,
 that they're temporary, they're nationalistic,
 they're jingoistic, it's all negative,
 to people more in the nationality.
 And they're saying, look, this is where I pay my taxes.
 This is where I do my army service.
 This is where I have a vote.
 This is where I have a passport.
 Who the hell are you to tell me
 that because you've moved into some place
 that you can make money globally,
 that you've chosen to abandon other people
 to whom you have a special and elevated duty?
 And I think that these competing narratives
 have been pushing towards the global perspective
 from the elite and a larger and larger number
 of disenfranchised people are saying,
 hey, I actually live in a place and I have laws
 and I speak a language, I have a culture,
 and who are you to tell me that because you can profit
 in some faraway land, that my obligations
 to my fellow countrymen are so much diminished?
 So these tensions between nations and so on,
 ultimately you see being proud of your country and so on,
 which creates potentially the kind of things
 that led to wars and so on,
 they ultimately, it is human nature
 and it is good for us for wake-up calls of different kinds.
 Well, I think that these are tensions.
 And my point isn't, I mean,
 nationalism run amok is a nightmare.
 And internationalism run amok is a nightmare.
 And the problem is we're trying to push these pendulums
 to some place where they're somewhat balanced,
 where we have a higher duty of care to those
 who share our laws and our citizenship,
 but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system.
 I would think this is elementary,
 but the problem that we're facing
 concerns the ability for some to profit
 by abandoning their obligations
 to others within their system.
 And that's what we've had for decades.
 You mentioned nuclear weapons.
 I was hoping to get answers from you
 since one of the many things you've done is economics.
 Maybe you can understand human behavior
 and why the heck we haven't blown each other up yet.
 But okay, so we'll get back.
 I don't know the answer to that.
 Yeah, it's really important to say
 that we really don't know.
 A mild uptick in wisdom.
 A mild uptick in wisdom.
 Well, Stephen Pinker, who I've talked with,
 has a lot of really good ideas about why.
 I don't trust his optimism.
 Listen, I'm Russian,
 so I never trust a guy who's that optimistic.
 No, no, no, it's just that you're talking about a guy
 who's looking at a system in which more and more
 of the kinetic energy, like war,
 has been turned into potential energy,
 like unused nuclear weapons.
 Wow, beautifully put.
 And now I'm looking at that system and I'm saying,
 okay, well, if you don't have a potential energy term,
 then everything's just getting better and better.
 Yeah, wow, that's beautifully put.
 Only a physicist could.
 Okay.
 I'm not a physicist.
 Is that a dirty word?
 No, no, I wish I were a physicist.
 Me too, my dad's a physicist.
 I'm trying to live up that probably for the rest of my life.
 He's probably gonna listen to this too.
 He did.
 He did.
 He did.
 So your friend Sam Harris worries a lot
 about the existential threat of AI,
 not in the way that you've described, but in the more.
 Well, he hangs out with Elon.
 I don't know Elon.
 So are you worried about that kind of,
 you know, about the,
 about either robotic systems or, you know,
 traditionally defined AI systems
 essentially becoming super intelligent,
 much more intelligent than human beings and getting.
 Well, they already are.
 And they're not.
 When seen as a collective, you mean?
 Well, I mean, I can mean all sorts of things,
 but certainly many of the things that we thought
 were peculiar to general intelligence
 do not require general intelligence.
 So that's been one of the big awakenings
 that you can write a pretty convincing sports story
 from stats alone without needing to have watched the game.
 So, you know, is it possible to write lively prose
 about politics?
 Yeah, no, not yet.
 So we were sort of all over the map.
 One of the things about chess,
 there's a question I once asked on Quora
 that didn't get a lot of response, which was,
 what is the greatest brilliancy ever produced
 by a computer in a chess game?
 Which was different than the question
 of what is the greatest game ever played?
 So if you think about brilliancies
 as what really animates many of us
 to think of chess as an art form,
 those are those moves and combinations
 that just show such flair, panache, and soul.
 Computers weren't really great at that.
 They were great positional monsters.
 And recently we've started seeing brilliancies.
 A few grandmasters have identified with AlphaZero
 that things were quite brilliant.
 Yeah, so that's an example of something.
 We don't think that that's AGI,
 but in a very restricted set of rules like chess,
 you're starting to see poetry of a high order.
 And so I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI.
 AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives
 in the same way that I don't think a worm should be,
 you know, the C. elegans shouldn't be treated
 as non-conscious because it only has 300 neurons.
 It maybe just has a very low level of consciousness
 because we don't understand what these things mean
 as they scale up.
 So am I worried about this general phenomena?
 Sure, but I think that one of the things that's happening
 is that a lot of us are fretting about this
 in part because of human needs.
 We've always been worried about the golem, right?
 Well, the golem is the artificially created.
 Life, you know.
 It's like Frankenstein type character.
 Yeah, sure, it's a Jewish version.
 Frankenberg, Frankenstein.
 Yeah, that makes sense.
 That's right.
 But we've always been worried about creating
 something like this, and it's getting closer and closer.
 And there are ways in which
 we have to realize that the whole thing
 that we've experienced or the context of our lives
 is almost certainly coming to an end.
 And I don't mean to suggest that we won't survive.
 I don't know.
 And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow.
 Could be 300, 500 years.
 But there's no plan that I'm aware of
 if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit
 that are sensible within current technological dreams,
 the Earth, the Moon, and Mars.
 And we have a very competitive civilization
 that is still forced into violence
 to sort out disputes that cannot be arbitrated.
 It is not clear to me that we have a long-term future
 until we get to the next stage,
 which is to figure out whether or not
 the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken.
 And that requires our source code.
 Our source code, the stuff in our brains
 to figure out what do you mean by our source code?
 The source code of the context,
 whatever it is that produces the quarks,
 the electrons, the neutrinos.
 Our source code, I got it.
 So this is-
 No, you're talking about stuff
 that's written in a higher level language.
 Yeah, yeah, that's right.
 You're talking about the low level bits or lower.
 That's what is currently keeping us here.
 We can't even imagine.
 We have harebrained schemes
 for staying within the Einsteinian speed limit.
 Maybe if we could just drug ourselves
 and go into a suspended state,
 or we could have multiple generations.
 I think all that stuff is pretty silly.
 But I think it's also pretty silly to imagine
 that our wisdom is going to increase to the point
 that we can have the toys we have,
 and we're not going to use them for 500 years.
 Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough
 when I realized you're just one letter away from the guy.
 Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein.
 It's, well, you get to pick.
 Okay, so unified theory.
 You know, you've worked, you enjoy the beauty of geometry.
 I don't actually know if you enjoy it.
 You certainly are quite good at it.
 I tremble before it.
 Tremble before it.
 If you're religious, that is one of the-
 I don't have to be religious.
 It's just so beautiful.
 You will tremble anyway.
 I mean, I just read Einstein's biography,
 and one of the things you've done
 is try to explore a unified theory,
 talking about a 14-dimensional observer
 that has the 4D space-time continuum embedded in it.
 I'm just curious how you think, philosophically,
 at a high level about something more than four dimensions.
 How do you try to, what does it make you feel?
 Talking in the mathematical world about dimensions
 that are greater than the ones we can perceive.
 Is there something that you take away
 that's more than just the math?
 Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me.
 Okay.
 Now, on the front of that tongue,
 there was a sweet receptor.
 And next to that were salt receptors on two different sides,
 a little bit farther away.
 There was a little bit farther back.
 There were sour receptors.
 And you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue
 where your bitter receptor was.
 Show the good side always.
 Okay, but that was four dimensions of taste receptors.
 But you also had pain receptors on that tongue
 and probably heat receptors on that tongue.
 So let's assume that you had one of each.
 That would be six dimensions.
 So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza
 and it's got some hot pepper on it,
 maybe some jalapeno.
 You're having a six dimensional experience, dude.
 Do you think we overemphasize the value of time
 as one of the dimensions or space?
 Well, we certainly overemphasize the value of time
 because we like things to start and end,
 or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to.
 Well, what if you flipped one of the spatial dimensions
 into being a temporal dimension?
 And you and I were to meet in New York City
 and say, well, where and when should we meet?
 And say, how about I'll meet you on 36th and Lexington
 at two in the afternoon and 11 o'clock in the morning?
 That would be very confusing.
 Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time.
 We happen to be in a delicious situation
 in which we have three dimensions of space and one of time
 and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric
 where we can trade off a little space for a little time,
 but we still only have one dimension
 that is picked out relative to the other three.
 It's very much Gladys Knight and the Pips.
 So which one developed for who?
 Do we develop for these dimensions or did the dimensions,
 or were they always there and it doesn't?
 Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place
 where there are four temporal dimensions
 or two and two of space and time
 or three of time and one of space?
 And then would time not be playing the role of space?
 Why do you imagine that the sector that you're in
 is all that there is?
 I certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise.
 I mean, I haven't done ayahuasca
 or any of those drugs that I'd hoped to one day, but-
 Instead of doing ayahuasca,
 you could just head over to building two.
 That's where the mathematicians are?
 Yeah, that's where they hang.
 Just to look at some geometry.
 Well, just ask about pseudo-Romani and geometry.
 That's what you're interested in.
 Okay.
 Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru.
 And then some extra money for that trip.
 Yeah, but you won't be able to do any calculations
 if that's how you choose to go about it.
 Well, a different kind of calculation.
 So to speak. Yeah.
 One of my favorite people, Edward Frankel,
 Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math,
 great title for a book,
 said that you are quite a remarkable intellect
 to come up with such beautiful original ideas
 in terms of the unified theory and so on,
 but you are working outside academia.
 So one question in developing ideas
 that are truly original, truly interesting,
 what's the difference between inside academia
 and outside academia when it comes to developing such ideas?
 Oh, it's a terrible choice, terrible choice.
 So if you do it inside of academics,
 you are forced to constantly
 show great loyalty to the consensus
 and you distinguish yourself with small,
 almost microscopic heresies
 to make your reputation in general.
 And you have very competent people and brilliant people
 who are working together,
 who form very deep social networks
 and have a very high level of behavior,
 at least within mathematics
 and at least technically within physics,
 theoretical physics.
 When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people.
 Mad men, and these are people
 who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position
 and almost always lose their way.
 And the key question is,
 will progress likely come from someone
 who has miraculously managed to stay within the system
 and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy
 that is sort of unthinkable,
 in which case that will be fascinating?
 Or is it more likely that somebody will maintain
 a level of discipline from outside of academics
 and be able to make use of the freedom
 that comes from not having to constantly
 affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field?
 So you've characterized in ways that academia
 in this particular sense is declining.
 You posted a plot, the older population
 of the faculty is getting larger,
 the younger is getting smaller and so on.
 So which direction of the two are you more hopeful about?
 Well, the baby boomers can't hang on forever.
 First of all, in general, true,
 and second of all, in academia.
 But that's really what this time is about.
 Is the baby boomers control.
 We're used to financial bubbles
 that last a few years in length and then pop.
 The baby boomer bubble is this really long lived thing
 and all of the ideology, all of the behavior patterns,
 the norms, for example, string theory
 is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomena.
 It was something that baby boomers were able to do
 because it required a very high level
 of mathematical ability.
 So you don't think of string theory as an original idea?
 Oh, I mean, it was original to Veneziano,
 probably is older than the baby boomers.
 And there are people who are younger than the baby boomers
 who are still doing string theory.
 And I'm not saying that nothing discovered
 within the large string theoretic complex is wrong.
 Quite the contrary, a lot of brilliant mathematics
 and a lot of the structure of physics
 was elucidated by string theorists.
 What do I think of the deliverable nature
 of this product that will not ship called string theory?
 I think that it is largely an affirmative action program
 for highly mathematically and geometrically talented
 baby boomer physicists so that they can say
 that they're working on something within the constraints
 of what they will say is quantum gravity.
 Now there are other schemes,
 there's like asymptotic safety.
 There are other things that you could imagine doing.
 I don't think much of any of the major programs,
 but to have inflicted this level of loyalty
 through a shibboleth, well, surely you don't question X.
 Well, I question almost everything in the string program.
 And that's why I got out of physics.
 When you called me a physicist, it was a great honor.
 But the reason I didn't become a physicist
 wasn't that I fell in love with mathematics.
 As I said, wow, in 1984 and 1983,
 I saw the field going mad.
 And I saw that mathematics, which has all sorts of problems,
 was not going insane.
 And so instead of studying things within physics,
 I thought it was much safer to study the same objects
 within mathematics.
 There's a huge price to pay for that.
 You lose physical intuition.
 But the point is that it wasn't a North Korean
 reeducation camp either.
 Are you hopeful about cracking open the Einstein
 unified theory in a way that has,
 I mean, really, really understanding
 whether this uniting everything together
 with quantum theory and so on?
 I mean, I'm trying to play this role myself.
 To do it to the extent of handing it over
 to the more responsible, more professional,
 more competent community.
 So I think that they're wrong about a great number
 of their belief structures.
 But I do believe, I mean, I have a really profound
 love-hate relationship with this group of people.
 I think-
 On the physics side.
 Oh yeah.
 Because the mathematicians actually seem to be
 much more open-minded and-
 Well, they are and they aren't.
 They're open-minded about anything
 that looks like great math.
 Right.
 Right, they'll study something that isn't
 very important physics, but if it's beautiful mathematics,
 then they'll have, they have great intuition
 about these things.
 As good as the mathematicians are,
 and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level
 give them the edge, the theoretical physics community
 is bar none the most profound intellectual community
 that we have ever created.
 It is the number one, there is nobody in second place
 as far as I'm concerned.
 Look, in their spare time, in the spare time,
 they invented molecular biology.
 What was the origin of molecular biology?
 You're saying physics-
 Well, somebody like Francis Crick.
 I mean, a lot of the early molecular biologists-
 Were physicists?
 Yeah, I mean, Schrodinger wrote What is Life?
 And that was highly inspirational.
 I mean, you have to appreciate that
 there is no community like the basic research community
 in theoretical physics.
 And it's not something, I'm highly critical of these guys.
 I think that they would just wasted the decades of time
 with a near religious devotion to their misconception
 of where the problems were in physics.
 But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse
 ever witnessed within academics.
 You see it as a collapse or just a lull?
 Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality.
 We can't afford to pay these people.
 We can't afford to give them an accelerator
 just to play with in case they find something
 at the next energy level.
 These people created our economy.
 They gave us the rad lab and radar.
 They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II.
 They created the semiconductor and the transistor
 to power our economy through Moore's law.
 As a positive externality of particle accelerators,
 they created the World Wide Web.
 And we have the insolence to say,
 why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars?
 No, the question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars?
 Right, these guys signed
 the world's worst licensing agreement.
 And if they simply charged for every time
 you used a transistor or a URL
 or enjoyed the peace that they have provided
 during this period of time
 through the terrible weapons that they developed
 or your communications devices,
 all of the things that power our economy,
 I really think came out of physics,
 even to the extent the chemistry came out of physics
 and molecular biology came out of physics.
 So first of all, you have to know
 that I'm very critical of this community.
 Second of all, it is our most important community.
 We have neglected it, we've abused it.
 We don't take it seriously.
 We don't even care to get them to rehab
 after a couple of generations of failure.
 I think the youngest person
 to have really contributed to the standard model
 of theoretical level was born in 1951, right?
 Frank Wilczek.
 And almost nothing has happened
 that in theoretical physics after 1973, 74,
 that sent somebody to Stockholm
 for theoretical development that predicted experiment.
 So we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves.
 Now with that said, these guys have behaved abysmally,
 in my opinion,
 because they haven't owned up to where they actually are,
 what problems they're really facing,
 how definite they can actually be.
 They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries
 which are desperately needed in other fields,
 like gauge theory,
 which at least the mathematicians can share,
 which is an upgrade of the differential calculus
 of Newton and Leibniz.
 And they haven't shared the importance
 of renormalization theory,
 even though this should be standard operating procedure
 for people across the sciences
 dealing with different layers
 and different levels of phenomena.
 And by shared you mean communicated in such a way
 that it disseminates throughout the different sciences.
 These guys are sitting,
 both theoretical physicists and mathematicians
 are sitting on top of a giant stockpile
 of intellectual gold, right?
 They have so many things
 that have not been manifested anywhere.
 I was just on Twitter, I think I mentioned
 the Habermann switch pitch that shows the self-duality
 of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism.
 Now this is like a triviality
 and it makes an amazing toy that's built a market,
 hopefully a fortune for Chuck Habermann.
 Well, you have no idea how much great stuff
 that these priests have in their monastery.
 So it's truly a love and hate relationship for you.
 Yeah, well, it sounds like it's more on the love side.
 This building that we're in right here
 is the building in which I really put together
 the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences
 and the National Science Foundation
 through the Government University Industry
 Research Roundtable to destroy the bargaining power
 of American academics using foreign labor.
 With the microfeatures in the base.
 Oh yeah, that was done here in this building.
 Isn't that weird?
 And I'm truly speaking with a revolutionary in a radical.
 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
 At an intellectual level,
 I am absolutely garden variety.
 I'm just straight down the middle.
 The system that we are in,
 this university is functionally insane.
 Harvard is functionally insane.
 And we don't understand that when we get these things wrong,
 the financial crisis made this very clear.
 There was a long period where every grownup,
 everybody with a tie who spoke in baritone tones,
 with the right degree at the end of their name,
 was talking about how we banished volatility.
 We were in the great moderation.
 Okay, they were all crazy.
 And who was right?
 It was like Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini.
 Now what happens is that they claimed the market went crazy,
 but the market didn't go crazy.
 The market had been crazy.
 And what happened is that it suddenly went sane.
 Well, that's where we are with academics.
 Academics right now is mad as a hatter.
 And it's absolutely evident.
 I can show you graph after graph.
 I can show you the internal discussions.
 I can show you the conspiracies.
 Harvard's dealing with one right now
 over its admissions policies for people of color
 who happen to come from Asia.
 All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going.
 What we're talking about,
 just while we're on the topic of revolutionaries,
 is we're talking about the danger of an outbreak of sanity.
 Yeah, you're the guy pointing out the elephant
 in the room here.
 The elephant has no clothes.
 Is that how that goes?
 I was gonna talk a little bit to Joe Rogan about this
 when I had time.
 But I think you have some, just listening to you,
 you could probably speak really eloquently to academia
 on the difference between the different fields.
 So you think there's a difference
 between science, engineering,
 and then the humanities and academia
 in terms of tolerance that they're willing to tolerate?
 So from my perspective, I thought computer science
 and maybe engineering is more tolerant to radical ideas,
 but that's perhaps innocent of me.
 Because I always, all the battles going on now
 are a little bit more on the humanities side
 than gender studies and so on.
 Have you seen the American Mathematical Society's
 publication of an essay called Get Out the Way?
 I have not.
 The idea is that white men who hold positions
 within universities and mathematics
 should vacate their positions
 so that young black women can take over,
 something like this.
 That's in terms of diversity,
 which I also wanna ask you about,
 but in terms of diversity of strictly ideas,
 do you think, because you're basically saying physics
 as a community has become a little bit intolerant
 to some degree to new radical ideas,
 or at least you said that-
 It's changed a little bit recently,
 which is that even string theory is now admitting,
 okay, this doesn't look very promising in the short term.
 So the question is what compiles,
 if you wanna take the computer science metaphor,
 what will get you into a journal?
 Will you spend your life trying to push some paper
 into a journal, or will it be accepted easily?
 What do we know about the characteristics of the submitter
 and what gets taken up and what does not?
 All of these fields are experiencing pressure
 because no field is performing so brilliantly well
 that it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking,
 in the ways in which we've become accustomed.
 But don't you think, even in theoretical physics,
 a lot of times, even with theories like string theory,
 you can speak to this, it does eventually lead to
 what are the ways that this theory would be testable?
 Ultimately, although look, there's this thing about Popper
 and the scientific method that's a cancer and a disease
 in the minds of very smart people.
 That's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out,
 it's how it gets checked.
 And there is a dialogue between theory and experiment,
 but everybody should read Paul Dirac's 1963 American,
 Scientific American article, where he,
 you know, it's very interesting, he talks about it
 as if it was about the Schrodinger equation
 and Schrodinger's failure to advance his own work
 because of his failure to account for some phenomena.
 The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off,
 it won't agree with experiment, but it doesn't mean
 that the theory is actually wrong.
 But Dirac could as easily have been talking
 about his own equation in which he predicted
 that the electrons should have an antiparticle.
 And since the only positively charged particle
 that was known at the time was the proton,
 Heisenberg pointed out, well, shouldn't your antiparticle,
 the proton have the same mass as the electron
 and doesn't that invalidate your theory?
 So I think that Dirac was actually being quite,
 potentially quite sneaky in talking about the fact
 that he had been pushed off of his own theory
 to some extent by Heisenberg.
 But look, we've fetishized the scientific method
 and pauper and falsification because it protects us
 from crazy ideas entering the field.
 So it's a question of balancing type one and type two error
 and we're pretty maxed out in one direction.
 The opposite of that, let me say what comforts me,
 sort of biology or engineering, at the end of the day,
 does the thing work?
 Yeah.
 You can test the crazies away.
 The crazy, well see, now you're saying,
 but some ideas are truly crazy
 and some are actually correct.
 Well, there's precorrect currently crazy.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 And so you don't wanna get rid of everybody
 who's precorrect and currently crazy.
 The problem is that we don't have standards in general
 for trying to determine who has to be put to the sword
 in terms of their career and who has to be protected
 as some sort of giant time suck, pain in the ass
 who may change everything.
 Do you think that's possible,
 creating a mechanism of those selected?
 Well, you're not gonna like the answer, but here it comes.
 Oh, boy.
 It has to do with very human elements.
 We're trying to do this at the level of rules and fairness.
 It's not gonna work.
 Because the only thing that really understands this,
 you ever read The Double Helix?
 It's a book.
 Oh, you have to read this book.
 Not only did Jim Watson half discover
 this three-dimensional structure of DNA,
 he was also one hell of a writer before he became an ass.
 No, he's tried to destroy his own reputation.
 I knew about the ass.
 I didn't know about the good writer.
 Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living.
 And as I've said before,
 Jim Watson is too important a legacy
 to be left to Jim Watson.
 That book tells you more about
 what actually moves the dial.
 And there's another story about him,
 which I don't agree with,
 which is that he stole everything from Rosalind Franklin.
 I mean, the problems that he had
 with Rosalind Franklin are real,
 but we should actually honor that tension in our history
 by delving into it rather than having a simple solution.
 Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick
 being a pain in the ass
 that everybody secretly knew was super brilliant.
 And there's an encounter between Chargaff,
 who came up with the equimolar relations
 between the nucleotides,
 who should have gotten the structure of DNA,
 and Watson and Crick.
 And he talks about missing a shiver
 in the heartbeat of biology.
 And this stuff is so gorgeous.
 It just makes you tremble even thinking about it.
 Look, we know very often who is to be feared,
 and we need to fund the people that we fear.
 The people who are wasting our time
 need to be excluded from the conversation.
 You see, and maybe we'll make some errors
 in both directions, but we have known our own people.
 We know the pains in the asses that might work out,
 and we know the people who are really just blowhards
 who really have very little to contribute most of the time.
 It's not 100%, but you're not gonna get there with rules.
 Right, it's using some kind of instinct.
 I mean, to be honest,
 I'm gonna make you roll your eyes for a second,
 but the first time I heard that there is a large community
 of people who believe the Earth is flat
 actually made me pause and ask myself the question.
 Why would there be such a community?
 Yeah, is it possible the Earth is flat?
 So I had to like, wait a minute.
 I mean, then you go through a thinking process
 that I think is really healthy.
 It ultimately ends up being a geometry thing, I think.
 It's an interesting thought experiment, at the very least.
 Well, I do a different version of it.
 I say, why is this community stable?
 Yeah, that's a good way to analyze it.
 Well, interesting that whatever we've done
 has not erased the community.
 So they're taking a long shot bet that won't pan out.
 Maybe we just haven't thought enough
 about the rationality of the square root of two
 and somebody brilliant will figure it out.
 Maybe we will eventually land one day
 on the surface of Jupiter and explore it.
 These are crazy things that will never happen.
 So much of social media operates by AI algorithms.
 You talked about this a little bit,
 recommending the content you see.
 So on this idea of radical thought,
 how much should AI show you things you disagree with
 on Twitter and so on?
 In a Twitter verse, in the web internet.
 I hate this question.
 Yeah? Yeah.
 Because you don't know the answer?
 No, no, no, no.
 Look, they've pushed out this cognitive Lego to us
 that will just lead to madness.
 It's good to be challenged with things
 that you disagree with.
 The answer is no.
 It's good to be challenged with interesting things
 with which you currently disagree,
 but that might be true.
 So I don't really care about whether or not
 I disagree with something or don't disagree.
 I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing
 is being pushed out.
 Is it because it's likely to be true?
 Is it because, is there some reason?
 Because I can write a computer generator to come up
 with an infinite number of disagreeable statements
 that nobody needs to look at.
 So please, before you push things at me
 that are disagreeable, tell me why.
 There is an aspect in which that question is quite dumb,
 especially because it's being used to almost,
 very generically by these different networks to say,
 well, we're trying to work this out.
 But basically, how much, do you see the value
 of seeing things you don't like, not you disagree with,
 because it's very difficult to know
 exactly what you articulated,
 which is the stuff that's important for you to consider
 that you disagree with.
 That's really hard to figure out.
 The bottom line is the stuff you don't like.
 If you're a Hillary Clinton supporter,
 you may not wanna, it might not make you feel good
 to see anything about Donald Trump.
 That's the only thing algorithms
 can really optimize for currently.
 They really can't.
 Yeah, they can do better.
 This is, we're- You think so?
 No, we're engaged in some moronic back and forth
 where I have no idea why people who are capable
 of building Google, Facebook, Twitter,
 are having us in these incredibly low-level discussions.
 Do they not know any smart people?
 Do they not have the phone numbers of people
 who can elevate these discussions?
 They do, but this, they're optimizing for a different thing
 and they're pushing those people out of those rooms.
 They're optimizing for things we can't see.
 And yes, profit is there.
 Nobody's questioning that.
 But they're also optimizing for things
 like political control or the fact
 that they're doing business in Pakistan
 and so they don't wanna talk about all the things
 that they're going to be bending to in Pakistan.
 So we're involved in a fake discussion.
 You think so?
 You think these conversations at that depth
 are happening inside Google?
 You don't think they have some basic metrics
 under user engagements?
 You're having a fake conversation with us, guys.
 We know you're having a fake conversation.
 I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation.
 You know how to cool these units.
 You know high availability like nobody's business
 by Gmail never goes down, almost.
 So you think just because they can do incredible work
 on the software side with infrastructure,
 they can also deal with some of these difficult questions
 about human behavior, human understanding, you're not.
 I've seen the developers screens
 that people take shots of inside of Google.
 And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple.
 We're not, we're engaged, they're engaging us
 in the wrong conversations.
 We are not at this low level.
 Here's one of my favorite questions.
 Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase
 in tech space equipped as a listening device?
 Where's my physical shutter to cover my lens?
 We had this in the 1970s.
 It cameras that had lens caps, you know.
 How much would it cost to have a security model?
 Pay five extra bucks.
 Why is my indicator light software controlled?
 Why when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on
 by putting it as something that cannot be bypassed?
 Why have you set up all my devices
 at some difficulty to yourselves as listening devices
 and we don't even talk about this?
 This thing is total fucking bullshit.
 I hope these discussions are happening about privacy.
 Is there more difficult than you're giving credit for?
 It's not just privacy.
 It's about social control.
 We're talking about social control.
 Why do I not have controls over my own levers?
 Just have a really cute UI where I can switch,
 I can dial things or I can at least see
 what the algorithms are.
 You think that there is some deliberate choices
 being made here.
 There's emergence and there is intention.
 There are two dimensions.
 The vector does not collapse onto either axis.
 But the idea that anybody who suggests
 that intention is completely absent is a child.
 That's really beautifully put.
 And like many things you've said is gonna make me think.
 Can I turn this around slightly?
 Yeah.
 I sit down with you and you say
 that you're obsessed with my feed.
 I don't even know what my feed is.
 What are you seeing that I'm not?
 I was obsessively looking through your feed on Twitter
 because it was really enjoyable
 because it was the Tom Lehrer element,
 is the humor in it.
 By the way, that feed is Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter.
 It's great.
 Eric R. Weinstein.
 No, but seriously, why?
 Why did I find it enjoyable?
 Or what was I seeing?
 What are you looking for?
 Why are we doing this?
 What is this podcast about?
 I know you've got all these interesting people.
 I'm just some guy who's sort of a podcast guest.
 Sort of a podcast.
 You're not even wearing a tie.
 I mean, it's not even a serious interview.
 I'm searching for meaning,
 for happiness, for a dopamine rush,
 so short term and long term.
 And how are you finding your way to me?
 What is, I don't honestly know what I'm doing to reach you.
 The representing ideas which feel common sense to me
 and not many people are speaking.
 So it's kind of like the intellectual dark web folks.
 These folks, from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson to yourself,
 are saying things where it's like,
 you're like saying, look, there's an elephant.
 He's not wearing any clothes.
 And I say, yeah, yeah, let's have more of that conversation.
 That's how I'm finding you.
 I'm desperate to try to change the conversation we're having.
 I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020.
 I don't think we can afford four more years
 of a misinterpreted message, which is what Donald Trump was.
 And I don't want the destruction of our institutions.
 They all seem hell bent on destroying themselves.
 So I'm trying to save theoretical physics,
 trying to save the New York Times,
 trying to save our various processes.
 And I think it feels delusional to me
 that this is falling to a tiny group of people
 who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out
 that everything they say will be misinterpreted
 and that their lives will be ruined through the process.
 I mean, I think we're in an absolutely bananas period
 of time and I don't believe it should fall
 to such a tiny number of shoulders to shoulder this weight.
 So I have to ask you on the capitalism side,
 you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism
 or it has effects that are, well, not unintended,
 but not what economists would predict
 or speak of capitalism creating.
 I just wanna talk to you about in general
 the effect of even then artificial intelligence
 or technology automation taking away jobs
 and these kinds of things and what you think
 is the way to alleviate that,
 whether the Andrew Ng presidential candidate
 with the universal basic income, UBI,
 what are your thoughts there?
 How do we fight off the negative effects of technology?
 You're a software guy, right?
 A human being is a worker is an old idea.
 A human being has a worker is a different object, right?
 So if you think about object-oriented programming
 as a paradigm, a human being has a worker
 and a human being has a soul.
 We're talking about the fact that for a period of time,
 the worker that a human being has was in a position
 to feed the soul that a human being has.
 However, we have two separate claims
 on the value in society.
 One is as a worker and the other is as a soul
 and the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity,
 it needs meaning, it needs purpose.
 As long as your means of support is not highly repetitive,
 I think you have a while to go
 before you need to start worrying.
 But if what you do is highly repetitive
 and it's not terribly generative,
 you are in the crosshairs of for loops and while loops.
 And that's what computers excel at, repetitive behavior.
 And when I say repetitive, I may mean things
 that have never happened through combinatorial possibilities,
 but as long as it has a looped characteristic to it,
 you're in trouble.
 We are seeing a massive push towards socialism
 because capitalists are slow to address the fact
 that a worker may not be able to make claims,
 a relatively undistinguished median member of our society
 still has needs to reproduce, needs to have to dignity.
 And when capitalism abandons the median individual
 or the bottom 10th or whatever it's going to do,
 it's flirting with revolution.
 And what concerns me is that the capitalists
 aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand this.
 You really want to court authoritarian control
 in our society because you can't see
 that people may not be able to defend themselves
 in the marketplace because the marginal product
 of their labor was too low to feed their dignity as a soul.
 So my great concern is that our free society has to do
 with the fact that we are self-organized.
 I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan
 when Lehman Brothers collapsed and thinking,
 who's going to tell all these people
 that they need to show up at work
 when they don't have a financial system
 to incentivize them to show up at work?
 So my complaint is, first of all, not with the socialists,
 but with the capitalists, which is you guys are being idiots.
 You're courting revolution by continuing to harp
 on the same old ideas that, well, you know,
 try harder, bootstrap yourself.
 Yeah, to an extent that works, to an extent.
 But we are clearly headed in a place
 that there's nothing that ties together our need
 to contribute and our need to consume.
 And that may not be provided by capitalism
 because it may have been a temporary phenomena.
 So check out my article on anthropic capitalism
 and the new gimmick economy.
 I think people are late getting the wake-up call
 and we would be doing a better job
 saving capitalism from itself
 because I don't want this done
 under authoritarian control.
 And the more we insist that everybody
 who's not thriving in our society
 during their reproductive years
 in order to have a family is failing at a personal level.
 I mean, what a disgusting thing that we're saying.
 What a horrible message.
 Who the hell have we become
 that we've so bought into the Chicago model
 that we can't see the humanity
 that we're destroying in that process?
 And I hate the thought of communism.
 I really do.
 My family has flirted with it decades past.
 It's a wrong, bad idea.
 But we are going to need to figure out
 how to make sure that those souls
 are nourished and respected
 and capitalism better have an answer.
 And I'm betting on capitalism,
 but I gotta tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with my team.
 So you're still on the capitalism team.
 You just, there's a theme here.
 Well, radical, radical capitalism.
 Hyper capitalism, yeah.
 Look, I want, I think hyper capitalism
 is gonna have to be coupled to hyper socialism.
 You need to allow the most productive
 people to create wonders.
 And you gotta stop bogging them down
 with all of these extra nice requirements.
 Nice is dead.
 Good has a future.
 Nice doesn't have a future
 because nice ends up with gulags.
 Damn, that's a good line.
 Okay, last question.
 You tweeted today a simple, quite insightful equation
 saying imagine that every unit F of fame you picked up
 has stalkers and H haters.
 So I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame,
 perhaps a little bit.
 Well, it's not as simple.
 People always take these things literally
 when you have like 280 characters to explain yourself.
 So you mean that that's not a mathematical?
 No, there's no law.
 Oh, okay.
 All right.
 I put the word imagine
 because I still have a mathematician's desire for precision.
 Imagine that this were true.
 But it was a beautiful way to imagine
 that there is a law that has those variables in it.
 And you've become quite famous these days.
 So how do you yourself optimize that equation
 with the peculiar kind of fame
 that you have gathered along the way?
 I wanna be kinder.
 I wanna be kinder to myself.
 I wanna be kinder to others.
 I wanna be able to have heart.
 Compassion, these things are really important.
 And I have a pretty spectrumy kind of approach to analysis.
 I'm quite literal.
 I can go full Rain Man on you at any given moment.
 No, I can, I can.
 It's facultative autism, if you like.
 And people are gonna get angry
 because they want autism to be respected.
 But when you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics,
 I speak with speech apnea.
 Be right down to dinner.
 We have to try to integrate ourselves
 in those tensions between,
 it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul.
 Many of us are optimizing one at the expense of the other.
 And I struggle with social media
 and I struggle with people making threats
 against our families.
 And I struggle with just how much pain people are in.
 And if there's one message I would like to push out there,
 you're responsible, everybody, all of us,
 myself included, with struggling.
 Struggle mightily because it's nobody else's job
 to do your struggle for you.
 Now with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying
 and you're trying to figure out how to better yourself
 and where you've failed and where you've let down
 your family, your friends, your workers,
 all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break.
 You know, if it's not working out,
 I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success.
 There's been no period of my life
 where both haven't been present in one form or another.
 And I do wish to say that a lot of times
 people think this is glamorous.
 I'm about to go do a show with Sam Harris.
 People are gonna listen in on two guys
 having a conversation on stage.
 It's completely crazy.
 I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure
 that those people get maximum value
 and that's why I'm doing this podcast.
 Just give yourself a break.
 You owe us your struggle.
 You don't owe your family or your coworkers
 or your lovers or your family members success.
 As long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up,
 recognize that this new situation with the economy
 that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions
 has caused the people who've risen to the top
 of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel.
 Everybody is lying at the moment.
 Nobody's really a truth teller.
 Try to keep your humanity about you.
 Try to recognize that if you're failing,
 if things aren't where you want them to be
 and you're struggling and you're trying to figure out
 what you're doing wrong, what you could do,
 it's not necessarily all your fault.
 We are in a global situation.
 I have not met the people who are honest,
 kind, good, successful.
 Nobody that I've met is checking all the boxes.
 Nobody's getting all 10s.
 So I just think that's an important message
 that doesn't get pushed out enough.
 Either people wanna hold society responsible
 for their failures, which is not reasonable.
 You have to struggle, you have to try.
 Or they wanna say you're 100% responsible
 for your failures, which is total nonsense.
 Beautifully put.
 Eric, thank you so much for talking today.
 Thanks for having me, buddy.