#134 – Eric Weinstein: On the Nature of Good and Evil, Genius and Madness

Eric Weinstein is a mathematical physicist, podcaster, and intellectual. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium – Sun Basket: https://sunbasket.com/lex and use code LEX to get $35 off – SEMrush: https://www.semrush.com/partner/lex/ to get a free month of Guru – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Eric’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein Eric’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ericweinsteinphd The Portal podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-portal/id1469999563 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 07:46 – Eddie Van Halen 15:26 – Leonard Cohen 23:22 – Battle between ego and humility 28:38 – Darkness and beauty 35:20 – Jimi Hendrix 38:08 – Good Will Hunting 42:16 – Revolutionary minds 53:49 – Next Elon Musk should come from MIT 58:14 – Love with save the world 1:03:30 – Are we headed toward a civil war? 1:15:04 – Joe Rogan 1:28:52 – Our political leaders 1:34:11 – Younger people should have more power 1:44:30 – The Portal 2:09:20 – Money 2:11:26 – Roger Penrose 2:19:06 – Jeffrey Epstein 2:37:44 – We need to get off this planet 2:40:41 – An update on Geometric Unity 2:46:33 – Gratitude

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, the third time we've spoken on this podcast. He is the wise turtle, master oogway to my Kung Fu panda, one of my favorite people to talk to in this world. A complicated and fascinating mind that I'm grateful to have the chance to accompany in exploring this world through conversation on this podcast and on his, the latter called The Portal. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First is Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Second is Sun Basket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety into my culinary

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  life. Third is SEM Rush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers, but somebody should. It helps you make good decisions. And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that wherever this life takes me, I'm drawn to the possibility of having many more conversations with Eric through the years. I think we have just the right kind of contrasting worldviews and a deep

• 1:27Lex Fridman?

  respect and appreciation of each other's lifestyles that creates for this magical experience in the realm of conversation that feels like we're always looking for something that we never quite find, but are always better for having tried. I'm not sure how or why the universe is connected Eric and me, but it did. And I would be a fool not to trust its judgment and enjoy the journey. If somehow you like this podcast, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman.

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. It's like a second pair of eyes that helps make sure that my writing sounds more like Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, one of my favorite books, and less like James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which is a novel I've attempted to read several times in college and failed miserably on every occasion.

• 2:55Lex Fridman?

  Grammarly is doing a couple of test reads with this podcast, and they will judge whether they want to sign a long-term contract based on how many people sign up to Grammarly Premium, which I've been using and enjoying for many years now. So I think you know what to do, especially if you enjoy this podcast or want your writing to not be a chaotic stream of consciousness like the precursor to the GPT-3 language model that is the post-Ulysses writing of Mr. James Joyce. Get 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at grammarly.com/lex. That's 20% off Grammarly Premium at grammarly.com/lex. Now here's the tricky part.

• 3:40Lex Fridman?

  You have to sign up on a desktop, not your smartphone. Otherwise, it doesn't count as support for this podcast. So. Please use your desktop or laptop. I hope you'll be up for this challenge. This show is also sponsored by Sun Basket. Sun Basket delivers fresh, healthy, delicious meals straight to your door. As you may know, my diet is pretty minimalist, so it's nice to get some healthy variety into the mix. They make it easy and convenient with everything pre-portioned and ready to prep and cook. You can enjoy delicious, healthy dinner in as little as 15 minutes. I've enjoyed a lot of meals from their menus that fit my, what they call carb-conscious ways.

• 4:23Lex Fridman?

  The items on the menu are always delicious, like today it's black Angus ribeye steak with broccoli and radishes, Italian sausages and vegetable skewers with two romuscos, Mediterranean lemon chicken with baby broccoli, artichokes and olives. What the heck is baby broccoli? I don't know. Right now, Sun Basket is offering 35 bucks off your order when you go right now to sunbasket.com/lex and enter promo code Lex at checkout. Again, visit sunbasket.com/lex and use code Lex to get $35 off your order. This show is sponsored by SEMrush, which if you look around,

• 5:08Lex Fridman?

  seems to be one of, if not the, most respected digital marketing tool out there. It does a lot of stuff, including SEO optimization of keywords, backlinks, content creation, social media posts, and so on. They have over 45 tools and are trusted by over 6 million marketers worldwide. I don't like numbers, but that's because I'm an idiot with that stuff and in general. I speak from the heart and data be damned, but somebody needs to pay attention to numbers because otherwise you can't make optimal decisions. I believe heart comes first, data second, but both are necessary. I started using them just for fun to explore non-numeric things like what kind of titles or words connect with people.

• 5:54Lex Fridman?

  As a writer and crappy part-time speaker, that information helps me at least in moderation. The amount of data that they put at your fingertips is amazing. So if you want to optimize your online presence, check them out at semrush.com/partner/lex to get a free month of guru-level membership. Okay, this show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. It provides privacy in your digital life. Without a VPN, your ISP, internet service provider, can see every site you've ever visited. That's terrifying, even when you're browsing in incognito mode, even if you clear your history.

• 6:37Lex Fridman?

  In the US, they can legally sell your data to ad companies. ExpressVPN prevents them from being able to do all that by rerouting and encrypting your internet connection through their secure servers. I've used it for many years on Windows, Linux, and Android, but it's available everywhere else, too. For me, it's been fast and easy to use. One big power on button that's fun to press. Probably my favorite intuitive design of an app. Doesn't try to do more than it needs to. I believe there's a Charles Bukowski quote about that. Go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod.

• 7:22Lex Fridman?

  And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

• 7:46Lex Fridman?

  Who's the greatest musician of all time, would you say? We were just off-camera talking about Eddie Van Halen. He unfortunately passed away.

• 7:54Eric Weinstein?

  Who's the greatest musician of all time?

• 7:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Eric Weinstein?

  Jonathan Richman.

• 7:59Lex Fridman?

  Who's that?

• 8:00Eric Weinstein?

  It's a weird question, so I'm gonna give you a weird answer. It's not because-

• 8:03Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.

• 8:03Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Jonathan Rich, but the reason I'm picking on him is that he had a quote. He was the frontman of a group called The Modern Lovers. And his quote was something like, "We have to be prepared to play music. When our instruments are broken, the electricity's out and it's raining," something like that. And I thought that that quote was very interesting because what it said was, "You have to be able to strip this thing down farther and farther back to get to something that is intrinsically musical." So we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity. And we're talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing. And that affected me emotionally. I don't know whether it affected you. I was never a Van Halen, the group fan. But I revered Eddie Van Halen's capacity for innovation.

• 8:48Eric Weinstein?

  Just, I saw him like, you know, Rodney Mullen, the skateboarder. I had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast just to talk about what it's like to totally discontinuously innovate.

• 9:00Lex Fridman?

  And you posted a video of Spanish Fly, I think, and saying like, "I didn't know the guitar could make those kinds of sounds." Like, "What is this voodoo magic?"

• 9:07Eric Weinstein?

  What is it? Well, this is the thing, right? The arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast. And the attacks from the hammer-ons, when they go at light speed as he did, particularly, and the reason I chose that was is that I wanted to strip out the electronics. Because part of the claim will be is that he's a rock musician and a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar to sort of the electrified setup, you know, his use of the whammy bar, for example, or the Frankenstrat that he built from different pieces, right? All of those aspects,

• 9:45Eric Weinstein?

  in my opinion, are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship. And that's why I chose Spanish Fly, because everyone, of course, will go to something like Eruption or Running with the Devil, which is the first things that they heard that let them know that there was a new force erupting out of Southern California that was Eddie Van Halen, right? I mean, I'm in love with, I'm in love with the story of it.

• 10:06Lex Fridman?

  You're often so poetic about music. Like, it clearly touches your soul on some kind of, on many levels. What is that? Is it deeper than just rocking out with the, in your convertible? Corvette sixty nine. I imagine Eric Weinstein just driving down the California highways, blasting some kind of music. Is it just like being able to be carefree for moments of time? Or is there something more fundamental that connects to like the theory of everything? And physics and life and all of that?

• 10:41Eric Weinstein?

  How often do you have the chance, for example, to hear mathematics performed as you do in Bach, right? Like something with that kind of precision and elegance that can't really be grasped, where, you know, to go back to Leonard Cohen's famous line, "The baffled king composing," right?

• 11:01Lex Fridman?

  Such a good song.

• 11:02Eric Weinstein?

  Such a good song, but it's also like individual verses of that song are insanely important. The baffled king is how we often make music. We don't really understand, what did we just do that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch, right? And so it's a very strange thing that you should be able to have. Think of it like your computer. You've got this weird open music port, you know, port thirty seven point eight, you know? Like, it's not even, it's not even supposed to be there. And suddenly, somebody starts playing guitar and they're making you feel things. Or, you know, like in particular, particular instruments like the violin, it's so difficult. It's so unforgiving. And when

• 11:45Eric Weinstein?

  it gives up its secrets, it just, you know, it wraps its fingers around your heart and won't let go. Sometimes I talk about head, heart, and loins. When something can grab your head, heart, and your loins at the same moment and integrate them, there are very few opportunities to live like that. And if you think about Eddie Van Halen, you know, as far as your head, the musical innovations and the fact that he was drawing directly from the classical canon.

• 12:17Eric Weinstein?

  You know, really speaks to the idea that maybe rock is what somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it as being, you know, an infinitely extensible medium. In terms of heart, I always noticed the smile on his face. It's painful to look at an Eddie Van Halen solo now. Like, sometimes you'll see the cigarette dripping off the side of his mouth and you're like, that's gonna fucking kill you. And I'm not even worried about it for you, I'm worried about it for me. You're gonna rob, I don't even need to hear you play another note. I just like knowing that you're in the world, that there is somebody that everyone looks to, that nobody, I've never heard a guitarist say, eh, I don't know, I think he was okay. Like, I've never, just never heard it. You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius.

• 13:01Eric Weinstein?

  There are very few people like that in the, in the world. And then Loinz, those leaps, that guy was incredibly good looking, you know, skin tight pants, super athleticism. He completely owned the sexual, the male sexuality of the stage, both being the completely dominant, you know, sort of mythical alpha male, I hate that expression, but there you are. But also this kind of little boy with this mischievous smirk and, you know, the sense that it all came together. How could you not eat that up?

• 13:34Lex Fridman?

  You could just imagine the millions of like, young teenage boys, Corey, just like, playing air guitar in their, in their room, just that, yeah, basically dreaming of being that kind of god, the, the, the most perfect example of what a human being can be. Yeah, it's fascinating to think.

• 13:52Eric Weinstein?

  It is, and, and then, you know, as in many of the cases with these bands, you get these multiple talents in the same outfit. And I think that the original configuration with David Lee Roth, I mean, David Lee Roth is such a hot mess at all times.

• 14:08Lex Fridman?

  I would love you to talk to David Lee Roth, like, if they're...

• 14:14Lex Fridman?

  That that dance would be just gorgeous.

• 14:16Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know.

• 14:17Lex Fridman?

  He's. Can you handle it? Can you ride that?

• 14:19Eric Weinstein?

  Probably not.

• 14:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Eric Weinstein?

  Probably not, because I think he's very, I I get the feeling that he's very smart and very dysregulated. And I don't know that I could.

• 14:32Lex Fridman?

  Like, like bring him down to earth for a moment.

• 14:34Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I can also get pretty dysregulated, you know?

• 14:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Eric Weinstein?

  And so I don't know. I don't know whether it could be magic. It could be a shit show. I don't know what you thought of his appearance on Rogan. That was an interesting one.

• 14:45Lex Fridman?

  I loved it, but Joe and that and Joe does this sometimes. Sometimes he just sits back and listens. And he just lets.

• 14:53Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Lex Fridman?

  Like the music play, which works really well. I think you have a chance to kind of jump into the chaos.

• 15:00Eric Weinstein?

  I care too.

• 15:01Lex Fridman?

  And then you'll just start and the places you'll go, you may not even talk about music for like hours. It might just go to this because he I think lives in Japan, like there's a weird.

• 15:11Eric Weinstein?

  He's he's been in like an EMT after he was a rock star. He chose to be kind of like. I don't know, you know, it it it like.

• 15:19Lex Fridman?

  There's depth to that man that that hasn't been explored by him either. So like, that'll be an exciting conversation. Can we go back to Leonard Cohen?

• 15:28Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Lex Fridman?

  Can we just? I the things I feel when I listen to Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen or anything by him really, but that one.

• 15:37Eric Weinstein?

  Do you really want to get into it?

• 15:38Lex Fridman?

  Let's go. What what is it that song mean to you?

• 15:44Lex Fridman?

  Is it love?

• 15:45Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, boy. Well, first of all, it's it's it's mystery. Like, it starts off about mystery. So what are you? What are you doing? You're doing this alternation between the two chords. So three notes at the same time. One is called the the tonic. Or you have the the major and the relative minor, and he's alternating between them. There's only one note of difference between those two chords. One of them would be feeling sad. One of them would be more joyous, typically described. And so by altering one note, it's the minimal amount to take you back and forth between joy and happiness. Uh, as that's encoded in us. So he starts off with, I heard there was a scene, David played the please the Lord, but you don't really care for music, do you?

• 16:32Eric Weinstein?

  That's really interesting because it's he's using this technique called bathos, right? So the alternation between the sublime and kind of the guttural or ridiculous or the mundane, right? So he's like. There's a bitterness to it, too. Is it just play? Well, the way I hear it, again, you know, a great song allows for different interpretations. You happen to be asking me, so I'm going to impart some stuff that probably isn't in the song, but why it speaks to me, that's what makes it great.

• 16:59Eric Weinstein?

  The way I hear it is he doesn't believe the audience. You don't really care for music, do you? Then what are you doing listening to this, you stupid idiots, you know? Of course you care for music. You're too cool to care. So I see through you and screw you. That's like the kind of that's that's the energy I get.

• 17:15Eric Weinstein?

  Then he does this weird thing. It goes like this is where he should put the description of where he is in the chord progression, which is the tonic, right? It goes like this, and then he hits the fourth and the fifth, which are the two other major elements, the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony. So he's describing the chord progression in real time in the lyrics. There's two ways this can come about in other songs. Like, we had this example of

• 17:43Eric Weinstein?

  "Every Time We Say Goodbye." Do you know the song? "Every time we say goodbye." No, I think it was a Cole Porter, maybe? Or Gershwin, maybe Porter, I don't know. "I cry a little. There is no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor." Right? Like, it's a beautiful use. Then then there's times when it's duplicitous. So for example, you'll have,

• 18:11Eric Weinstein?

  I guess my favorite examples of this are Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." "I fell into a burning ring of fire." Then what does he do with the lyrics and the tune?

• 18:23Eric Weinstein?

  I went down, down, down. He goes up. Yeah. Right. And so the idea is like, oh, okay, that was a head fake. Yeah. Right. And another one of these, um, you know, is Nina Simone's Feeling Good. Well, okay, so what do you get a? Birds flying high. You know how I feel. And sun up in the sky. You know how I feel. That woman's voice. It's a new dawn. She doesn't give a damn. Yeah. She's just. And I'm feeling, but then what's the? Dudum. Dudum. Yeah. It's like heavy stripping music. It's, it's, you're not in a good place. You're probably in some strip club with some. Last of your money. You're drinking lousy beer, some bad situation.

• 19:09Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. And she's feeling good? No, it's funereal. It's oppressive, right? I never thought of that song that way. Wow. Well, you think of it as joyous? Yeah. No, no, no. If you think about it, contrast it with Ray Charles, for example. You know, do you know, do you know Lonely Avenue? Well, my room has got two windows. But the sunshine never comes through. It's really depressed. It's the same sort of vibe as Nina, but she's claiming that she's in great shape. So she's like a good case of the unreliable narrator. Leonard Cohen, to me, is talking about the unreliable audience that's too cool to be with the performer on stage. There are things that go with the music, like the Cole Porter stuff that go against, like the Johnny Cash.

• 19:53Eric Weinstein?

  I think these are the games that musicians play that the rest of us only sort of notice subliminally. Okay. Fourth, the fifth, then he, when he, he should say something about the relative minor or the, he's giving you the secret. The baffled king. In other words, he doesn't know why it works. Did Pachelbel know why Pachelbel's canon would work? Yeah. It was a discovery. And that's the whole thing. Like some music is discovered and some music is invented and.

• 20:24Eric Weinstein?

  He's talking about a musical discovery. He's talking about the Pythagorean power of the wave equation. And then superimposed, like there's two genius intellectual concepts behind music, one of which is the wave equation. Usually we solve it for a one dimensional medium because we're talking about strings or air columns. Occasionally, you're talking about things like hand pans or steel drums or metallophones or gamelan's, whatever. And those have a wave equation too, that's much more chaotic. The other equation is this crazy thing that two to the 1912th is almost exactly equal to three, which is what gave us even temperament. And so the tension between those two things is in fact, one of these most beautiful stories.

• 21:07Eric Weinstein?

  Inside of that system, that formula of the baffled king is a discovery. It's not, he's not really composing it. The reason he's baffled, it's imagine that you took like a little brush and you started brushing off, you know, a pyramid under the sands. You might think that you created the pyramid by your brushing, but in fact, somebody else did it. That's why you're baffled, right?

• 21:32Lex Fridman?

  That's beautifully put. You're right. And as creating one of the greatest songs of all time, and as he's doing it, he's baffled.

• 21:40Eric Weinstein?

  And he's Leonard.

• 21:42Lex Fridman?

  He's within the song.

• 21:43Eric Weinstein?

  And he Leonard is baffled is my contention, but he knows enough to know that he's baffled. Right? And so the idea is that he is composing, he has the audacity to compose as David. He's echoing David at a minimum. And then in a later song, which I really wish we would discuss, that's totally dystopic and you will not like it at all, is the future, which contains this line that I think I used in my episode with Roger Penrose on the portal. No, the subtle plug.

• 22:16Lex Fridman?

  The Bordeaux, the Bordeaux.

• 22:17Eric Weinstein?

  I'm the little Jew that wrote the Bible. So there is this way in which Leonard Cohen, I think, is constantly coming to the idea of being a biblical like scribe. And I think this is one of the great things that, you know, you see Dylan doing this with All Along the Watchtower. You saw Warren Zevon, who we should talk much more about, doing this with a song called, I Was in the House When the House Burned Down. Do you know this?

• 22:42Lex Fridman?

  No, this is embarrassing.

• 22:44Eric Weinstein?

  Sweetheart, this is a great day. Warren Zevon is one of the most important songwriters of our time. And he's been largely forgotten.

• 22:55Eric Weinstein?

  By this generation, but you know, Bob Dylan would sing one of his songs in tribute. I've heard Bob Dylan, you know, very small number of songwriters really move him. Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot and Warren Zevon. By the way, Bob Dylan, if you're out there, appear on either one of our podcasts. We need to get your voice into a new medium for a new group.

• 23:18Lex Fridman?

  Definitely.

• 23:19Eric Weinstein?

  This is a time, this is a time for Bob Dylan, my friend. Honestly, you've been doing an amazing job in this space. One of the reasons I'm super excited to do this podcast again is that I've learned some things about what I don't do well. And I also have sort of struggled with the question, should I do those things better? Because what if it's, you know, I always use the same example of the fitted sheet. When you're trying to put a queen sized fitted sheet on a king sized mattress, he's like, okay, I got that corner squared away. Then you get another corner that pops off and they have to go back around. I wonder whether I can improve my style in the ways in which, you know, I think it was just a recognition of a difference.

• 23:59Eric Weinstein?

  You do a better job of getting to the soul of a really top intellectual guest and making them accessible and presenting them as themselves for a huge number of people. And I'd give my eye tooth to be able to do that.

• 24:15Lex Fridman?

  Do you ever think about this? Like, cause I think about what is the greatest conversation I'll ever have? You know, like in a sense, the portal, not to reduce it to anything, but there will be the greatest conversation. You may have already had it, but it's very possible. If enough people like me can keep twisting your arm to keep doing the portal, please, that is, there'll be an amazing conversation. And one of the questions that I ask myself is like, who is the person that I'm especially equipped, for some reason, I'm convinced on Putin. There's something in my head that says, I can do this man better than anyone else in this world.

• 25:00Lex Fridman?

  I got this thought in my head about it. I don't know why, and I'm convinced, but I think the universe works in that way. Like if it tells you, it's gonna happen.

• 25:08Eric Weinstein?

  The way I would say it is, is that almost everybody who becomes a Supreme Court Justice believes at a very early age, they're going to become a Supreme Court Justice. Many people believe at an early age that they can do it, don't get there. But of those who get there, almost all of them had this sort of. Well, I call it pathological self-confidence. And I do think you have pathological self-confidence and you also have humility. And most people would hear those as a contradiction. I think that you would not be able to get away with what you do if you didn't have the humility. And so I think, you know, the great danger is that your equation becomes unbalanced,

• 25:47Eric Weinstein?

  that you either lose the humility or you lose the humility overwhelms the ego and the drive. Because right now, you've got a Mexican standoff in your mind and the rest of us are just benefiting. That's beautifully put. My Mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours.

• 26:03Eric Weinstein?

  It's all reservoir dogs all the time. Yeah. But actually, the person who that describes is Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel thinks more different. People always say like, what does Peter think about X, Y, and Z, P and Q? It's like, well, do you want communist Peter? Do you want hyper capitalist Peter? Multiple minds in there. Oh, my God, right? On everything. That's why he's successful is that he's got all these minds fighting each other. And so when people say Peter is this or Peter is that, I just laugh. Because it like, nobody who knows him would describe him as having thoughts at the level that people are claiming. And I do think that, you know, in my case,

• 26:42Eric Weinstein?

  you know, there's also pathological epistemic humility. Like, just, I know, I know how little, I know how little I can do in one life. I know how many things I've screwed up. I know how many things I've got wrong. And on the other hand, I know that if not, you know, it's like Hillel's questions. You know, if I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If I'm only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? You know, at some level, there's a question about if I don't decide that someone is capable and that that somebody is me. And I, if I apply that to everyone else on the planet, then nobody's going to do anything. And so I do think that one of the things that people like you and I get is who are you to say that?

• 27:27Eric Weinstein?

  F that, man. Just sign me up for some Dunning Kruger.

• 27:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's multiple minds, like you said. Like this morning, I was feeling so good and confident about I couldn't think no wrong. And I remember last night clearly thinking that I'm the dumbest human who's ever lived.

• 27:46Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Lex Fridman?

  And nothing I've ever said is worth anything. What the fuck am I doing with my life? Why am I scared? I was terrified of this conversation. Who the hell am I?

• 27:57Eric Weinstein?

  This conversation?

• 27:58Lex Fridman?

  Because I'm an idiot. And because, you know, I, Lex, it, but no, no, no. But this morning,

• 28:07Lex Fridman?

  I was the baddest motherfucker who's ever walked this earth. So I was, I was very conscious. I think it was the coffee. I'm not sure, maybe some sleep.

• 28:14Eric Weinstein?

  This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages, some of them being alcoholic, others containing caffeine.

• 28:20Lex Fridman?

  There's, in fact, I can't share the story behind it, but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge.

• 28:26Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 28:27Lex Fridman?

  So, I mean, I,

• 28:29Eric Weinstein?

  I should have hit you for coffee because this is a morning, this is a morning show here.

• 28:32Lex Fridman?

  So I put out a call that we get a chance to have this conversation and people ask these wonderful questions. A few people asked about depression and suicide.

• 28:45Lex Fridman?

  This is a Russian program, so we'll have to go there. And I think about Leonard Cohen and one of the things that always kind of broke my heart and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just,

• 29:03Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, for love in a person's life is to hear how much, how much depression was a part of Leonard Cohen's life and how much he suffered.

• 29:14Lex Fridman?

  I guess one way, I'm not sure where we can go with this question, but do you think about the places that the mind can go, like these dark places?

• 29:24Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Lex Fridman?

  Is there something?

• 29:28Lex Fridman?

  Like where the only escape out is suicide, for example, that's the darkest version of it.

• 29:33Eric Weinstein?

  That, I really think suicide is a big place in suicidal ideation and self harm. And we don't talk a lot about it.

• 29:44Eric Weinstein?

  It's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans. These are umbrella categories. And if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves, but we don't know whether that's coming because of a problem in brain chemistry, because of an event in their life,

• 30:02Eric Weinstein?

  whether evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal, whether or not it might have a religious motivation. There's, there's too many different forms of self harm. It's something like the 10th largest killer or thereabouts.

• 30:19Eric Weinstein?

  And I think that, you know, you can look at it from different angles.

• 30:24Eric Weinstein?

  I'm old enough to have, you know, had Pete Seeger come to my college when I was at university and to watch his good humor in the face of all adversity.

• 30:38Eric Weinstein?

  I think of Odetta. I used to go to Odetta concerts and I don't know if you know who she is. Okay, this is gonna be one of the better days of your life. Check out Odetta when we're done with the interview. She was a civil rights figure, but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship. These people were in the struggle, right? And they, they saw lots of bad things happen and they kept their humor about them. And, you know, the thing is that you can take on the Velschmerz, you know, the pain of the, of the planet, or you can try to do something else, which is to be a happy warrior, even if.

• 31:20Eric Weinstein?

  The odds are terrible and the and the cost of failure is catastrophic.

• 31:25Lex Fridman?

  So even one surrounded by darkness. But the thing is with Leonard Cohen is he created such beautiful music. And yet, it's like Anthony Bourdain, the same. And yet, they go to this dark place. And it could be, it's easier to say it's just biochemistry.

• 31:46Eric Weinstein?

  No, there's a linkage between this highly generative, creative side. And in some cases, dark depression, in other cases, not. So you can't say that it's tied, that genius and madness are always, you know, co-travelling, or that beauty and pain are one and the same. What you can say is that there's a cluster of people that tell you that for that cluster, there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty. And I do think that in part, it's squaring circles that can't be squared. You know, that, well, we were just talking before about the inability to serve two perfect systems, the perfect system of the wave equation and the perfect system of even temperament.

• 32:31Eric Weinstein?

  They're both perfect, they're not compatible.

• 32:35Eric Weinstein?

  And once you realize that there is perfection and an inability to make contact with perfection,

• 32:44Eric Weinstein?

  I think, you know, you recognize that there is no solution to this world.

• 32:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. That's weird with the poets and musicians, that you want to say this is a particular thing that you do, but then there's Spanish Fly by Van Halen. And then you realize, oh.

• 33:04Eric Weinstein?

  Well, what do you get out of Spanish Fly by Eddie Van Halen? I think it's very singular because of its, the fact that it's purely acoustic.

• 33:12Lex Fridman?

  For some reason, I always, I couldn't imagine Eddie Van Halen separated from the band in front of thousands of people, just screaming and rocking out with lights everywhere. And Spanish Fly made me think like, you made me imagine him sitting alone on a couch in a room.

• 33:28Eric Weinstein?

  I think that's who he was, I really do. I mean, I, it's, believe me, I get it. He was a rock star, he was a rock god, got it, got it, got it, got it.

• 33:37Eric Weinstein?

  I'm almost positive that you can't get to where he got to without being a complete introvert.

• 33:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like, it made me imagine that there's like some half naked supermodel.

• 33:49Lex Fridman?

  Walking around hoping that they can, you know, do their thing together. And Eddie's completely disinterested. He'd be with the guitar.

• 33:57Eric Weinstein?

  He'd be with the guitar, right?

• 33:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Eric Weinstein?

  Because like, honestly, at some level, in one case, you know, maybe you're, maybe you're conquesting, maybe you're pursuing love and romance. In the other case, you're, you're talking about a relationship to the, to the order, the Creator, the Almighty, whatever it is you want to call that substrate that is reality. And, you know, do I believe that Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and Heifetz jacked into the, you know, the true essence of the world? Yeah, they did. I don't think it's as good as differential geometry. I'm sorry. I do think it's amazing for other reasons. And thank God, because it's very difficult to communicate differential geometry at scale.

• 34:40Eric Weinstein?

  But the thing about eruption, for example, what level do you want to come into eruption? Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry? Do you want the theatrics? Like, you could put him on, on wires and, you know, set his pants on fire or whatever. And, you know, it'd be, he'd be totally in keeping with it. On the other hand, you want to have something completely precise? That, you know, shows off the virtuosity of what's possible with a Stratocaster? Everything works. Multi-axis.

• 35:09Lex Fridman?

  But there's a precision to it, which, and which is very different than Hendrix. There's a messiness to Hendrix that, to me, somebody who has OCD has always been.

• 35:19Eric Weinstein?

  How does Hendrix affect you? I mean, let's, let's have the Jimi Hendrix conversation. I don't know that we can do anything to it that hasn't already been done to it. Maybe that's not true. Maybe the idea is that every generation has to have its Hendrix conversation. And this is a long.

• 35:32Lex Fridman?

  It's Jimi Hendrix experience.

• 35:33Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. So funny.

• 35:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Eric Weinstein?

  I hear you stole it from Joe Rogan.

• 35:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. There's so many details. One, it hurt my.

• 35:45Lex Fridman?

  So on so many levels that you can put a thumb over the guitar to play a note, to hold the note. And it doesn't, because I want it to be the Russian virtuoso that sits with his classical guitar in perfect form, plays really fast with the fingers. And then you don't want, you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed and supporting the neck.

• 36:06Eric Weinstein?

  That's the Russian conservatory student.

• 36:09Lex Fridman?

  Conservatory, yeah.

• 36:10Eric Weinstein?

  Then there's the Russian wild man.

• 36:13Lex Fridman?

  Which one is that?

• 36:14Eric Weinstein?

  Well.

• 36:14Lex Fridman?

  Haven't.

• 36:15Eric Weinstein?

  They're different Russian archetypes, right? So the completely idiosyncratic Russian is very different in a weird way from the,

• 36:25Eric Weinstein?

  you know, I can do this backwards in any key in any, in my sleep and in any time signature that you, you know, just snap your fingers. We've discussed my piano tuner in previous episodes.

• 36:38Lex Fridman?

  No, no, that was offline conversation. You told me the story.

• 36:41Eric Weinstein?

  I should tell you the story.

• 36:42Lex Fridman?

  You should, you should retell the story.

• 36:44Eric Weinstein?

  There I was in darkest Manhattan.

• 36:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Eric Weinstein?

  With the world's shittiest, it wasn't even an upright, it was a spinet piano. A friend had given it to me. The piano fell out of tune and I would have to tune it. And the only tuner I knew was this Russian guy and I hated dealing with him. There was something about his attitude that just really rubbed me the wrong way. So anyway, my wife says, tune that thing. So we get the piano tuner to come and he's tuning this. He's like, are you sure? Are you sure you want to tune this, this, this piece of shit? You know, okay, fine. So he's like, okay, it's your money.

• 37:18Eric Weinstein?

  The phone rings and I have the, the phone ringer set on a landline to Paganini Caprice 24. And immediately as the phone rings, he figures out what key the phone ringer is, and which is not the key that like, Liszt composed the variations on Caprice 24. And he starts going into theme and variations on Caprice 24 at some level I've never heard before, just jaw dropping it. And like, the phone stops ringing and we have this awkward silence. I said, I didn't know you were such a great piano player. And then he says one of these things in, you know, in Russian accent in English hurts in a way you can't imagine. No, you are the piano player. I am merely the piano tuner.

• 38:04Eric Weinstein?

  It's just like, oh, man, through the heart.

• 38:08Lex Fridman?

  You know, it's kind of reminiscent, I'd love to hear actually your opinion on this, it's reminiscent of the Good Will Hunting story. What do you think about that?

• 38:15Eric Weinstein?

  That movie?

• 38:16Lex Fridman?

  That movie. It's MIT, it's.

• 38:18Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I guess when I think of that film, I think about Matt Damon as a young guy, risking everything, giving up Harvard. I think, you know, probably the most accomplished group of people in the world are people who choose to give up Harvard voluntarily.

• 38:37Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful.

• 38:38Eric Weinstein?

  Right? Bigger than Harvard. You know, Ives was one of these people. Bill Gates, of course.

• 38:48Eric Weinstein?

  And then oddly, you know.

• 38:49Lex Fridman?

  Zuckerberg.

• 38:50Eric Weinstein?

  What Zuckerberg? But then Steve Jobs gave up a Reed. And Reed is like the weirdest, craziest college in the world. People should pay much more attention to Reed. And I'm sorry, it's going through a hard time at the moment, but what it was before the current craziness is really an interesting story. Irregardless, as we say in the six one seven area code.

• 39:10Eric Weinstein?

  I think that a lot about, a lot of my reaction is to the, the real story of Matt Damon, having this vision and being the young guy to pull it off. And, you know, I also think about Robin Williams trying to explore heart through this lens of acting. And, you know, as you and I, you've hung out with comedians.

• 39:34Eric Weinstein?

  They know that they already screwed up a bunch of people. They do. They'll, they're proud about it. They really are. The idea that Robin Williams, who I saw many years ago when I was in LA, in the comedy clubs around here.

• 39:49Eric Weinstein?

  You know, he was a straight up crazy dysregulated genius in tremendous pain.

• 39:55Eric Weinstein?

  And his desire to do it earnestly through acting, rather than constantly by just sniping, you know, or being a clown, or showing us how fast his mind worked relative to ours. I was really moved by that. I thought that he brought some authenticity and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that real.

• 40:19Lex Fridman?

  And again, like you said, it doesn't always have to be. But in that case, the madness and genius were neighbors.

• 40:26Eric Weinstein?

  That one couldn't have been any other way.

• 40:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Eric Weinstein?

  No, because his mind, the thing about seeing him in a comedy club was that he would react to random stimulus in the environment. You know, it could be a heckler. Sometimes you almost got the feeling that he wanted a heckler because it was, it gave him something to play against. Right? He was infinitely instantly inventive.

• 40:50Lex Fridman?

  But I actually, to me, the best Robin Williams is, as he got closer and closer to the end of his life, because there was a sadness. And he's almost fighting the sadness with this improvisational, like the weapons he has is this wit and humor and this dancing that he does with language. But, and then sometimes when you just fall silent, you can see the sadness. And, I don't know, there's something so beautiful about that. It's like this bird with a broken wing that's like trying to fly, you know? And it's getting older and older and it, I mean, those, he would have made a one hell of a podcast guest, I'll tell you, I'll tell you that. That's a sad.

• 41:36Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I have some sadness that I really do think that part of what we call podcasting is actually just getting to know a soul.

• 41:43Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 41:43Eric Weinstein?

  Over and over again, like.

• 41:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Eric Weinstein?

  Maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression and sadness and heavy feelings is not an American specialty. Seeing that in context with the beauty of life is a Russian specialty. Like, it is very much.

• 42:05Lex Fridman?

  Specialty. Sounds like a diner menu.

• 42:08Eric Weinstein?

  What?

• 42:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Eric Weinstein?

  You want the Russian special?

• 42:13Eric Weinstein?

  A big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression. I do think that we're in a really terrifying and depressing time. And I think that part of it is that we don't know if something huge is about to get started. And we don't even know what this is. I mean, we just sit here in this weird world that is falling into some new state. And we're not even super curious. It's like, what the hell just happened? Everybody's got an answer. And I'm positive that all of those answers are wrong. Let's, let's try to at least sneak up on the good answer. So the central core of the answer is that the US seemed to be the greatest thing in

• 42:52Eric Weinstein?

  the world in large measure, because we hadn't noticed that we were getting a benefit from having no plan, not having to make a plan for low growth. As long as we had growth, we were in great shape. Let's imagine that there was this, you could run an experiment. You have a billion copies of Earth and you start the initial conditions slightly different. On some giant number of planets, a lot of the things that were discovered from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century are discovered in a period of time, because a lot of that just has to do with, once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments,

• 43:37Eric Weinstein?

  you can see more. And the more you can see, the more you can make use of what you can see. And it turns out there was lots of stuff to do with like, you know, germs or electron orbitals, or, you know, spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum. And so we got to do all of those things. And the US roughly corresponded for a good chunk of its history with this bonanza. And so of course, we look like an amazing genius country. We have no plan. Imagine that you could sell a car, you don't have to put in seatbelts, you don't have to put in airbags, you don't have to put in rear view mirrors, or sensors, or rear view mirror. You could save a lot of money on a car by not putting in all of the stuff to keep things from going wrong.

• 44:22Eric Weinstein?

  And I think that's what we had. We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good, we plowed it back, the riches and spoils and then treasure back into the system and made more genius stuff. And we carried along a good chunk of humanity, hundreds of millions of people. We did not have a plan for what happens when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society.

• 44:46Lex Fridman?

  How confident should we be that the growth has slowed in a way that is permanent rather than a kind of slap in the face where?

• 44:56Eric Weinstein?

  It's not the right concept. Right concept is, I try to use the same words over and over again, in case people see mold, because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere. So I use this analogy of the orchard, because everyone talks about low hanging fruit. They know the concept of low hanging fruit, but they don't think in terms of orchards. So they say things like, you think we've picked all the low hanging fruit, but I believe in the infinitetiveness of the human mind. It's like, okay, that doesn't even work as an analogy. What if the idea is we only picked all the low hanging fruit here, and then we're having this stupid argument about low hanging fruit, and we're not going and looking for new orchards? We're not planting new orchards. We're not looking for forests.

• 45:39Eric Weinstein?

  We're just sitting here arguing about low hanging fruit. So my claim is there's probably a lot more low hanging fruit, and it's not here.

• 45:45Lex Fridman?

  It's in other orchards.

• 45:46Eric Weinstein?

  It's in other orchards. One of those turned out to be the digital orchard. The digital orchard has not been as stagnant as lots of these other, like the chemical orchard, you know?

• 46:00Lex Fridman?

  I have faith that there is a small percentage of the population, but not zero, that's looking for those other orchards. Like, I'm excited about one of those orchards, which is, I believe there'll be robots in everybody's homes, and that will unlock some totally new Thing, totally new set of technologies, ideas, the way we live life, the productivity, all the, everything, it'll change everything. So I'm excited about that orchard. So I'm, you know, I'm roaming that orchard and wondering how the hell you kind of bring back like the ant that finds a new source of food.

• 46:38Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Lex Fridman?

  I'm trying to find an apple I can bring back to the.

• 46:41Eric Weinstein?

  Great. So you're in, you're in, in an explorer idiom.

• 46:46Lex Fridman?

  And you have faith that there's enough of those.

• 46:48Eric Weinstein?

  I don't think there are very many of us. I mean, I'm, I'm one of them too.

• 46:52Lex Fridman?

  How many does it take?

• 46:53Eric Weinstein?

  Takes one ant.

• 46:55Lex Fridman?

  Takes one ant.

• 46:56Eric Weinstein?

  What are you talking about?

• 46:58Lex Fridman?

  How many elons does it take to screw in a light bulb?

• 47:01Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Let's imagine that we went, imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food.

• 47:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Eric Weinstein?

  Right? And then it comes back to the colony and it says, hey, I think I found a new source of food. And the initial reaction is you're not, you're not authorized to find new food.

• 47:19Lex Fridman?

  What?

• 47:21Eric Weinstein?

  Why would you try to go find new food?

• 47:22Lex Fridman?

  We're going to remove you from Twitter.

• 47:24Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. And by the way, I think the fact that you think you're allowed to go find new shows how privileged you are as an ant. Get out of the colony. Kill him, kill him. Well, that's probably not a great model for finding new orchards. And I think that what we find is that where there's a system that allows somebody to ascend without a lot of gatekeeping, you can have that. But, you know, I saw this happen in hedge funds. Hedge funds for a while, uh, hoovered up a lot of talent because they were places that had funding and had freedom. And in general, really smart people want to be free and they don't want to think a lot about how they're gonna, you know, feed themselves.

• 48:07Eric Weinstein?

  They want to get lost in their minds. So you can either give them productive places to play, dangerous places to play. You know, they're either going to break into computers or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies. And we're not providing for the people who have to disrupt and have to innovate and trying to channel that effort. We're so focused on this other thing, which is like fairness and safety. And fairness and safety, by the way, are really important. I don't want to denigrate them. But the singular focus on fairness and safety without, in the same breath, being focused on growth and discovery and creation is going to doom us because what

• 48:51Eric Weinstein?

  we're talking about is we're always talking about divvying up the pie that is as opposed to the pie that will be. Imagine that you spent all your time trying to divvy up the 13th century pie and you destroyed your ability to get to the 20th century. You'd be an idiot.

• 49:08Lex Fridman?

  But one place I think I disagree with you is I don't think you need that many people to empower the geniuses, the innovators, the people who refuse to spend most of their days in meetings about fairness.

• 49:22Eric Weinstein?

  This is good. Let's have a disagreement.

• 49:24Lex Fridman?

  I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium, is just one little example of a tool that you can give power to. Like you and your podcast can have the next Elon Musk and make him a star.

• 49:39Eric Weinstein?

  Now I see where you're going. Okay. There has been a series of places for people to play and be free and we've lost them successively.

• 49:50Lex Fridman?

  What's a good place you remember? Cause I disagree with you there too. I think they're still there. You can still play.

• 49:55Eric Weinstein?

  You interviewed Noam Chomsky.

• 49:58Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 49:59Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Noam Chomsky comes from an era.

• 50:02Lex Fridman?

  Where you can play?

• 50:03Eric Weinstein?

  Where you could play.

• 50:04Lex Fridman?

  At MIT.

• 50:04Eric Weinstein?

  At MIT.

• 50:06Lex Fridman?

  And you can't play. This is where I disagree with you.

• 50:08Eric Weinstein?

  We've already had this.

• 50:09Lex Fridman?

  But.

• 50:10Eric Weinstein?

  Go check the Clips channel for the Lex Fridman podcast.

• 50:13Lex Fridman?

  I think I wasn't brave enough at that time and I'm not really brave enough now.

• 50:18Eric Weinstein?

  Come on.

• 50:19Lex Fridman?

  Because I don't.

• 50:20Eric Weinstein?

  Where's the vodka?

• 50:22Lex Fridman?

  It's a feeling and people are going to tear me apart. Oh, what are you? And you speak from emotion and facts.

• 50:28Eric Weinstein?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 50:29Lex Fridman?

  The feeling.

• 50:30Eric Weinstein?

  Which podcast is this? It's yours.

• 50:31Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 50:32Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Tell the people who are currently editing your brain. Cause I saw that move right now.

• 50:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Eric Weinstein?

  They think you should go find another podcast. Right? Let's get rid of some of your audience right now.

• 50:45Lex Fridman?

  Please go find another podcast if you're editing my brain. Nevertheless, all the self doubt, they're sitting in that brain. So.

• 50:51Eric Weinstein?

  Oh my God, I can't stand to watch this, but all right.

• 50:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, okay.

• 50:53Eric Weinstein?

  What is this self doubt loop that you're in?

• 50:55Lex Fridman?

  The thing is. When I walk the halls of MIT.

• 51:00Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Lex Fridman?

  There's bureaucracy, there's administrators that never have done anything interesting in their entire lives. There's meetings, there's.

• 51:09Eric Weinstein?

  All the usual crap.

• 51:10Lex Fridman?

  All the usual crap. But there's, in the eyes of individuals.

• 51:15Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Lex Fridman?

  There's this glow of excitement that has nothing to do with career.

• 51:19Eric Weinstein?

  I understand this.

• 51:21Lex Fridman?

  And it's still a playground. There's little, little pockets of playgrounds from which genius can emerge still. And they're unaffected by diversity meetings or fairness meetings or blah blah.

• 51:34Eric Weinstein?

  I love to hear this.

• 51:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, you don't think so.

• 51:36Eric Weinstein?

  I don't believe it. Because I've watched the change, Lex. I've watched people, we're all editing ourselves all the time. I remember my old mind, I liked it better. All of this relentless focus on critical race theory and, you know, critical theory, postmodernism, fairness, social justice, it's making many of us into worse people.

• 51:59Lex Fridman?

  You think that's, do you think the Matt Damons of, you know, the character is paying attention to any of that? You think that has an effect?

• 52:06Eric Weinstein?

  Have you seen what happened to Matt Damon himself? Matt Damon has tried to say various things at various times that seem to be relatively innocuous. He can't, can't speak.

• 52:15Lex Fridman?

  Okay, well, let's, let's not mix up, Matt Damon is just an actor.

• 52:20Eric Weinstein?

  Well, no, no, he was just a Harvard student who came up with his own genius screenplay, acted and made it happen. No, no, we're somewhere else.

• 52:29Lex Fridman?

  You don't think you can build the rocket company out of MIT still?

• 52:33Eric Weinstein?

  I think that there are things that you can still do.

• 52:36Lex Fridman?

  But we're losing them.

• 52:37Eric Weinstein?

  We lose them. We keep losing them.

• 52:40Lex Fridman?

  I would say the biggest problem, here, let me just say like what I think the solution would be, is to fire anybody who is, doesn't like, who's not, like faculty, especially young faculty should have way more power and administration should have much less power. Because right now, the administration, which used, some of whom used to be faculty, but they've lost the fire, the spark that gave them, they've lost the memories of the playground. And so the people that admire and love the playground, like you could see it in their behavior, should have way more power. And so we should create a systems that give them power.

• 53:20Eric Weinstein?

  Lex, you're very idealistic.

• 53:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Eric Weinstein?

  And you're very, you've got a huge heart. It's a weird time because I don't want to dissuade you from believing beautiful things because I see how potent you are. You do all these things, jujitsu, guitar, podcasting, programming, computers, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think you're right. I think we're in a really deeply screwed up place where even the tiny number of... Let me give you an alternate version of this dystopia. I do think that there are people who are capable and there's still places to play and cause things to happen that progress the story forward. But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in who fit

• 54:04Eric Weinstein?

  that profile, like how much crap has Elon Musk taken? Quite considerable, right?

• 54:12Lex Fridman?

  And not much admiration from the...

• 54:16Eric Weinstein?

  Craig Venter, Jim Watson, these are very difficult people. Steve Jobs is a very difficult guy, you know?

• 54:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it is a bit heartbreaking to me. I mean, everybody is different generations. I just, my mind is a little focused on Elon Musk because he's the modern person.

• 54:38Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you know him. I mean, he's a person to you.

• 54:42Lex Fridman?

  It hurts my heart to see how few faculty and people with Nobel Prizes and so on admire Elon. Like how little prob... He gets, he gets a lot of fans from like people who buy his products and, you know, young minds.

• 55:00Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Lex Fridman?

  Just excited. But like, why don't we as institute, why doesn't MIT say that we want to, we, somebody amongst us will be the next Elon Musk and we want to encourage them? Like say that, say that in meetings, say that. Like that's success.

• 55:18Eric Weinstein?

  No kidding.

• 55:19Lex Fridman?

  For us as MIT. And they, instead, there's this jealousy. It's like,

• 55:24Eric Weinstein?

  Well, here's the crazy-

• 55:25Lex Fridman?

  Did you hear what Elon Musk tweeted? Did you, did you see, like how irresponsible is what he's doing? How, like, just saying all these things that are just dripping with jealousy and basically-

• 55:39Eric Weinstein?

  I want what he's got. That's the thing, right?

• 55:42Lex Fridman?

  And if, yeah.

• 55:43Eric Weinstein?

  Here's the weird thing. Rivalry has a different signature.

• 55:49Eric Weinstein?

  You see, when you know that you're never gonna make it. Yeah. That's the position you take. What is it in Kung Fu Panda, which you've watched now? Yes. Yes. What does Tai Lung say when he's looking for the Dragon Warrior and the Furious Five come to defeat him on the bridge?

• 56:11Eric Weinstein?

  One of them gives up Poe's name accidentally, and Tai Lung hears it. Poe, so that is his name. Finally, a worthy opponent. Our battle will be legendary. Right? He's excited. Why is that? Well, you learn about this in boxing. Sometimes you'll see a division or an MMA, which is lousy with talent. Just you can't swing a cat without hitting an amazing, amazing athlete.

• 56:39Eric Weinstein?

  Sometimes you'll have a division, which at that particular moment, has one star and no real competition in that weight class or something. That person is in bad shape because you can't build a legend without the other. When you think of Muhammad Ali, what are the names that you immediately think of? And you have to phrase your... You have to think of the other heavyweights. Listen. Right? So those, those opponents are in part what made Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali. And that's, you know, that's why the Mayweather McGregor revelation that, okay, this guy's got his opponent's picture in his house.

• 57:24Eric Weinstein?

  How weird is that?

• 57:27Eric Weinstein?

  Well, because without the opponent, you may not be able to get there. Now, I am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries. Do you have examples in mind? Well, there are rivalries where people take each other's credit and screw each other over. And then there are other rivalries, like the RNA Thai Club, where these guys were so in love with what they were doing, that they couldn't wait to share everything. And like Nobel Prizes were so abundant that, you know, most people got Nobel Prizes just for being a member of the RNA Thai Club and doing cool stuff. And yeah, that's, that's the golden, that's the golden kind of sweet spot.

• 58:09Eric Weinstein?

  Most of these people can't do what Elon's doing because they can't break rules, they can't take the pressure. I'll tell you what really concerns me about your perspective. I think that there are a lot of genius ideas inside of people who don't have the stomach for conflict and derision. And I think a lot of those people are female. And I think that until we come up with a world in which we can swat down the trolls, where we can actually cause the trolls not to ruin everything. And I don't necessarily mean by shutting them up. I don't necessarily mean by being brutal to them, but somehow separating off people who are working and people who are trolling.

• 58:51Eric Weinstein?

  I think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius, in part because women in particular are not necessarily going to push an idea if it results in 10 years of being derided. Very few men are willing to do that either. But there are some of us who are so dumb that we will pigheadedly stick to an idea for 10 years, even if the world collapses. I don't think that there is many women who are going to make that calculation, even if they know the idea is correct.

• 59:23Lex Fridman?

  And one of the things that I believe technology can help us fight the trolls, of all definitions of troll, like I believe that a better Twitter can be built.

• 59:32Eric Weinstein?

  Interesting. I do not. I don't believe that a Twitter successor can be built that solves most of the problems. I think you can always improve what we have, but I don't think that converges in something that really works, because I think ultimately, the problem isn't Twitter, the problem is us. For example, I've recently made a very disturbing realization, which is academics and trolls have very many similar behaviors.

• 1:00:00Lex Fridman?

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:01Eric Weinstein?

  It's largely a trolling community.

• 1:00:04Lex Fridman?

  I tend to believe that the trolls are not, it's like the Peter Thiel many mind idea.

• 1:00:11Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Lex Fridman?

  Which, in all of the trolls, there's the possibility of goodness. And all you have to do, not all you have to do, what you have to do is create technology that incentivizes them to.

• 1:00:27Lex Fridman?

  To embrace, to discover, to embrace, to practice the better angels of their nature. And I believe that like the people actually want to do that. The trolls is a short term dopamine rush of childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome. I believe that like, deep within, we want to overcome that.

• 1:00:53Eric Weinstein?

  I, I, I try to keep myself from believing what you believe.

• 1:00:59Lex Fridman?

  Because you'd be disappointed if it's not.

• 1:01:01Eric Weinstein?

  Because it's dangerous, because a lot of these people are implacable foes. And there aren't many of them, but when you meet somebody who's like, yeah, I just like screwing people up. I'm here for the pain.

• 1:01:12Lex Fridman?

  I, I just believe even in them, there's a good.

• 1:01:14Eric Weinstein?

  There's a wonderful book that I'm going to recommend to you, where I hope this comes from. Maybe I've got the source wrong, but in any event, it's a great book called Maximum City about Bombay. And I believe that the conceit is that the author leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult. And he realizes he has to rediscover the city because he can't live in the city he left. So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas of the city. And one of them is the underworld. He hangs out with the police, but in the underworld, he's talking to contract killers. And he says, you know, it's really weird. Everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them.

• 1:01:56Eric Weinstein?

  And they always say this thing about, I've got a, I've got two kids at home. He says, never say that to a contract killer because we have terrible relationships with our parents. Doesn't endear us.

• 1:02:10Eric Weinstein?

  And I was just thinking like, oh, wow. So there's a minus sign in front of that statement. You're sitting there saying, you know, I've got a three year old. It's like, okay, well, I'm going to take this POS out of, out of that kid's life. Maybe he'll have a chance. You don't know how people are wired.

• 1:02:26Eric Weinstein?

  And as much as I hate to say it, there are people whose wiring is so disturbing and so different from yours that you will never guess why you can't reach them or how much pleasure they may have gotten because they may have gone over a point of no return.

• 1:02:42Lex Fridman?

  Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis. You do not know this for sure.

• 1:02:50Eric Weinstein?

  No.

• 1:02:51Lex Fridman?

  And I am an, you know, whatever the hell I am, that has a different hypothesis, that even in the darkest human beings that seem to be only full of evil, there's a good person there that could be discovered.

• 1:03:10Eric Weinstein?

  Lex, one of the reasons I love doing your show is that you have these beliefs, even as a Russian.

• 1:03:18Lex Fridman?

  The Russian special.

• 1:03:19Eric Weinstein?

  As you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness, which is a total cynicism and total idealism.

• 1:03:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Eric Weinstein?

  Locked together, right? That's very much a part of the Russian character.

• 1:03:30Lex Fridman?

  The reason I was, I was, kept bothering you, kept bothering you to have this conversation is I'm really worried about the next couple of months.

• 1:03:39Eric Weinstein?

  No kidding.

• 1:03:40Lex Fridman?

  And if there's anybody in this world that could help alleviate my worry by, by at least walking along with me through this worry of mine, it's you. Do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war? Some kind of division that explodes beyond just stuff on Twitter, but something that's really destructive to the fabric of our society?

• 1:04:12Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I believe we're in a revolution, as you know. I've called it the no-name revolution or N squared revolution. I've been talking about it for years. I don't think, I think waiting for this to be called a civil war is not smart.

• 1:04:28Lex Fridman?

  Only history will call it such. Fine.

• 1:04:31Eric Weinstein?

  But I think that the problem is, is that you're encountering things that you've never seen, trying to fit them into things that you already know.

• 1:04:37Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:04:37Eric Weinstein?

  And.

• 1:04:38Lex Fridman?

  But history repeats itself.

• 1:04:40Eric Weinstein?

  Yes.

• 1:04:41Lex Fridman?

  Ish.

• 1:04:44Eric Weinstein?

  You don't see lessons from history? I do. We see today. But I don't see it repeating itself. What about violence? The famous quote is that it rhymes. It rhymes. I mean, the thing I'm, I guess I'm speaking to is violence and... We're in there. The abstraction of violence. Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class. Okay? Thank you for speaking to the audience. Trying to lose these people. Come with me. Go on. No, no, no. I, I, I've dealt with your audience and your audience contains some of the smartest people around. Yeah. I guarantee you, if I say some stuff, uh, first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say, they're going to detail.

• 1:05:26Eric Weinstein?

  So that, that'll be a little bit of catnip to, to bring in the smart people. But they'll also digest it for each other. It's one of the great lessons of long form podcasting. If you don't, if you don't waste all your time explaining things, that's the job of the audience to do amongst themselves. They're happy doing the work and those who aren't, they leave. Isn't that great? They'll leave. The people who don't want to struggle will leave. You can get rid of them. I think that the point is you, you would want to say violence is defined relative to a context. So let's call it meta-violence so that we don't get into the, the problem with, we already have a term for physical violence, right? So we have meta-violence and physical violence. I would say that physical violence is subclassed from meta-violence.

• 1:06:10Eric Weinstein?

  Meta-violence is the disruption of a system. It's sort of, you know, it's a, you know, for, for example, if a cell dies, you can die through apoptosis or necrosis. Apoptosis is controlled, programmed cell death. Necrosis is just like, okay, this didn't work. That was a violent disruption of the system. And this meta-class is presumed in the documentation. Is it all negative? No. What are you talking about? So... Well, this is part of the problem and the madness of our age, right? Which is if you, if you open up a drawer in your, in your cabinet, right?

• 1:06:52Eric Weinstein?

  In your kitchen and you see knives, spoons and forks. Do you have a sense that the spoons are good utensils and the knives or forks are bad utensils because they're mean? I mean, like, if you start thinking in these terms. Yeah. That knife is there to do violence. That's violence you want done.

• 1:07:12Eric Weinstein?

  Right? When I cut a mango, I'm doing violence to the mango. The mango expects that I will do violence to it because otherwise I won't be able to get the meat and it won't get its seed spread somewhere else. So in part, violence is absolutely part of our story.

• 1:07:31Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, so there's this metaviolence class.

• 1:07:34Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Lex Fridman?

  And what's?

• 1:07:35Eric Weinstein?

  So the metaviolence class is already, you know, it's a multiple inheritance pattern, whatever's going on right now inherits from metaviolence.

• 1:07:43Lex Fridman?

  No, but there's, there's certain subclasses that allow evil to emerge. So what, what I'm specifically worried about is that...

• 1:07:55Eric Weinstein?

  What's on your mind, Lex? What's really going on?

• 1:07:57Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:07:59Lex Fridman?

  I, I worry that amidst the chaos of we have these protests or the chaos that could be created by the feeling that the election does not represent the, the voice of the people, like saying that whoever gets quote unquote wins the election according to the, some kind of reporting of the numbers that come out, that's not going to represent what people actually, who people actually want to be the leader. Like something in that narrative will create so much division that people will resort to

• 1:08:39Lex Fridman?

  literal violence, like protests that really, that the United States loses its united aspect. And because of that, because of that chaos and tension, evil, evil people, evil forces that my definition of evil is, you know, just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power, the kind of power that is ultimately goes against the ideal of the United States. That could be Donald Trump, that could be another human being, it doesn't really matter. The, my, my worry is that love doesn't win out in this. The unity doesn't win out in this. And I feel like...

• 1:09:23Lex Fridman?

  You and I have responsibility.

• 1:09:27Eric Weinstein?

  No kidding.

• 1:09:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I know. And so how do we let love win in this moment of

• 1:09:35Eric Weinstein?

  We're gonna have to fight for it. You're gonna have to become a fighter. You have to, you're gonna have to throw some serious punches if that's what you want.

• 1:09:43Lex Fridman?

  You have to be Muhammad Ali here because the moment you start criticizing anything.

• 1:09:48Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Lex Fridman?

  People, you have to be a masterful communicator because.

• 1:09:53Eric Weinstein?

  That's why you're here.

• 1:09:56Eric Weinstein?

  Look, Lex, in part, your decency is allowing you to do things that you couldn't otherwise do. I saw that you had Michael Malice on your podcast.

• 1:10:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Eric Weinstein?

  Now, Michael Malice is, I think of somebody who, at his best, is extremely shrewd and insightful. Yes.

• 1:10:19Eric Weinstein?

  He's also got this trolling game, which he's quite open about, and you talk to him about it, which I can't stand. And that's, this is the idea, oh, grandpa doesn't get the internet. Well, I'm grandpa. I don't get the internet. I don't love the trolling.

• 1:10:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Eric Weinstein?

  There are trolls of the past who were incredibly good. I don't see any of the modern trolls as being that kind of genius level trolling the people who deserve it in the way that they deserve it, you know? Right now, what I see is that anything that stands up gets cut down.

• 1:10:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Eric Weinstein?

  You know, it's like anything earnest, you have to turn into cynicism and a meme. And it's, it's this idea that the people who believe that the world is chaos and has no point are constantly trying to let you know, don't try to use the internet for meaning, for decency, for goodness, because we are going to find out that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy and we will, we will make you suffer. So I do think that there's a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world. Some of it mine, some of it yours, but we all have it. And the trolls somewhat remove that. But it's not a judicious, kind, constructive, compassionate, caring version most of the time. And a lot of those trolls, and I have this feeling about Michael Malice, I don't know

• 1:11:34Eric Weinstein?

  whether it's right, that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath it. And that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior. And you and I don't seem to be doing that. I don't see you as almost ever trolling.

• 1:11:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you and I are, I'm very much against trolling.

• 1:11:49Eric Weinstein?

  I'm very much against trolling. It doesn't mean that it's selective. You know, I'm not even, it's not even true. Like, everything we say, we say like, I'm forward, I'm against it.

• 1:12:01Eric Weinstein?

  This isn't my native language. I speak nuance. I don't speak this internet shit.

• 1:12:07Eric Weinstein?

  And the more I have to communicate through internet shit, right? I almost never take a tweet seriously if it contains the letters LMAO, LOL, RTFL, you know, FOL.

• 1:12:21Lex Fridman?

  There's an interesting effect where people say stuff and then finish with LOL. You put it beautifully that it indicates to me that this is a person, we've talked about like why I wore the stupid suit.

• 1:12:32Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Lex Fridman?

  Is like, this is anti, this is to fight the LOL at the end of sentences. Is take, it's like stand up for the words you're saying.

• 1:12:41Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Lex Fridman?

  Don't finish stuff with LOL, removing completely the responsibility of the content of the sentence that preceded it.

• 1:12:49Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. Also, choosing the outfit that worked both for Men in Black and the Blues Brothers, not a terrible choice. Okay, but getting back, look, Lex, we're not in a position to do this.

• 1:13:02Eric Weinstein?

  You need to be seated in a different chair. Your chair is the wrong chair. You're in the wrong chair. It's been so long. All right. I want to talk about you and Joe Biden.

• 1:13:16Eric Weinstein?

  Joe Biden was a 29 year old guy with nothing particular going on, so far as I can tell.

• 1:13:24Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. I know people as impressive at age 29 as Joe Biden. You know, 12 rows back, three, three deep, doesn't matter. Huge number of people. None of them my age can get to where he got to. Like, we're all morons.

• 1:13:42Eric Weinstein?

  Anytime somebody takes out, like, if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop,

• 1:13:49Eric Weinstein?

  you'd be angry.

• 1:13:51Eric Weinstein?

  What is this guy doing repairing guitars?

• 1:13:55Eric Weinstein?

  Then somebody will say, maybe he loves to repair guitars.

• 1:13:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, what is your piano, Russian piano tuner doing?

• 1:14:02Eric Weinstein?

  What is my Russian piano? That was the whole point of that story. Which is, what is it that happened in that life that converted somebody? And I find this, for example, with Russian doctors who are, you know, technicians in offices now.

• 1:14:19Eric Weinstein?

  There's a huge amount of talent in the world that's not sitting in its proper seat.

• 1:14:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Eric Weinstein?

  And quite honestly, I've gotten to the point where my feeling is we've got to take the seats.

• 1:14:34Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:14:35Eric Weinstein?

  And maybe we don't sit in them. Maybe the idea is that we take the seats and we put some smart Gen Z person in the seat and say, look, no chanting. I don't want to hear you say, no justice, no peace. If there aren't verbs, if it, if it rhymes, it's wrong. Like, I used to have this thing, if it rhymes, things that rhyme are more true. But like, in general, if something starts at one, two, three, four, I don't want to hear what the rest of your sentence is.

• 1:15:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Lex Fridman?

  But I, I feel like the responsibility that you carry, that I carry, this is where Joe Rogan generally removes himself from being, I'm just a comedian, this idea of, I'm just a comedian.

• 1:15:17Eric Weinstein?

  They all do that.

• 1:15:19Lex Fridman?

  But at this moment in history, like, history literally can pivot on the words of a tattooed.

• 1:15:30Lex Fridman?

  Ripped 50 year old comedian. And I think the same is true with you.

• 1:15:37Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, well, I'm interested and I care. Speaking of lyrics, you know, there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. That's not us. The hour is getting late. That's not us. In the song, the Joker and the thief are on opposite sides of Jesus having this conversation over Jesus. You and I, we've been through that. That's not our fate. That's somebody else's fate to throw spitballs at the internet. That's not your fate. You're an earnest guy. You're filled with love. You're getting the most amazing podcast guests.

• 1:16:09Lex Fridman?

  But you can win over the internet. This is the point I'm trying to make, that you're saying, I'm just a grandpa. I don't care.

• 1:16:15Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, I'm telling you, you're going to get bigger and then you're going to get cut down. You're going to keep ascending for a while, Lex.

• 1:16:22Lex Fridman?

  And then you're saying, and naturally there's.

• 1:16:23Eric Weinstein?

  I'm telling you, I watched the same process. People get up to a certain level. And one of the things that's going on, in my opinion, with Joe Rogan is that when Joe Rogan starts to talk about his misgivings about Joe Biden, in a way that you find at any bar in America, about cognitive decline in a 77 year old who's about to be 78, I believe in November. We have never had anything remotely as insane as a 78 year old person slated to win the White House.

• 1:16:56Lex Fridman?

  And you're saying when that idea is being communicated, is there something about the DISC concept? You talk about the system naturally starts to.

• 1:17:04Eric Weinstein?

  Bad thing happens to Joe or one of Joe's close associates. The ability to destroy people who become inconvenient has been documented. This is what we have done in the past. Whether we are doing it now, we don't know because we are not doing this church, church committee too. In order to know whether or not you are currently destroying American citizens as we did in the past and as we have documented, as we found out in 1976, the federal government destroyed Americans who had political beliefs that the government didn't want to continue. And I don't know whether you are grasping that.

• 1:17:44Eric Weinstein?

  One interpretation of why Jon Stewart and why Joe Rogan and why Bill Maher, all these people to some extent hide behind, it's a joke.

• 1:17:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Eric Weinstein?

  It's because they're trying to find a protected class. Is there someplace I can stand and speak the truth, which does not result in my being garbage collected?

• 1:18:06Lex Fridman?

  Interesting. I guess you're right. My intuition is you can stand.

• 1:18:12Lex Fridman?

  As you gain more power, you can stand.

• 1:18:16Eric Weinstein?

  There's a fight over Joe Rogan right now. I mean, I talked about it for a few years now. People did not understand how big that program was. People didn't understand long form podcasting. I was derided by people who I think of as being very shrewd.

• 1:18:33Eric Weinstein?

  For believing in these podcasts as a major force. And most of the people who derided me have said, wow, did I not get things? It's like if you started to propose. You know, you wanted to do The Sopranos in the era of 30 minute sitcoms. Like, you don't get it, man. The American people, they're not interested in these long plot storylines. That's your weird thing? Nobody cares, dude. Everybody just wants short, fast, memorable. And like, okay, so if you do that, you totally miss the opportunity. And you know, the savvy people used to say, kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, that was totally wrong because they didn't calculate opportunity costs.

• 1:19:17Eric Weinstein?

  I have been talking about the problem of Joe for a long time. The problem is, is that when the system wakes up, they're going to want to control it.

• 1:19:26Lex Fridman?

  And they have different, they come up with new different mechanisms of doing that. I guess one interesting one is cancel culture.

• 1:19:33Eric Weinstein?

  Well, look at the number of people around Joe who they've come after since they've realized that Joe was really big. Joey Diaz.

• 1:19:42Eric Weinstein?

  Brian Callen.

• 1:19:45Eric Weinstein?

  Chris Delia. Now, I'm not saying that those are all related. But I do notice that there are at least correlations between when Joe says something, when something bad happens in Joe's universe. It's easier for me to believe that that's happening when it's happening around Joe himself.

• 1:20:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Eric Weinstein?

  But I'm worried about my friend. And I don't necessarily want to push him towards being more if he doesn't want it. Because I don't think, I don't want to, I don't want to conscript people. He's got a great life. He's got a great situation. He's done a huge service. Thank God. Do you know?

• 1:20:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Eric Weinstein?

  Like, how much do I owe Joe just for what he's done for you? To say nothing of what he's done for me, or for Brett, or for Sam, or any of these people? And, you know, I'd like to think that we all try to give back. But I'm worried about Joe. He's not worried.

• 1:20:45Lex Fridman?

  One of the inspiring things about Joe.

• 1:20:47Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Lex Fridman?

  Is, I mean, he's in this war alone. And the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life.

• 1:20:55Eric Weinstein?

  Well, that's his thing. As long as he stays close to things that he loves and being, you know, one of the things is he's honest about his drug use. He loves, he loves to hunt. So he's just, he does a certain amount of like semi vice signaling upfront. And then you just also know him. This is why every time they try to take him down. You use the N word, you know? It's like, unfortunately, everybody knows who Joe is. And he, yes, he, he doesn't act as if he went to a fancy finishing school. Right? That's not his energy. The fact that you've got some super smart guy who always pretends to be a meathead, just like, you know, like, hey, I'm a comedian, like all these defenses and disguises.

• 1:21:38Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, you've got this super smart guy who, um, he's admitted to most of the things that, you know, you can, you can take him down for. And because everybody's been effectively in his den or his basement. Think about that studio is his basement. People have hung out with Joe so many hours that you can't tell them something about Joe where they're going to say, wow, I'm going to believe the New York Times and not the hundreds of hours I've spent on the Joe Rogan experience.

• 1:22:02Lex Fridman?

  But the cool thing is that this is what inspires me is that the way he's waging war against the system is just by being a good person and, and talking enough hours in a week where that message like bleeds throughout the words, in the gaps between. And that, that's so inspiring to me that the good people can win by just being good.

• 1:22:25Eric Weinstein?

  And, and he's kind and he's tough and he also, he's no pushover.

• 1:22:31Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:22:31Eric Weinstein?

  I always worry a little bit when I sit down in that chair.

• 1:22:35Lex Fridman?

  You still get scared that he'll call you on some kind of bullshit that you weren't even aware of?

• 1:22:39Eric Weinstein?

  No, the first time I was on the show, the energy wasn't great between us. And it was in a sober October situation. So I think I hadn't understood that. And maybe our egos got a little bit off.

• 1:22:53Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know. I mean, I was having fun, but maybe it was just two complicated life forms getting to know each other. The first one was probably, um, yeah, that made me a little nervous for the future. But then, you know, Joe, Joe and I have become friends, although sometimes we have miscommunications like on Yom Kippur. I, I texted him and I said, Joe, you know, I want to apologize for ways I've let you down as a friend and haven't been there for you. And appreciate everything you've done for me and all this stuff. Like I get this text back like, what the fuck is your problem?

• 1:23:29Eric Weinstein?

  You're great, dude. I don't know what bad place you're in, but cheer up. It's like, Joe, don't you have any Jews in your life that apologize for what they've done? He was just like, dude, have you lost your mind? What the hell's gotten into you?

• 1:23:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What, what do you think? Uh, what do you think about the Spotify thing?

• 1:23:47Eric Weinstein?

  What about it? Ask me a question.

• 1:23:49Lex Fridman?

  He's now, as opposed to being just a comedian with a podcast, he now is just a comedian with a podcast. Who stepped like in the middle of the center of cancel culture, which is like, I know Spotify is in Sweden, but they represent Silicon Valley. They represent the very kind of structures they contain and represent the kind of structures that threaten to destroy the elons of the world. And he just like stepped like with his Alex Jones and his, uh, Joey Diaz just strolled right into the middle of it.

• 1:24:27Eric Weinstein?

  I think it's awesome. I love it.

• 1:24:30Lex Fridman?

  But do you think he'll, he's strong enough to?

• 1:24:33Eric Weinstein?

  Well,

• 1:24:34Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. I mean, I don't even know the right way to ask this, but is he strong enough to persevere?

• 1:24:39Eric Weinstein?

  It's a bit interesting. It's like when a lion decides, wow, that honey badger looks tasty. I'm gonna swallow it whole. See what happens.

• 1:24:47Lex Fridman?

  Because I talked to him offline. He really seems to be willing to give away the hundred million, which gives him so much power.

• 1:24:54Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, I don't.

• 1:24:57Lex Fridman?

  It's a powerful thing to be able to say, I don't, yeah, to the honey badger. He just strolls in, but he's willing to walk away from anything in this.

• 1:25:06Eric Weinstein?

  Well, he's gonna walk out the other side of the lion. I don't think he's gonna go out the way he came in.

• 1:25:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you know what it is? It's Tommy Lee Jones entering the bug.

• 1:25:15Lex Fridman?

  This is like a giant alien. He just walks into it?

• 1:25:18Eric Weinstein?

  He just, he gets swallowed by the bug and he blasts out from the inside. I have it as Tommy Lee Jones.

• 1:25:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:24Eric Weinstein?

  But anyway.

• 1:25:24Lex Fridman?

  Joe Rogan to you.

• 1:25:25Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, is that my feeling is that Spotify doesn't understand what they're messing with. I could be wrong, but I'm not.

• 1:25:32Lex Fridman?

  No, you're right.

• 1:25:32Eric Weinstein?

  I'm right.

• 1:25:35Eric Weinstein?

  Because Joe doesn't need anything, man. I mean, this is the weird thing about it. It's like, I'm sure that he loves all his toys, whatever, blah, blah, blah. He's a rich guy. Yes, he's got FU money. He had FU money a long time ago. And you're not, you know, the other thing about, it's a bit weird being friends with a dude like that. It just is because like you call him up or he'll call you up and he's like, what's going on in your life? I don't know. Kind of depressed, trying to get some meth done. What are you up? Oh, dude, I can cheer you up. I just came off of a 29,000 person stadium. It's like, oh, cool. How'd you do that? Oh, I don't know. I just announced it on Instagram a few days ago and it's filled up. It's like, oh, damn.

• 1:26:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:18Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, that thing is powerful.

• 1:26:20Lex Fridman?

  So powerful. Yeah. So there you go. I mean, you could be that too.

• 1:26:24Eric Weinstein?

  The instant Joe takes an interest in politics and saving the world.

• 1:26:28Lex Fridman?

  You might destroy all of that.

• 1:26:29Eric Weinstein?

  It's going bye bye. I promise.

• 1:26:32Lex Fridman?

  I just disagree with you.

• 1:26:34Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:26:34Lex Fridman?

  Because you have to, you have to do it. Like you've said this many times before.

• 1:26:37Eric Weinstein?

  I'll bet you.

• 1:26:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Eric Weinstein?

  I'll bet you a bottle of Stoli that you can get, if you get Joe Rogan to get highly politically active and call out the system for all the bullshit that it is in a very pointed and determined fashion. And he doesn't get destroyed. I'll give you, I'll give you the vodka.

• 1:26:56Lex Fridman?

  The vodka?

• 1:26:56Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57Lex Fridman?

  That sounds like a pretty damn good deal.

• 1:26:59Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:00Lex Fridman?

  But this, you've said this, I mean.

• 1:27:02Eric Weinstein?

  No living heroes, my friend.

• 1:27:05Eric Weinstein?

  No living heroes.

• 1:27:06Lex Fridman?

  I just.

• 1:27:07Eric Weinstein?

  No living heroes.

• 1:27:09Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's just difficult. You just have to be good at it. I mean, if you just say generic political things.

• 1:27:15Eric Weinstein?

  No, no.

• 1:27:16Lex Fridman?

  You, it, it, you're going to be taken down.

• 1:27:18Eric Weinstein?

  The more heroic you are, the more beautiful you are. The more you will be made to suffer. If they cannot get you on reputation, if Jesus himself came down. I don't know if I ever read, I probably have never read to you the hit piece I did on Jesus. You don't know about this?

• 1:27:35Lex Fridman?

  No, I did not know.

• 1:27:36Eric Weinstein?

  I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world.

• 1:27:41Eric Weinstein?

  So whoever it was who cured cancer, you know, discovered new particles or whatever it is. I did a hit piece against them to prove that I can do it to anybody on, around anything at any time.

• 1:27:52Lex Fridman?

  Except Eddie Van Halen is what we're talking about.

• 1:27:54Eric Weinstein?

  Well, Eddie Van Halen is now dead, but if, if this was a, a situation, you know, hot for teacher. Canceled.

• 1:28:04Lex Fridman?

  Disrespectful.

• 1:28:05Eric Weinstein?

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:08Eric Weinstein?

  Also, you know, packaging, female objectification for young men. Clearly Eddie Van Halen is one of the worst people alive.

• 1:28:17Lex Fridman?

  But the, the skill, the, the incredible inspiration that is just radiating from his music inspires so many millions that they will fight those canceled pieces, they, they will fight those.

• 1:28:30Eric Weinstein?

  This is your thing.

• 1:28:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Eric Weinstein?

  You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil and the good has already been decided, designated the winner. And it's not true, but your belief in that it's true.

• 1:28:41Lex Fridman?

  Take it till you make it, no? I mean, you gotta.

• 1:28:44Eric Weinstein?

  It's motivating both of us. Like I also believe that we're going to win because if I don't, then I can't get out of bed. And I, it's pretty heavy at the moment.

• 1:28:52Lex Fridman?

  Do you think 2021 can, can make us feel good about the trajectory of society? So like where we emerged from this year, feeling good, like there's a smile on Eric Quinlan's face. And the next time we talk, we'll be doing some kind of duet on guitar and not having this worried look on our faces.

• 1:29:17Eric Weinstein?

  No.

• 1:29:19Lex Fridman?

  Okay, but you've also promised that you're going to somehow end this in a positive. Okay, so how do you, how do you turn the no around? What's the U-turn from the no?

• 1:29:29Eric Weinstein?

  No, until we get some actually decent people in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking about their next paycheck, I don't see a solution. Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are and to let you know why I don't think it's coming. First of all, both of these political parties, the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go. They're tearing us apart. They lack the will to be Americans. They don't understand the subtlety of the project. They're simply the people who figured out how to inhabit the seats and that is their great achievement.

• 1:30:11Eric Weinstein?

  I believe that in order to solve this, you need people who can integrate, who are not partisan at the level of the partisan warriors that we're seeing. People who believe in dividing the pies of the future rather than the present pie as our main task as Americans because we are built around growth. I'm sorry to say it. You need an ability to have subtle conversations and you need the ability to exclude. And, and, you know, at the moment, everyone knows inclusion is good, which it isn't. It's like saying, well, water is good. If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me. It's not. People drown. People need to, you know, get dehydrated. It can be life-saving or

• 1:30:55Eric Weinstein?

  life-ending. It, it isn't good or bad. Inclusion is not good or bad. Inclusion is just inclusion. Exclusion is part of inclusion. We've taught people that they can reason through the world as sub, you know, cocker spaniels. They just bark things at each other.

• 1:31:17Eric Weinstein?

  You know, I'm for safety. I'm for inclusion. I'm for growth. Oh, really? Do you guys use verbs? Dependent clauses? Are there compound, complex sentences? Where are we in this sea of nonsense? You have to be able to build a place where you have smart, talented people who represent a diverse group of correct opinions. You need to get rid of almost all of the people who have opinions that are antithetical to what we're trying to accomplish. You need to give them insulation, which we're terrified because we don't trust anybody. So everything has to be transparent. If you're going to the bathroom, I want those walls to be plexiglass so I can see what you're doing. It's like, that's too much transparency. We have too much and not enough at the same time.

• 1:32:02Eric Weinstein?

  And then, you know, in essence, you need to ensure that people aren't worried about feeding their family every four seconds for being real. None of that is happening. And our billionaires? Our billionaires are pathetic. What is the point of billionaires? If you're not going to do billionaire-type cool stuff, like saying, "F you." And I'm going to throw, you know, $3 billion at the project of restoring the national conversation? I don't grasp this. What is the point of creating obscene wealth if we don't have anyone smart enough and caring enough to use it?

• 1:32:42Lex Fridman?

  I agree with that, that last part for sure. I mean, slightly pushed back on the idea that the leaders themselves are broken. I feel like, this goes to the Joe Rogan, Joe Biden and Trump having a debate on that program. I feel like Joe Biden has a lot of really interesting ideas that he's almost forgot how to communicate. He's been fake for so long within the system.

• 1:33:14Eric Weinstein?

  Hillary was fake for too long. I'm sure she had real ideas at the beginning that she still was campaigning on decades later.

• 1:33:20Lex Fridman?

  But like, if the system, if the platforms empowered you to search, to be honest, to be real, to search for those ideas within yourself, like long-form conversations do, then we, even the Donald Trump and Joe Biden leaders we have now, would... We'd take this country to a better place that would unite people. So like, we can keep the current Congress, we just need to create better platforms. This is going to the intuition that there's good in Donald Trump.

• 1:33:51Eric Weinstein?

  There is.

• 1:33:52Lex Fridman?

  Depth and complexity and intelligence.

• 1:33:54Eric Weinstein?

  There is.

• 1:33:54Lex Fridman?

  And the same with Joe Biden.

• 1:33:56Eric Weinstein?

  There's good in Joe Biden.

• 1:33:58Lex Fridman?

  And it's just, we're not incentivizing.

• 1:34:02Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's several things I think are broken. One of them is Twitter, the other is journalism. It's just the platforms of us communicating with each other.

• 1:34:11Eric Weinstein?

  One of the reasons that I try to come up with unifying explanations is that, you know, if you look at the number of wildfires in California, let's say, that we've just seen, if you treat them all as spontaneous, uncorrelated instances, it feels like, oh, my God, it's just whack a mole. Every time I send a fire truck here, there's a fire over there. So you want to come up with something like a central theory, which is, why do I suddenly have a problem when I hadn't had a problem before? So I look for these unifying explanations. And I found one the other day that really speaks to me.

• 1:34:47Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, people are very frustrated because they've been trained to think about this incorrectly, in my opinion. But here's the graph that you need to look at. On the X axis is time by year. And on the Y axis is something like average age of a human. The title of the graph is any desirable situation involving institutions.

• 1:35:14Eric Weinstein?

  So that could be CEO, it could be tenured professor.

• 1:35:20Eric Weinstein?

  It could be who's getting grants. It could be the age at which people win Nobel prizes.

• 1:35:31Eric Weinstein?

  University presidents, all these things go up. In other words, for a long period of time, the average age of the person in a desirable situation has been increasing something like nine months for every 12. Those graphs have to go down at some point. The specter of

• 1:35:53Lex Fridman?

  Brilliantly put.

• 1:35:54Eric Weinstein?

  Of having five people, all born in the 1940s, as the final entrance in the presidential context. That makes no sense. Think about how bizarre a thing that nobody's even really talking about. The last five people were all ancient by presidential standards. Not one, not two, but five. We are talking about a contest between somebody who is the oldest of the baby boomers, the very beginning of the baby boom, summer of 46 birthday, fighting somebody who is in the silent generation.

• 1:36:35Eric Weinstein?

  The silent generation guy in a town hall in Florida gets this question from a Gen Z guy saying, you know, what's going on with my future? Joe Biden has the audacity to say, I'm a transitional president. You guys, the highly educated one. When has any generation in history needed a transitional 78-year-old person to take office? It's bizarre. It's preposterous. That graph is the graph we can't talk about. That graph is the graph of our destruction. Because it has the, you can make a one-line argument, which is, sounds like ageism, which isn't a very good argument.

• 1:37:19Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:37:20Eric Weinstein?

  But what it does is, is it muddles the conversation. And you always have to ask yourself the question, if this conversation becomes muddled, who wins as a result of the muddling?

• 1:37:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's a battle. But so let's just win it. Let's win the battle. You give

• 1:37:36Eric Weinstein?

  Are you running?

• 1:37:37Lex Fridman?

  For, for, sure. I'll run. I was born in Russia. Can't run. So, uh, but we Russians can hack elections, so we'll figure it out. This is me officially announcing my

• 1:37:47Eric Weinstein?

  I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida.

• 1:37:53Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. Lex, what is it that you really want to ask?

• 1:37:55Lex Fridman?

  I think I want to put some responsibility on the portal, the portal, the portal. That the portal gives power to the people in that graph. Like, because you put it quite brilliantly that the people that move the world, their age has been going up. And not move the world, but put in the position where they get the chance to affect the world. The, these new platforms, I think Twitter falls in them, give power to the younger people. It doesn't have to be about age necessarily, but the younger thinking people. So that's a promising thing. And you are like, you're like Gandalf.

• 1:38:39Lex Fridman?

  You get to, you get to pick your Frodo's or whatever. I'm not very good with the analogy, but the whole point is for you as Gandalf.

• 1:38:46Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know that I make that much sense. Gandalf makes sense. I don't know if people know how to fit me into this ecosystem. I think there's something in my presentation that people find very confusing.

• 1:38:57Lex Fridman?

  No, figure it out. I'm not, I disagree with you, but you need to look at the mirror and think like, what, what is it? Is it, um, maybe you need a mustache? I don't know.

• 1:39:08Lex Fridman?

  But there, there's something about figuring out how to be a charismatic communicator in this. And that, that's the responsibility. You said like finishing sentences with the LOL is painful for your soul.

• 1:39:20Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. That's just how somebody lets me know I don't have to take their opinion seriously.

• 1:39:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It's still the language, the, the way that people are communicating. And you're swimming that wave. You have a big platform. Um, I have a growing platform. It feels like this is the place to give power.

• 1:39:35Eric Weinstein?

  I agree, but we're going to get swatted down.

• 1:39:37Lex Fridman?

  I just don't think so.

• 1:39:38Eric Weinstein?

  You're wrong.

• 1:39:39Lex Fridman?

  Why are you afraid of the big, like this is.

• 1:39:41Eric Weinstein?

  Because I've studied it. Because I've studied. Let me ask you a question, Lex.

• 1:39:49Eric Weinstein?

  I believe that every society is supposed to have a collection of what I call break glass in case of emergency people.

• 1:39:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:59Eric Weinstein?

  These are people who are universally loved and trusted by your society. For example, David Attenborough, the great British naturalist and presenter, recently came on Instagram, he's worried about the planet.

• 1:40:13Eric Weinstein?

  And I said, you know, look, there are very few of these people left. Let's pay attention, find out what he has to say. Maybe, maybe he's gonna be an ass, maybe he's gonna be an idiot, maybe he's gonna say wrong things, don't know. Tell me about your top 10 universal American heroes.

• 1:40:27Lex Fridman?

  This is not a rhetorical question.

• 1:40:28Eric Weinstein?

  No. Give me five. Everybody looks to that person and says, yep, the best of us.

• 1:40:36Lex Fridman?

  Well, not divisive. Well, everybody's an interesting concept. I mean, Elon Musk is very divisive, right?

• 1:40:44Eric Weinstein?

  But I'm talking about overwhelmingly, people would, would follow that person if that person gave a rousing, intelligent speech that said, we, we must act now because we're in dire straits.

• 1:40:58Lex Fridman?

  I think a lot of people fall in that category. For me, it would be in the, in the tech world, in the engineering world.

• 1:41:05Eric Weinstein?

  Tell me names.

• 1:41:06Lex Fridman?

  Elon Musk.

• 1:41:07Eric Weinstein?

  Elon Musk.

• 1:41:11Lex Fridman?

  The Rock.

• 1:41:13Lex Fridman?

  I'm thinking like, who is the most eloquent actor? So like, you think celebrities, so people with platforms.

• 1:41:18Eric Weinstein?

  I didn't say celebrities, they have to be well known.

• 1:41:20Lex Fridman?

  I believe like, yeah, so this goes to Joe, Joe Rogan.

• 1:41:29Eric Weinstein?

  First two did not really impress me as being what I said, but okay.

• 1:41:35Eric Weinstein?

  Elon several years ago would have.

• 1:41:38Lex Fridman?

  Can you, can you try to?

• 1:41:40Eric Weinstein?

  Joe Rogan has.

• 1:41:41Lex Fridman?

  Why do they fail? Why, why does, why is?

• 1:41:43Eric Weinstein?

  Lots of people treat Joe Rogan as if he's some sort of right wing racist because they've never watched his program, they don't know who his friends, I don't know.

• 1:41:52Lex Fridman?

  Oh, but when I thought you said everybody, I thought you meant a large enough, people where huge change can happen, not actually literally everybody. Because I think.

• 1:42:04Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, people who've pulled, like, people who've pulled off something where everybody's convinced that that person just deeply.

• 1:42:14Eric Weinstein?

  I think I've told you this story before, but the one time I've seen the power of a figure like this, I mean, very few times I've been in a large crowd and I've seen people just moved where they would do almost anything good, bad and different because they were primed. One was a Rolling Stones concert. The other one was Nelson Mandela coming to Boston. And man, you've never seen anything like this. You check out the photos from the banks of the Charles River when Nelson Mandela came. There are people that you need in your dark hours and we can't agree on who they are. And as soon as they

• 1:42:56Eric Weinstein?

  emerge, we tar them with shit. We get at the shit, Brett.

• 1:43:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I just disagree with you. So I think.

• 1:43:04Eric Weinstein?

  What do we disagree about?

• 1:43:04Lex Fridman?

  Okay. I think it doesn't matter who it is. I think really good speeches are needed.

• 1:43:10Eric Weinstein?

  Great. Who's gonna give them? I saw Killer Mike try to give a good speech.

• 1:43:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he did. Wow.

• 1:43:15Eric Weinstein?

  In Atlanta, right?

• 1:43:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Eric Weinstein?

  That was something. Very impressed.

• 1:43:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:21Eric Weinstein?

  Even Killer Mike immediately gets into this, sell out. Like.

• 1:43:27Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, but he, he's, he didn't take up the responsibility, I would say.

• 1:43:32Eric Weinstein?

  He didn't.

• 1:43:32Lex Fridman?

  Of, of going bigger. So he was speaking to the community and.

• 1:43:38Eric Weinstein?

  He was doing what he.

• 1:43:39Lex Fridman?

  On this particular moment, he's exceptional at it. And he was speaking to this particular moment. He didn't take it a step farther, which is like giving the same speech, but bigger than race, bigger than this particular moment, but more about the, the American project.

• 1:43:59Eric Weinstein?

  You know, the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson?

• 1:44:01Lex Fridman?

  Yes. Yeah, there you go. That's a good example. Sully.

• 1:44:04Eric Weinstein?

  That guy, until we screw him up, is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.

• 1:44:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, Jaco, maybe that's another.

• 1:44:13Eric Weinstein?

  Jaco's pretty good. Jaco is pretty good. Can't really tell. Is he a Democrat? Is he a Republican? I don't know. He's an American. That's for damn sure.

• 1:44:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And I think there's a lot of folks.

• 1:44:24Eric Weinstein?

  And then you, no, I think Jaco, there aren't. That's one of the reasons why Jaco is so important.

• 1:44:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Your podcast, The Portal, is something in my little universe is something a lot of people really love. And it moves them. They draw a lot of meaning from it. And also, especially in difficult times.

• 1:44:48Lex Fridman?

  And they, it gives them a comfort of through like this kind of, it's not just nuance. It's there's like, even when you're talking about chaos, there's love underneath all of it. And I think people draw a lot of meaning from it, which is why they are wondering why you haven't been doing that many podcasts, or you haven't done it in maybe a month and a half or two months in this most difficult of times. Is there, is there a good reason?

• 1:45:22Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, there are lots of good reasons. So the first one is kind of weird, which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous. And if you say, I don't want to be famous, it's like, oh, you're just saying that because you want to be, everyone to think you're famous. You're not that famous. You know, okay.

• 1:45:42Eric Weinstein?

  I don't love being as well known as I've become.

• 1:45:49Eric Weinstein?

  There's lots of things that are fun about it. It's wonderful that you can go to, I can go to any city in the world. There are portal listeners there. All I need to do is put out a tweet and 20 people show up for a drink.

• 1:46:00Lex Fridman?

  And they're amazing people.

• 1:46:01Eric Weinstein?

  And they're almost, I mean, you can see my live Q and A's on my Instagram page. If you go to Eric R. Weinstein, I just pick somebody randomly. And I was really worried about it at first. And, you know, maybe I should be worried about it. But in general, people all over the world are just so positive. And so, you know.

• 1:46:21Lex Fridman?

  And thoughtful, deep and have a story that's.

• 1:46:23Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, because they're self-selected, right?

• 1:46:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26Eric Weinstein?

  But I don't like the fame.

• 1:46:28Lex Fridman?

  The thing we just described comes with the fame. It's a beautiful thing. You don't, you're worried that it's getting.

• 1:46:33Eric Weinstein?

  It's ephemeral. It'll, look, Lex, it'll turn on you in a heartbeat.

• 1:46:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40Eric Weinstein?

  It'll turn on you in a heartbeat. And the other problem is, I don't, I don't like my audience being my audience. I want to get closer to them. I want to talk to them. I want to find out what's, what is this doing in your life? My house fills up with art that people send me. The lightest thing is an effects pedal called something like, I don't know, it's a bow tie overdrive.

• 1:47:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Eric Weinstein?

  From a guy in Mexico. Right?

• 1:47:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. You play electric, by the way, in a tiny little tangent? Do you play electric?

• 1:47:07Eric Weinstein?

  I have a Stratocaster.

• 1:47:09Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:47:09Eric Weinstein?

  But it doesn't have a strap and I don't know what to do with it. And I have a bad amp. So you should, you should, you should hook me up with the.

• 1:47:16Lex Fridman?

  We'll find it a home, maybe.

• 1:47:18Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:47:19Lex Fridman?

  You're starting to sense that this is too much?

• 1:47:22Eric Weinstein?

  No, I want to be, I want to be here. I want to do the work. Very simply.

• 1:47:30Eric Weinstein?

  I don't have an ability to fully explain myself. I don't want to claim that I don't love the fact that, how much love do we get from these programs? Like I, generically, people are incredibly generous.

• 1:47:46Eric Weinstein?

  You know, people have begged me, set up a Patreon account and I haven't been able to do it. I should do it. I've said to everybody, it's a business, it's a business, it's a business.

• 1:47:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Eric Weinstein?

  But like, they're so used to being defrauded when somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives. My, my goal was to say, I'm going to keep talking to you about, you, you want to know why I started doing ads on my show? Was because I wanted people to think from the get go, this is a business. This is what I sound like when I'm selling.

• 1:48:15Eric Weinstein?

  But you know, like you see, I've lost weight.

• 1:48:19Eric Weinstein?

  A lot of that is due to Athletic Greens.

• 1:48:21Lex Fridman?

  Athletic Greens.

• 1:48:22Eric Weinstein?

  You know?

• 1:48:23Lex Fridman?

  Code.

• 1:48:26Lex Fridman?

  What's the?

• 1:48:26Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know what my promo code is for Athletic Greens. Probably athleticgreens.com slash portal, but doesn't matter.

• 1:48:32Lex Fridman?

  Portal.

• 1:48:33Eric Weinstein?

  But you know, Fitbit, who doesn't advertise, has also been instrumental, as well as a guy named Stephen Kates, who, you know, was a fan from the show, found me on the street and just said, I'm a trainer. I want to help train you. And it's got me on a, on a good, good path. So, you know, that's one paid advertiser and two people I'm calling out just because, you know, two, two outfits, Stephen Kates and Fitbit that have changed my life. I wanted people to say, you know, you don't have to be afraid of advertising. If I do it in this way, this is powering your show. But the whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy feelings like, oh, wow, I knew he was a shill. He's a grifter, you know, okay. I didn't love that. I didn't love the issues.

• 1:49:18Eric Weinstein?

  So I didn't set up a Patreon. The security issues for talking and being me are significant. Yeah. And I don't have the kind of money to hire around the clock. I mean, I desperately want to get to a level of wealth where I don't have to think about money. I don't think it's, you know, some people want money because they, they, they need it for status. I think I can handle status if I want it doing this. I don't want the status necessarily, and I don't want, I, I'd want the status, but I don't want the fame that goes with it. I want the money. I don't want to be seen as this is about money because it's about a substance. Yeah.

• 1:50:00Eric Weinstein?

  And, you know, all of those things, that's part of, I haven't solved these issues. Yeah, I, I've been feeling bad because people say, where's the portal word? We're desperate. These are difficult times. We have an election coming up. And it's just like, do you think for a moment that I want to explain that I actually got really uncomfortable being as well known as I was? And then what is it that I want? Because I want to be better known and less well known at the same time. It doesn't, there's nothing the audience can do. I don't want the audience to be the audience. That doesn't make sense to people. I want it to be a business, but I don't think people need to fear a business if the business is open about being a business. That, and then that's all to the side.

• 1:50:39Eric Weinstein?

  What you're seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly meta violent period in our online existence. And I believe that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are completely screwed. At the moment, the leadership of these parties is unsalvageable, unworkable. Everyone hears that from inside the two party system. Oh, I get it. He's trying to subtract votes off of Biden. Oh, I get it. He's trying to scuttle Trump. Oh, I get it. This is a play for his show because he's trying to plug into discuss. There's a Bill Hicks routine on marketing. Have you ever seen this? Brilliant.

• 1:51:19Eric Weinstein?

  I recommend it to everyone where he, he comes out on stage and he says, are there any people in marketing and sales of the audience? Woo, yeah. It's like, okay, great. Can you do us all a favor and die? And like, everybody laughs. He's like, no, I'm not laughing. I'm being serious. So he talks about how marketing is horrible. So you're like, where's this act going? Then he gets to the point of it's like, oh, I know how you, marketing people think. Bill's going after that resentment dollar. That's good dollar. Let's get that resentment anti-marketing dollar.

• 1:51:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Eric Weinstein?

  It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying. I really hate marketers. Oh, that's good. It's the authenticity dollar. You can't escape this kind of negative marketing thought. And I guess that gets to the issue that I don't want to be destroyed in advance of this election. I don't think it's a good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting how completely ridiculous Donald Trump and Joe Biden are as candidates for the President of the United States, full stop. None of this makes any sense. These moderators of these pseudo debates. We're in the wrong format with the wrong people. No part of this makes a whit of sense.

• 1:52:35Lex Fridman?

  Can I try to push back several claims? One is

• 1:52:43Lex Fridman?

  I don't believe the systems as they stand now can destroy the Eric Weinstein voice, the voice.

• 1:52:50Eric Weinstein?

  You, you're a child. I'm sorry to say that.

• 1:52:53Lex Fridman?

  But, well, let me, well, it's also possible.

• 1:52:56Eric Weinstein?

  Let's fight.

• 1:52:56Lex Fridman?

  It's entirely possible that you're the child. Okay. Because a child would say you would call other people a child.

• 1:53:04Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. Get in the first blow.

• 1:53:07Eric Weinstein?

  It's a big reveal. It's a tell.

• 1:53:10Lex Fridman?

  Because the only power they have is to attack you psychologically.

• 1:53:15Eric Weinstein?

  No.

• 1:53:15Lex Fridman?

  Well, I believe that the army of people that love you.

• 1:53:21Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:21Lex Fridman?

  Is much more powerful than mainstream media, than people that you might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said, which is try to reduce you like the marketing.

• 1:53:34Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:35Lex Fridman?

  Thinking, I just believe there's an army, maybe there's a better term, of people that see you for who you are and are hungry, like.

• 1:53:46Eric Weinstein?

  I'm not disputing those things. That's not what I'm saying.

• 1:53:49Lex Fridman?

  I would venture to say, as your therapist, that you're actually

• 1:53:57Lex Fridman?

  The battle is all in your mind that you have fallen these demons in the system. And they're just a tiny minority and it's all in your mind. They cannot actually remove. They're not strong enough to remove the voice of Eric Weinstein, to silence the voice.

• 1:54:19Eric Weinstein?

  I love this. This is some of the best fiction writing I've ever heard. Let me tell you, I have relatives who've known me my entire life. Where one article in the New York Times, they will believe that over me.

• 1:54:35Lex Fridman?

  My contention is that only that has no power except to affect your psychology. What you have to do is the Rogan thing, which is laugh.

• 1:54:44Eric Weinstein?

  You're not hearing me.

• 1:54:44Lex Fridman?

  Just laugh.

• 1:54:45Eric Weinstein?

  I am laughing.

• 1:54:46Lex Fridman?

  I know, but more.

• 1:54:48Eric Weinstein?

  I'm telling, no, I'm telling you something. Okay, the way this works is through ruin. Ruin can come to anyone. There's no one who cannot be ruined. Every single person is signed up right now to be ruined by the system.

• 1:55:06Lex Fridman?

  But don't you understand that you have more power than the system? The ruin, you can ruin the system. Your Twitter account, the podcast, that's what I'm telling you about the army.

• 1:55:17Eric Weinstein?

  I agree that my Twitter account, my pocket, but what we've seen, for example, you saw what happened to Brett's Articles of Unity project?

• 1:55:25Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:55:26Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, what happened?

• 1:55:27Lex Fridman?

  The, you mean from on the Twitter side?

• 1:55:29Eric Weinstein?

  On the Twitter side, what happened? What happened?

• 1:55:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, actually, it's not an answer.

• 1:55:34Eric Weinstein?

  Say the words.

• 1:55:35Lex Fridman?

  It was blocked or removed from Twitter.

• 1:55:37Eric Weinstein?

  Suspended, account suspended.

• 1:55:40Lex Fridman?

  And.

• 1:55:41Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, I have a direct, I have a direct line to Jack.

• 1:55:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:45Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, so I'm talking to the CEO, who I am crazy enough to still believe in.

• 1:55:51Lex Fridman?

  Good, I do too.

• 1:55:52Eric Weinstein?

  I believe it somehow. There's a very strange thing going on with Jack Dorsey. I cannot possibly reconcile the actions with the person I've, that, that is a next level mind in there.

• 1:56:06Eric Weinstein?

  I'm not, I don't know it well enough to say that it's all next level. I'm not claiming he doesn't have any blind spots. Every smart person I know has blind spots. I don't know what he's up against, blah, blah, blah. There's no way that the Jack Dorsey that I've talked to and the Jack Dorsey that interacted over Articles of Unity can be the same person. He is constrained by that company in some way that doesn't make sense to me. Either that, or he's the most duplicitous person on earth and I'm not believing it. I just don't buy it. Okay. Something horrible is happening.

• 1:56:39Eric Weinstein?

  I, my claim is I can remove you functionally from the chessboard in a tiny number of moves. No matter who you are, no matter how virtuous or how much of a bastard you've been your entire life, it doesn't take more than three or four moves to basically neuter you as a force.

• 1:56:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and I disagree that if that's possible, that means I'm not very good at chess. Like Unity 2020 was removed from Twitter because it's not good enough. Not within the system. Like the army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea was too small.

• 1:57:16Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, but fear, uncertainty and doubt is the name of the game, the coin of the realm.

• 1:57:21Lex Fridman?

  Psychology, though, it's not real power. It just affects the mind.

• 1:57:25Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, I have a reading assignment for you. Because you're Russian, you'll really enjoy this.

• 1:57:31Eric Weinstein?

  As part of the great American tobacco settlement, the Tobacco Institute had to disgorge its archives of all of its strategies, all of its skullduggery and put it on the web for all time so that we could all understand how the tobacco companies got together and destroyed people, right? You see, tobacco destroys people, you can see Scientology destroys people. There are various vindictive organizations that will not tolerate

• 1:58:05Eric Weinstein?

  reality and opposition to them.

• 1:58:07Lex Fridman?

  Let's take him down.

• 1:58:08Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:58:09Lex Fridman?

  That's what I'm trying to tell you is.

• 1:58:10Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, no.

• 1:58:11Lex Fridman?

  So, so why aren't you doing the podcast to return? Because that's one of the weapons of war.

• 1:58:19Eric Weinstein?

  Well, first of all, if you're at war, I don't want to discuss strategy on a podcast. Right?

• 1:58:28Lex Fridman?

  But that's you're misunderstanding.

• 1:58:29Eric Weinstein?

  What did Montgomery say about Rommel? But wasn't his line, I read your book, you beautiful bastard? It's like, why are you using the tactics that you already explained? Okay, so one of the things I'm doing is I'm not having a strategic conversation with you and a hundred, several hundred thousand of our closest friends. I pulled back because this is not the battle that I know what I'm doing. I do not feel passionately enough about defeating Donald Trump to elect Joe Biden, even if that's the way I'm going to ultimately vote. Right? I don't believe in the Biden Democratic Party.

• 1:59:12Eric Weinstein?

  I don't believe in the Trump Republican Party. So, yes, it's an incredibly consequential election, but to me, it's like the Crips and the Bloods and the Latin Kings fighting over the right to extort, you know, a business and the business trying to figure out who it wants to do the extorting.

• 1:59:30Lex Fridman?

  But don't you think, listen, there's very few people that are as good with the English language as you. Don't you think it's possible to draw a line that doesn't, that in between, that finds how we find our common humanity, that ensures a better 2021 without having to say like, Donald Trump is evil, or Joe Biden is incompetent, or any of that, just somehow draw a beautiful line.

• 1:59:58Eric Weinstein?

  I am seeing people in so much pain. This election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who comments on it, Lex.

• 2:00:07Lex Fridman?

  Maybe they're not good enough.

• 2:00:08Eric Weinstein?

  They're not good enough? No, but that, okay.

• 2:00:11Lex Fridman?

  But the hope is.

• 2:00:12Eric Weinstein?

  Do you believe in me?

• 2:00:13Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:00:14Eric Weinstein?

  You do?

• 2:00:15Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:00:16Eric Weinstein?

  All right, listen to me very carefully. My spider sense, my intuition, that has allowed me to survive in this space, I've been mouthing off since the 80s, tells me this is a super dangerous time for smart people to be spending the dry powder because the election doesn't make sense. Doesn't mean that I don't have a sense that one outcome would be better than the other, probably, but the variance on that, I'm not even positive that I'm right.

• 2:00:46Eric Weinstein?

  These two options are so completely inappropriate to the world of 2020. What we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and more silent generation people trying to sort out a highly technical world being mediated through social media.

• 2:01:06Eric Weinstein?

  We need more exclusion. We need more actual elites. The people we've called the elites are not the elite. They need to go.

• 2:01:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we need excellence, competence.

• 2:01:15Eric Weinstein?

  We need people who can be trusted behind closed doors and we need to close the doors so we can't see what those people are doing.

• 2:01:25Eric Weinstein?

  Here's the thing. Imagine that you had a bunch of people who'd all seen action in combat, had all volunteered to be part of the armed services, had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need to. So you were convinced that these people had put their lives on their line for their country, not for a payday. Imagine you had 10 of these people with technical backgrounds, men, women, black, white, Muslim, Jew, doesn't matter, right?

• 2:01:52Eric Weinstein?

  I would trust those people. I'd close the door. I don't want to know what they talked about. I don't want transparency into all of their negotiations. I want to know that they're patriotic, that they see something in the world bigger than themselves and their family fortunes. I want to know that they're courageous. I want to know that they've got all of our well-being and I'm willing to roll the dice. And if they screw us over, I'd rather go down like that.

• 2:02:20Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so I disagree with you there because there's a difference in those and Jaco because because you're not speaking to people with credentials of particular.

• 2:02:30Eric Weinstein?

  No, I'm talking about self-credentialed people.

• 2:02:32Lex Fridman?

  Self-credentialed.

• 2:02:32Eric Weinstein?

  I view Jaco as self-credentialed.

• 2:02:34Lex Fridman?

  But the biggest, the powerful thing about Jaco is he's not only self-credentialed, but he's. Been real with people. The, the magical thing about Jaco isn't his book, isn't his life story, is he's been talking on a podcast for a long, there's something real that happens.

• 2:02:51Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, so if you took, if you took Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard, and you took Jaco Willing, and maybe Jesse Ventura, right? You can take-

• 2:03:03Lex Fridman?

  I see where you're going with this.

• 2:03:04Eric Weinstein?

  What? You can take Bernie Sanders, who's a lone voice. You take all of these people who've like really just risked. Like, why do we trust, why is Katherine Heffron the best that Hollywood ever produced? Because she told Hollywood to go fuck itself. Hard. They gave her four Academy Awards, and she said, "Love you, sweeties, I'm gonna use them as the doorstops for the bathrooms in my house."

• 2:03:31Lex Fridman?

  See, that's skill. That's, uh, that's, that's just-

• 2:03:34Eric Weinstein?

  That's what you were talking about.

• 2:03:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:35Eric Weinstein?

  Be Katherine Heffron. Audrey Heffron is pretty amazing, but Katherine Heffron is next level, right?

• 2:03:42Lex Fridman?

  Well, you, I mean-

• 2:03:43Eric Weinstein?

  That's what you're trying to say to me.

• 2:03:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:45Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, I'm trying to figure it out, Lex. I don't have the answer yet. What I do know is that this election is chewing people up. And I mean two separate things. One, the parties don't have enough integrity, that if you comment either for or against, there's a, a short sequence where you make a comment that's nuanced, you get referenced to something, right? Like, you know, take this thing about, you know, find people on both sides. That is non-resolved after N years, whether the context should be reported or not. We are in some situation in which Democrats and Republicans are primed to fight each other, the way introducing two ants from two different ant colonies always produces a battle.

• 2:04:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:30Eric Weinstein?

  Okay? I don't want to be in that fray, because those people are gonna kill each other mindlessly, like robots. And until the election is concluded-

• 2:04:42Eric Weinstein?

  Like, I, do I think this is dire? Yes. Could it be make or break? Absolutely. I'm not saying that. Do I know which way this goes? I can make an excellent argument that we need to elect Joe Biden right now. We've got a situation which can only be cured by voting for Joe Biden. I can make another argument that we could have a situation that can only be cured by defeating Joe Biden right now and all of the things that the modern Democratic Party represents. Yeah. I don't have, you know, it's, it's not the lady and the tiger. We're choosing between the tiger and the tiger. It's the Sumatran tiger versus the Siberian tiger. Right? I'm trying to think, well, which tiger can I, do I have a better chance against? The key problem for us politically

• 2:05:26Eric Weinstein?

  is that we have to divorce the concept of the center and moderation from kleptocracy. Every time we try to say something like, we need more moderate solutions, we need more pluralistic solution, people will say, wow, you just want to hand us right back into the swamp, don't you? Those swamp people, because the moderates and the swamp people are the same people.

• 2:05:50Eric Weinstein?

  Right? So then we have these two crazy wings. We can't have crazy right wing people. I don't want any tiki torch BS. We can't have crazy left wing. Don't attack my courthouse. Really don't attack my courthouse. And we can't have moderates. It's like, okay, how do we install our children and rape pillage and get these speaking fees when we're out of office and become, you know, cozy with the things where, when we're supposed to be regulating them and then, you know, become their lobbyists, you know, immediately when we leave office, all of this stuff. We need an entirely different system. And I can't talk about that at the moment. When I talk, people say, oh, wow. So you're going to sit this one out because you're a pussy, because

• 2:06:31Eric Weinstein?

  you're a coward? Great to know, Eric. We thought better of you. Bye. Click. Yeah. I don't know what to do. So. But are you thinking of what to do? Yeah. Oh, you better believe it. Look, Brett, Brett had this idea of unity 2020, and I told him it was a wrong idea.

• 2:06:50Eric Weinstein?

  I didn't tell him that Unity 2024 was a wrong idea. I didn't tell him that Unity 2028 is a wrong idea. And if I were to make the case that he was right and I was wrong, because he's now shuttered the thing, right? I would say that the case to be made that he was correct was is that by doing this in 2020, we found out what we were up against. It's good to know that Twitter can turn this off at the drop of a hat.

• 2:07:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:13Eric Weinstein?

  Great to know. It's good to know, as we learned, that you cannot have meetings of presidential candidates in a primary that are not approved of by the party.

• 2:07:29Eric Weinstein?

  Right? Like, they've got this thing figured out, so we don't have any way in. And now Unity 2024 makes sense because Unity 2020 was tried. Okay, I don't know that we get to 2024 under all circumstances, and some we do and some we don't.

• 2:07:46Lex Fridman?

  But there's a game theoretic thing that I'm not sure you're counting for, but you probably are, but let me just make an argument.

• 2:07:54Lex Fridman?

  Is Jack Dorsey very likely listens to your podcast? And wait, this is the power of these words.

• 2:08:04Eric Weinstein?

  Something deep went wrong.

• 2:08:07Lex Fridman?

  But we can change it with the power of words.

• 2:08:11Eric Weinstein?

  Something went wrong at Twitter.

• 2:08:14Lex Fridman?

  They have so much division on their platform.

• 2:08:16Eric Weinstein?

  It's what I'm trying to say. They've got.

• 2:08:18Lex Fridman?

  It's not wrong. They just don't know. They're understaffed.

• 2:08:20Eric Weinstein?

  They have, no, they have an insoluble problem.

• 2:08:23Lex Fridman?

  Difficult to solve.

• 2:08:24Eric Weinstein?

  They have an insoluble problem.

• 2:08:26Lex Fridman?

  This is where you and I disagree.

• 2:08:28Eric Weinstein?

  Because, well, all right.

• 2:08:29Lex Fridman?

  Or I'd like to create a competitor.

• 2:08:30Eric Weinstein?

  No, so then, you know, give it to me.

• 2:08:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:33Eric Weinstein?

  Create the competitor. Show me that you actually have understood this. Because my guess is, is that most of the things that you'll think about, I mean, I can tell you things I've talked to Jack about, which I know would make Twitter much better. However, I think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet, and you subtract off all sorts of context and mutual self-knowledge, the problem is us. It's not the platforms. You're thinking about a technological solution, and I'm saying the problem is, is that we are ultimately the product.

• 2:09:07Lex Fridman?

  And I just disagree with that, and there's a lot of, probably could save that for tomorrow.

• 2:09:10Eric Weinstein?

  I look forward to spending summers in your villa when you debut this product, and I would love to angel invest in it.

• 2:09:20Lex Fridman?

  By the way, in terms of money, I'll never have a villa.

• 2:09:25Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah?

• 2:09:26Lex Fridman?

  No, I will always give away everything I own.

• 2:09:28Eric Weinstein?

  Don't do that.

• 2:09:29Lex Fridman?

  No, sorry, invest into like things like you mentioned, awesome things.

• 2:09:34Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, invest, fine, but a little bit of avuncular advice.

• 2:09:42Eric Weinstein?

  Don't pledge to be the person who disgorges themselves of security. Money is freedom. That's what it is. It's a big hunking pile of freedom. Okay? You can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you, if you don't, you know? So you can use it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money. But generally speaking, Lex, money is freedom, and your voice is important. At least retain the amount of money, security you need to follow Joe's advice. What is the point of F you money if you don't say F you? The number of people who have F you money, who don't say F you,

• 2:10:23Eric Weinstein?

  indicates the number of people who chose the freedom of their wealth to create a prison. They built a prison with the freedom they had, and they walked into it, locked the door.

• 2:10:34Lex Fridman?

  I think it's too difficult not to create. The reason I want to give away the money is because I just know my own psychology, and you create prisons. Our human mind just creates those prisons. The FU money is enough for basic shelter and basic food. That's, that's the optimal FU.

• 2:10:53Eric Weinstein?

  You don't have kids yet.

• 2:10:53Lex Fridman?

  This is a, okay, this is the problem. This is why I'm, so this is me, single Lex, speaking.

• 2:10:59Eric Weinstein?

  Great.

• 2:11:00Lex Fridman?

  But kids.

• 2:11:00Eric Weinstein?

  Future Lex, future Lex, I'm talking to future Lex. Single, single present Lex, please don't listen. Don't be an ass. You're, you're gonna need some money and don't make these pledges to say on a podcast. I'm, I'm, I'm say, I want to save you from yourself. You need money to do many of the beautiful things that we're counting on you to do. Don't F it up.

• 2:11:26Lex Fridman?

  Can I talk to you about Roger Penrose?

• 2:11:28Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 2:11:29Lex Fridman?

  You've talked to Roger on the portal, but also in between the lines and offline, just everything you've said about Roger Penrose. For, for people who don't know, he just recently, a few days ago, won the 2020, shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics. But it's clear to me that he had like a deep, personal impact on you, a connection with you in terms of both your love of mathematics, just the way you see the world. Like this, this is the Eddie Van Halen conversation. This is clearly somebody who's profound in your worldview. Can you, can you talk about Roger? Can you talk about what it means that he won his highest of prizes? Just in general, let's celebrate the man.

• 2:12:14Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, okay. So first of all, there are two other people who won this prize. I'm sorry, I just didn't happen to know who they were before they won. Roger is a very, it is not Roger in particular, but the class from which Roger comes that is so important. So I would put Roger in the class of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang.

• 2:12:44Eric Weinstein?

  Put Witten in there? Yeah. I mean, Witten's a special case, but Witten is weirdly the reverse of the Roger Penrose story, right? Because Witten is the first physicist to win a mathematical Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. Penrose is, in some sense, a mathematician who's now won the Nobel Prize. So it's a perfect sort of a couplet. Yeah.

• 2:13:11Eric Weinstein?

  Roger's class means everything to me. That's the highest achievement of the human mind. I'd probably throw Bach in with Feynman and Dirac and everything, right? I think that he was so inventive, it was very frustrating to watch this career. It was a little bit frustrating to watch Feynman's career. Feynman was so good, and had he been born slightly different, at a slightly different time, I believe, his claim on physics would be far greater.

• 2:13:51Eric Weinstein?

  I feel like Penrose, in some sense, came up a very difficult path, because, you see, Einstein effectively solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the beginning. As a result, the children of Einstein are impoverished, because there wasn't as much to pick off of the trees and sell at the market, whereas Bohr didn't, and Planck didn't do nearly as good of a job with quantum theory. So there's lots to do in quantum theory. I think that Roger affected me personally by a diagram that I saw in a paper of Herman Gluck at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the first picture I'd ever seen of the Hopf vibration sketched.

• 2:14:33Eric Weinstein?

  And that, you know, weirdly, I brought that to the Rogan program in order to sort of convey the wonder. I was recapitulating my own journey.

• 2:14:44Eric Weinstein?

  I think I probably saw that at like age 16 or something. It just flipped my mind.

• 2:14:50Eric Weinstein?

  Roger is incredibly visual. He's incredibly geometric. He's incredibly sui generis. He just does his own thing. He's got lots of bets. None of them had really come through the way you would hope. And I think they stretched the rules, to be blunt about it.

• 2:15:08Lex Fridman?

  To give him the prize?

• 2:15:09Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I do.

• 2:15:11Lex Fridman?

  You said this thing on Twitter, which is beautiful, that every once in a while comes a human being that gives value to the prize versus the prize giving value to the human.

• 2:15:22Eric Weinstein?

  Two different kinds of prizes. The reason that we care about the Nobel Prize isn't because of Alfred Nobel. It's because it came along at the right time to reward Einstein, Dirac, Schrodinger, Feynman. Most of the, most of the people who should have won, won. Most of the awards are not good in the sense that they don't really follow. The prize is used to rewrite history. That's its problem. So it's, you should have a love hate relationship with it because on the one hand, it does focus the world on what really matters. And on the other hand, it distorts what really matters. And both of

• 2:16:05Eric Weinstein?

  those functions take place simultaneously. In this case, I think that they violated their own rules slightly. So it wasn't really clearly a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion. But they, like, we better give this award to somebody of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize is fully funded with prestige going forward. That's, that's sort of my weird speculative guess as to what happened. And so Roger's getting on in years and the person should be alive. So they, I think they bent the rules and I think they couldn't have bent it for a better person. And I hope they will not bend the rules out of weakness, but out of strength in future. Would be great to get Madame Wu.

• 2:16:52Eric Weinstein?

  And Emmy Nerd, a posthumous prize along with Doug Prasher, George Sudarshan and George Zweig, as well as Ernst Stuckelberg Nobel Prizes. There have been some terrible omissions, the first two being females who revolutionized our view of the world. And I take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people from ethnic groups or genders or whatever, in order to make it plural and inclusive, if it's not following the work. And I feel very clear that in a few cases, we know there was a real problem with the Nobel Committee, because we have stunning accomplishments.

• 2:17:36Eric Weinstein?

  And try to get through a day as a physicist without Nerd's theorem, and try to imagine the universe without Madame Wu's discovery that left and right don't appear to be symmetric. I mean, these are terrible omissions, and they're a huge blot on science for not being more inclusive when it matters. Yeah, so just like you said, the Nobel Prize is plagued by omissions as much as... And distortions and dilutions. For example, Dirac and Schrödinger were, I believe, given the prize in the same year. There's no reason that those two people needed to dilute each other. The same thing with, you know, Dyson was an omission. Tomonaga probably got included in part because we had an opportunity to show that something had happened on both

• 2:18:20Eric Weinstein?

  sides of the Pacific after the war. But I don't think we needed to dilute Weinberg or Feynman or Schwinger. It just makes me, it makes me somewhat sick. All of these people are such important giants, and it has to do with the field, I think, not wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget cuts and worldly pressures. So I think it's really important that we have absolute superstars, because we produce superstars. We acknowledge them, we don't dilute them, and that we bend the rules to make sure that the prize stays funded with the prestige that comes from giving

• 2:19:00Eric Weinstein?

  it to the Roger Penrose's, Albert Einstein's, and Paul Dirac's of the world. Can we talk a little bit about... Evil? Sure.

• 2:19:12Lex Fridman?

  I haven't actually talked to you about this topic. And it's been sitting on my mind. Mostly because everybody at MIT is quiet about it. Which is Jeffrey Epstein. I didn't get a chance to experience what MIT was like at the time when Jeffrey Epstein was part of this. But it's, I'd love to try to understand. How evil was allowed to flourish in a place that I love? Whether you think. Maybe let me ask the question this way. Was it the man evil?

• 2:19:56Lex Fridman?

  Or was the system evil? Or is evil too strong a word? Because what I see is the presence of this particular human being. In the eyes of many destroyed. The reputations of many really strong scientists and also weakened the ability. Like weaken the institution of MIT by. Making everybody quiet, like almost making them unable to say anything interesting or difficult. Yeah. And what is that?

• 2:20:41Lex Fridman?

  And what am I supposed to?

• 2:20:44Eric Weinstein?

  We don't know.

• 2:20:45Lex Fridman?

  Why is everyone quiet about Jeffrey? What I want to scream.

• 2:20:47Eric Weinstein?

  No, we don't know. Obviously, I want to scream about it too, right? And I probably have said too much about Jeffrey Epstein. Look, something horrible happened. I don't know what it is. But something horrible happened. And. You know, at the one thing that, okay, let's just do this. The first thing I need to do is I need to get rid of this woke crap about power differentials. Okay? In general. You can talk about hypergamy and power differentials are Russell conjugates of the same concept.

• 2:21:26Eric Weinstein?

  Just the way particular proportions and symmetries are mathematically provable to be attractive. In females to males.

• 2:21:37Eric Weinstein?

  Male attractiveness is largely determined by male competence and ability to amass power and success and all these sorts of things. The relationship between consenting adults is, quite frankly, not something I want to sort out. The relationship between the sexuality of adults and minors, and particularly, you know, there's the 17, 18 issue. That's very different than 12, 13. We're talking about really sick depravity with respect to what it appears that Jeffrey

• 2:22:22Eric Weinstein?

  Epstein was involved in at some level. I believe this story is super complicated, in part because I think one thing Jeffrey Epstein was doing was providing money, encouragement, and support to scientists. Another thing he was doing, I believe, was giving tax advice to very rich people. I believe another thing he was doing was hooking very wealthy people up with young adult females. Another thing he was doing, I think, was doing stuff with children that will curl your toes.

• 2:23:05Eric Weinstein?

  So there's an entire spectrum of different stuff. And at the moment, nobody can pull apart or deconflate anything because the woke thing comes over it and says, you know, I think it's disgusting that, you know, a 43-year-old billionaire would be partying with a 23-year-old. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I don't want to adjudicate that. I'm worried about 12- and 14-year-olds that we're not talking about. But I mostly... I don't think MIT was deep into pedophilia. My guess is that that did not happen. I don't think that the scientists were the targets of the really sick depraved stuff. It's my guess.

• 2:23:49Eric Weinstein?

  My guess is that what you're looking at was a government construct. It may have been our government, it may have been a joint government project, it may have been somebody else's government, I don't know. I believe that, in part...

• 2:24:04Eric Weinstein?

  We don't really understand Robert Maxwell.

• 2:24:08Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, who's Robert Maxwell?

• 2:24:09Eric Weinstein?

  Ghislaine Maxwell's father was very active in scientific publishing. I don't know where peer review came from. I would love to run down the relationship between peer review and Robert Maxwell. I would love to run down the missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and the mysterious fortune of Jeffrey Epstein, because I don't think Jeffrey Epstein ever ran a hedge fund. I don't think he was a money advisor the way people claimed.

• 2:24:34Lex Fridman?

  So there's two things I want to talk about. So one is the shallow conversations of woke identity politics that you're referring to seems to be removing everyone's ability, no, everyone's willingness.

• 2:24:49Eric Weinstein?

  One of the things.

• 2:24:49Lex Fridman?

  To talk about like, what the hell is this person? And how is he allowed? More, most importantly, to how do we prevent it in the future? And from the individual perspective, the question for me is the same question I ask about 1930s Nazi Germany. I've been reading way too much, probably, or not enough about that period currently, is if I was in Germany at that time, what is the heroic action to take? When I think about MIT with Jeffrey Epstein, what is the heroic action to take? We're not talking about virtue signaling action.

• 2:25:23Eric Weinstein?

  You wouldn't know what.

• 2:25:24Lex Fridman?

  I would like to.

• 2:25:25Eric Weinstein?

  You would not know what you're up against, Lex. You're not hearing me. The problem here is, what was Jeffrey Epstein?

• 2:25:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, that question might be the heroic action to take.

• 2:25:35Eric Weinstein?

  That's all I'm trying to say. I'm just trying to get my first question. You have to map the silence with Jeffrey Epstein. What you're describing is a map of the silence at MIT.

• 2:25:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:47Eric Weinstein?

  Well, is there a map of the silence in Washington State around Jeffrey Epstein? The Bay Area, New York City? The amount of silence around Jeffrey Epstein should be telling you everything.

• 2:26:01Eric Weinstein?

  The number of dogs that don't bark is like nothing we've ever seen.

• 2:26:06Lex Fridman?

  You're exactly correct, but I want to know what is it telling us? Because what it's telling me is not some kind of conspiracy, but more a disappointing weakness.

• 2:26:19Eric Weinstein?

  Not some kind of conspiracy?

• 2:26:21Lex Fridman?

  Is not some kind of conspiracy, but.

• 2:26:23Eric Weinstein?

  You gotta be kidding. No, you're so, you're so afraid of saying the word conspiracy that you don't think it's a conspiracy?

• 2:26:28Lex Fridman?

  I personally, I just think it's people who I thought were my heroes just being weak.

• 2:26:34Eric Weinstein?

  No, be of good cheer, sir.

• 2:26:38Lex Fridman?

  A cheer?

• 2:26:39Eric Weinstein?

  Be of good cheer.

• 2:26:40Lex Fridman?

  Of good cheer?

• 2:26:41Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Lex Fridman?

  You think that there is a conspiracy?

• 2:26:42Eric Weinstein?

  I think there is a conspiracy.

• 2:26:46Lex Fridman?

  That'd be a very impressive one. That's the scale of it. I tend to believe that large scale can only be an emergent phenomenon.

• 2:26:55Eric Weinstein?

  Really? I find this so fascinating.

• 2:26:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:58Eric Weinstein?

  Because I always see you as like a logic. Logic and love drive your, drive your soul. You're very logical, you're relentless. You've got a lot of love in your heart. I believe that if you would review the video, where is it from? Dubai or Abu Dhabi of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest? Ever seen this thing?

• 2:27:18Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 2:27:19Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, it's the assassination in 2010, 10 years ago, of Mahmoud Al Mabou, something like that in Dubai, where I believe 26

• 2:27:33Eric Weinstein?

  separate individuals on multiple teams are shown converging, coming in from all over the world on false passports,

• 2:27:42Eric Weinstein?

  pretending to be tennis players or, you know, business people or vacationers. And all of these teams have different functions. And they murder this guy in his, in his hotel room. And the Dubai, I guess, chief of police or security officer was so angered that he put together this amazing video that says, we can completely detail what you did. We caught you on closed circuit TV. We don't know exactly who you are because your disguises and your false passports. But yeah, 26 people converged to kill one.

• 2:28:22Eric Weinstein?

  No, I don't believe you. I don't believe after COINTELPRO, an Operation Paperclip and Operation Mockingbird,

• 2:28:32Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know whether I should even bring up Rex 84.

• 2:28:37Eric Weinstein?

  To not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy.

• 2:28:41Lex Fridman?

  So you have a sense that evil can be as competent or more competent?

• 2:28:48Eric Weinstein?

  First of all, when evil wants to operate at scale, it needs to make sure that people don't try to figure out evil. When evil operates at scale,

• 2:28:57Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:28:57Eric Weinstein?

  From first principles, you have to realize that evil must not want it investigated.

• 2:29:03Lex Fridman?

  That's correct.

• 2:29:05Eric Weinstein?

  The most efficient way

• 2:29:08Eric Weinstein?

  to keep yourself from being investigated, if you are an evil institutional player who needs to do this repeatedly, is to invest in a world in which no one can afford to say the word conspiracy. You will notice that there is a special radioactivity around the word conspiracy. We have provable conspiracies. We have admitted to conspiracies. You have been invited to conspiracies. There is no shortage. Conspiracies are everywhere. Some of them are mundane. Some of them are like price fixing cartels, you know, or trade groups are generally speaking conspiracies. So the first thing you have to realize is that all of us are under a in a memetic complex where you can be taken off the chessboard by saying conspiracy theorist.

• 2:29:53Eric Weinstein?

  Get done. It's a one, it's like a one line proof. We don't have to listen to Lex. He said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show. Okay. That is partially distorting our conversation. If you want to ask me about Jeffrey Epstein, you have to agree with me that that is a logical description of what you would have to have if you wanted to commit conspiracies, is that you have to make sure that people are dissuaded from investigating.

• 2:30:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:30:15Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 2:30:16Lex Fridman?

  But it's a very, it's a fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy theories and the world without conspiracy theories to the, to the shallow glance looks the same.

• 2:30:28Eric Weinstein?

  Well, my point, there is responsible conspiracy theorizing, where you look at the history of unearthed conspiracies. And just like you would with any other topic, just think about how different the rules in your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing, where X can be anything.

• 2:30:49Eric Weinstein?

  Right? It's like if I say to you,

• 2:30:54Eric Weinstein?

  I can say the statement that average weight is not the same between widely separated populations. You'd say, yeah. I'd say average height is not the same between widely separated populations. You'd say, yeah. Then I say, in fact, no continuous variable that has that shows variation should be expected to be identical between widely separated. Of course, Eric, like IQ. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Right? So we have a violent reaction to specific topics. So the first thing I want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into everyone's mind.

• 2:31:35Lex Fridman?

  That's really important to state. Yeah, that's it's very interesting that. And as a prerequisite, as you're saying, that would be the first step if you wanted to

• 2:31:46Lex Fridman?

  pull off a conspiracy in a competent way, that's you would have to first convince the world of that.

• 2:31:51Eric Weinstein?

  I just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time. I highly recommend it.

• 2:31:57Lex Fridman?

  1971?

• 2:31:59Eric Weinstein?

  Well, the film is titled 1971, and it's about the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI, which was run by a student of Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist, and broke into FBI offices in Pennsylvania to steal files which allowed freedom of information requests that discovered a huge conspiracy. It was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy inside the federal government, a double conspiracy story,

• 2:32:28Eric Weinstein?

  which launched multiple conspiracies. I think that the problem with modern Americans is that they are so timid that they don't even learn about the history of conspiracies that we have absolutely proven. So with that done, Jeff Epstein, in my opinion, represented somebody's construction.

• 2:32:49Eric Weinstein?

  I don't think that-

• 2:32:49Lex Fridman?

  Kind of scary to think about.

• 2:32:51Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. Well, what part of the story isn't scary? I in part did something which I imagine may get me destroyed. Because I was more worried about being destroyed by somebody else I had a conversation with around Jeff Epstein. Right? So I'm just trying to like, get, let it be known that I don't know anything more than I've already said. Now, your friends at MIT.

• 2:33:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:17Eric Weinstein?

  Their problem is, is that Jeff Epstein showed up as the only person capable of continuing US scientific tradition. You see, the US scientific tradition is a little bit like the Russian. It's, it's combative. Okay? And we're a free society and we act like a free society. We're a rich society and we research like we're a rich society. That is historically, and then came the 1970s. And William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece Awards and the idea that we have to, we're paying too much. And these are welfare queens and lab coats and blah, blah, blah, blah. We need more transparency, more oversight.

• 2:34:01Eric Weinstein?

  Everything went to hell. And the national culture of US science was lost. The thing that produced all this prosperity and security and power was lost. And then Jeff Epstein shows up. And a tiny number of funders, maybe Fred Cavley, maybe Yuri Milner, maybe, who else would be in this category? Peter Thiel, to an extent. Howard Hughes would be the largest of these things, which has different grant structures than the NIH, gave people a modicum of risk-taking ability.

• 2:34:43Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, well, when Jeff Epstein showed up, everybody wanted to take risk in science. And suddenly, a charismatic billionaire says, hey, I can make that work for you. Here's $100,000. Go research something crazy. Well, that money was supposed to be provided by the federal government under the terms of the Endless Frontier Compact between the federal government and the universities. And the federal government and the taxpayers welched, okay?

• 2:35:13Lex Fridman?

  So that's one place to lay the blame for Jeffrey Epstein, is that the failure of the federal government.

• 2:35:20Eric Weinstein?

  To honor its, to honor its commitment.

• 2:35:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:24Eric Weinstein?

  Right? So the universities became psychopathic. It's not like everybody doesn't remember what we're supposed to be doing to be moral. But the point was, there wasn't enough money to be moral. So it was time to, to eye each other as a source of protein, as I like to say. And in that process, Jeffrey Epstein said, hey, come to my world. We can do it like we used to do.

• 2:35:52Eric Weinstein?

  So in part, my point is, is that almost none of your colleagues at MIT have that kind of religious commitment to science, that they're willing to go down with ship science.

• 2:36:05Eric Weinstein?

  The Galileo Galilei thing became very important to science because occasionally you just have to say, look, this isn't about me and you. There isn't enough money in the world to buy the kind of legacy I want to leave to this planet.

• 2:36:23Eric Weinstein?

  This is one of the great things about science. You know, potentially it's worth dying for.

• 2:36:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm glad you said it.

• 2:36:33Lex Fridman?

  Science is one of the things at its best that's worth dying for.

• 2:36:38Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, I'm not eager to martyr myself, but I've certainly risked my health, my fortune.

• 2:36:47Eric Weinstein?

  You know, I've destroyed myself economically over science and, um,

• 2:36:54Eric Weinstein?

  and my, my, my, my need to oppose these sons of bitches in chaired professorships who are destroying our system along with everyone else.

• 2:37:04Lex Fridman?

  Let me bring in Grandmaster Uwe into this.

• 2:37:09Eric Weinstein?

  Uwe.

• 2:37:09Lex Fridman?

  Uwe.

• 2:37:10Eric Weinstein?

  Master Uwe.

• 2:37:12Lex Fridman?

  I think he's a Grandmaster.

• 2:37:14Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, that would make him a chess-playing turtle.

• 2:37:16Lex Fridman?

  So I read some Wikipedia.

• 2:37:18Eric Weinstein?

  Uh-oh.

• 2:37:21Lex Fridman?

  Shifu's a master. There's apparently only one Grandmaster, and that's Uwe. Anyway.

• 2:37:27Eric Weinstein?

  Is the phrase "Grandmaster" ever uttered in the script?

• 2:37:29Lex Fridman?

  I don't think so.

• 2:37:30Eric Weinstein?

  I don't think so.

• 2:37:30Lex Fridman?

  But there's a story.

• 2:37:31Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, there's off-script canon? I'm gonna call Glenn Berger right now and find out if any of this is true.

• 2:37:39Lex Fridman?

  All right. You're not supposed to call out my journalistic integrity. But.

• 2:37:44Eric Weinstein?

  Master Uwe.

• 2:37:45Lex Fridman?

  Master Uwe. He says a couple of things I'd like to bring up with you. So, one, as part of a longer quote, recommends that you should find a battle worth fighting.

• 2:38:01Lex Fridman?

  We've talked about several battles just now. What is the battle worth fighting for, for Eric Weinstein, in the next few months, in the next year?

• 2:38:13Eric Weinstein?

  There's only one.

• 2:38:19Eric Weinstein?

  Well, it's the Moses. It's the Moses thing.

• 2:38:23Eric Weinstein?

  It's time to go. It's time to leave. This place is over.

• 2:38:25Lex Fridman?

  To get off the planet.

• 2:38:27Eric Weinstein?

  I, yeah, I freak people out when I say that, but, like, look at your world. You just got introduced to the problem of a virus. Wait till it's fusion devices, and you understand what it means to have one interconnected planet with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else, you know?

• 2:38:48Lex Fridman?

  So do you see the foray, your work in physics, and maybe like the echoes of it in ship Elon?

• 2:38:58Eric Weinstein?

  Everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming, if we don't have one, should work on the plan that he/she thinks best. Right? So Elon wants to do rockets. People misinterpret me. Meta Eric says, "I don't think that's a smart plan."

• 2:39:21Eric Weinstein?

  Regular Eric says

• 2:39:25Eric Weinstein?

  all people who have a hope should do that thing.

• 2:39:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:30Eric Weinstein?

  At least it's Mars, man. At least it's the moon and Mars and maybe Titan and whatever. And I don't think it'll work and it doesn't make sense and it looks silly.

• 2:39:38Lex Fridman?

  But that's exactly the kind of fight worth fighting.

• 2:39:40Eric Weinstein?

  But it's, it's the kind of, it's for the same reason that I went on Brett's Unity 2020 thing when I didn't think it had a hope in hell and people, you know, are making fun of it. It's like, we gotta do things that make, that make us feel dumb and silly and childish that possibly have a hope of working. Okay. So everybody should do something. My version of this, I am the most hopeful about because I wouldn't have chosen to do, if I thought that Daniel Schmachtenberger's Wisdom Project was a better hope, I'd do that. It's more down to earth in a certain way. I just think that it's more probable. Look, we got from powered flight with the Wright brothers and wind tunnels to sending back

• 2:40:20Eric Weinstein?

  images from the surface of Titan via Huygens Cassini in less than a century. Okay. What we can do, if we can change the laws of physics, is something we can't even conceive of. It may be that it buys us nothing. And at least we will, we will know why we died on this planet.

• 2:40:41Lex Fridman?

  As a small aside, I think this is not the right time to take the full journey, but I feel like you'll guide me like Master Hui did and I'm the Kung Fu Panda at some

• 2:40:54Eric Weinstein?

  They only have one conversation.

• 2:40:57Eric Weinstein?

  We're on our like, what?

• 2:40:58Lex Fridman?

  We didn't, we didn't. Well, we're, we're, we're Jews and they weren't. So we talk too much, but the guide doesn't have to be with words.

• 2:41:07Eric Weinstein?

  You don't think Poe was Jewish?

• 2:41:10Lex Fridman?

  It's debatable. We'll have to go back to the Wikipedia.

• 2:41:13Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:41:16Lex Fridman?

  Is there that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source code, the source code of our universe? Can you comment on where, since we last spoke, where your thinking has been, has roamed around geometric community, around that work in physics? In this fight?

• 2:41:38Eric Weinstein?

  I'm trying to figure out when to release it now. I mean, I've released the video. The video, quite honestly, I think it has a very bizarre reaction. I think one of the things that I've learned from the video, because the video is coming up on half a million views on YouTube alone, to say nothing of the, um, the audio. But yeah, it produced a very strange reaction. One of the things I don't think that I properly understood is that most physicists don't talk in this geometric language. I thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds,

• 2:42:22Eric Weinstein?

  bundles, differential forms, connections, curvature, tensors, et cetera. And I, I saw a lot of the comments would say things like, I have a PhD in theoretical physics and I'm not even familiar with all of these concepts. And I think that was probably a distortion coming from living in Cambridge, Massachusetts for almost 20 years.

• 2:42:43Lex Fridman?

  So what's the solution to that?

• 2:42:46Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I mean, I can translate it into that. I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to. My problem is, is, you know, my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge, the same people have these perverse incentives on them, where they've invested in these programs that didn't work. So they're extremely hostile and kind of difficult to deal with. The fact that I'm not a physicist has its own set of issues, which is that effectively it's like the hermit kingdom. They don't get any visitors and they don't necessarily want somebody, you know, rolling up and saying, I know how to do physics. So I'm, I'm always very clear, I'm not a physicist.

• 2:43:31Eric Weinstein?

  That said, if I wait too long, I don't know that theoretical physics is really going to exist after the boomers, because everyone, and you, I think you had Wolfram on your program, I don't remember whether he said this to you or Brian Keating, but he said something like, "Everybody got discouraged. It was too hard." "We can't do that, guys. We cannot do that. There's something about the renormalization revolution that enervated the physics community, because it taught them, just because you can see in this energy regime, doesn't mean you can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how, you know, coupling constants run and what kind of UV fixed points exist, blah, blah, blah." Somehow, that discouraged people from guessing, from believing. Everything became an effective

• 2:44:16Eric Weinstein?

  theory. The beauty of the effective theory wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe, just the beauty of an energy level. So I think that renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened in science, and also, its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic. Well, the story I'm telling myself is that, in part, I'm waiting for them to get weaker. But on the other hand, I don't know that we have any time left. And so...

• 2:44:43Lex Fridman?

  Are you also thinking about ways of, you know, the podcast medium is revolutionary for public, for discourse, for what, I mean, I don't even know the right words for it. Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for re-energizing the physics community? So basically, for communicating, Jimmy?

• 2:45:03Eric Weinstein?

  Look, I have a fantasy, okay? My fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem. And it goes back to this thing that I read about in Feynman's books, about Tartaglia. They asked him this question, like, "What's the greatest thing that ever happened in math?" And he says, "Tartaglia's solution of the cubic." It's just like the weirdest answer. So you're like, "Okay, I'll bite. Why is it Tartaglia's solution of the cubic?" And he said, "Because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound that the ancients had failed to do." I was like, "Oh, I get it." It's the thing that opens up new psychology that says, "Maybe things are possible again."

• 2:45:44Lex Fridman?

  It's in your orchard.

• 2:45:46Eric Weinstein?

  Your orchard.

• 2:45:49Eric Weinstein?

  New farmers, new people who can find fruit that they can pick. And once you have one person do that, very often you get many. Like, one of the things that we were talking about with Eddie Van Halen, the reason that he created a revolution and somebody like Roy Buchanan did not, is that you could follow Eddie Van Halen. You couldn't pioneer it. And maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly and as fast and as inventively, but you could follow. Once you understand that there is a tapping principle. It was just the beginning of something called percussive guitar.

• 2:46:23Eric Weinstein?

  My belief is that once we start innovating in the present, everything will come. Because everything that around us is screwed up.

• 2:46:34Lex Fridman?

  On that, let me, with one last question, bring back Master Oogway. The, probably the most famous quote of his, right? With, "Yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."

• 2:46:50Eric Weinstein?

  It's very beautiful, although I would have gone with, "Quit, don't quit, noodles, don't noodles."

• 2:46:57Lex Fridman?

  I feel, I feel like people need to know way too much context for that to make sense.

• 2:47:02Eric Weinstein?

  It's hell with, it's your audience.

• 2:47:04Lex Fridman?

  Just to hell with context. Yep, they, they'll figure it out. Well, let me ask, what are you grateful for today? What is your present? We've talked about a lot of dark things, but what do you, brings you joy to your heart? That, I can't believe I'm lucky enough to have this.

• 2:47:25Eric Weinstein?

  No, Nyla and Zev. My wife, Pierre. The fact that we've got our health, all the, the little things. Saying grace after meals. You're coming over for Friday night Shabbat dinner. So we'll say, we'll, we'll, we'll bench together and say grace. It's important to just, like, this bottle of water in front of me. I made a point of just thinking about how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle that happens to be placed in front of me because somebody cared. Yeah, you know, so that, that small thing made a difference to me.

• 2:48:07Eric Weinstein?

  I still have strength for the fight so far. I think that's something I'm grateful for. I can't believe that I'm not more beaten down after all of this nonsense. I have the most interesting set of friends. I really do. I mean, I'm not that rich by monetary standards, but if there were friend billionaires, Forbes would be all over my ass. I just can't believe who I can talk to, you know, at the drop of a hat. And I'm really grateful.

• 2:48:52Eric Weinstein?

  I think this is the end of something profound and it's the beginning of whatever is next. And whatever is next could be terminal. Whatever is next could be amazing. Whatever is next could be a return to the horrors of the early 20th century that doesn't manage to go totally catastrophic, but you know, takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process. I'm grateful to having half of my life in the rearview mirror. Maybe it took place in a bubble and maybe it was unsustainable, but it was nice to be able to move around the world without a mask. It was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world, even if it was from a cot

• 2:49:35Eric Weinstein?

  in a hostel in some country. To fall in love. Absolutely. I mean. It was a good life. Find the last Indian Jewish girl left. Who knew? You're a lucky guy. Well, let me just say. Actually, there's something I wanted to just say before you get to that. Yes. I forgot to say something. Falling in love with an intellectual collaborator is a special thing that not everybody gets a chance to do. Like, I think when I met Pia, I fell deeply in love with her, all her normal characteristics. She and I had an antagonistic relationship around geometry and economics.

• 2:50:20Eric Weinstein?

  And then weirdly, you know, just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film, they hate each other, the two feel like we're fighting with each other, cats and dogs. And finally, you know, the sexual tension clearly was so, so thick you could cut it with a knife. And we came up with geometric marginalism, which is this other theory, not geometric unity, which allowed me to inhabit space

• 2:50:45Eric Weinstein?

  with somebody who I already knew intimately and had fallen in love with, and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play and to dance. It's sort of the intellectual version of the tango. One of the most romantic periods of my life that doesn't fall into most people's experience. That was a chance to see something totally unexpected. Haven't really had it since because she doesn't want to revisit the material, but something I'm super grateful for that's very particular and unique.

• 2:51:15Lex Fridman?

  But to flip the tables on you for hundreds of thousands, I think millions of people,

• 2:51:23Lex Fridman?

  I can speak, me and them are really grateful, one, that you exist, and two, sorry for your podcast. And I do hope your voice in some form continues to, to reverberate, I think, in the, at least in the 2021s and, and beyond, even if it takes a brief pause.

• 2:51:49Eric Weinstein?

  We're pausing at the moment. We've recorded some for future episodes and I'm recording for you. I really appreciate that. I mean, it's earnestness trades at a discount at the moment because it's easy to make fun of it. And one of the things I like best about you is that you and I are both fairly earnest. We may, we may joke and jab, but honestly, there's a project here and a world to win, as they say. The thing that I want my and your listeners to know is that I'm not stepping away from the podcast because I don't appreciate that people really want more. It's not. You know, this is hugely financially costly to me.

• 2:52:34Eric Weinstein?

  Um, I want to make sure you guys are getting the best that I can do. And destroying myself right in front of an election, I think Lex is incorrect. I think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren't any planes in the sky that aren't either colored red or colored blue, um, is a big danger, given how angry I am at the system. And I don't want to be removed from the chessboard because if nobody's going to talk about Jeff Epstein, there need to be people. If nobody's going to talk about various things that we've talked about on these programs, I want to make sure that I'm there. Do I think that this is potentially an existential election? Yes. Do I, my positive that I know that my way to bed is the right way out? No, I'm not. I don't know, people. I just don't know.

• 2:53:19Eric Weinstein?

  And where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms of how it is chewing up smart people. That I decided, it's really not about cowardice because I, it's hard for me to restrain myself. I have so many reactions every day. This is really about trying to plan for all of our futures to make sure that I'm around. I had a huge concern that what happened to Brett's Articles of Unity was going to happen to Brett, it's going to happen to the YouTube channels. I want to make sure that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket. So if something goes wrong over there, so you know, that's the whole idea of the intellectual dark web, which is at some level, a loose confederation.

• 2:54:01Eric Weinstein?

  It can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work. It can dissolve so that there really isn't anything. The thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately, when the hit pieces come, they don't come for what it is that they're angry at you about. They come for where they can get you. And so it's very important that right in front of an election.

• 2:54:26Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I think that the desire of the old system to defend itself through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects of the new America. And we have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions keeping individuals with podcasts and the ability to reach millions like through Substack out of their domain. I don't surrender this domain to them. They have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us. And I believe that they could remove you or me in an instant. By the end of today, if they wanted us off the chessboard, we would be off the chessboard. I know that's not your perspective. My goal is to stay here as long as possible to make sure that

• 2:55:08Eric Weinstein?

  you have enough of a counterbalancing set of ideas and to let and help other podcasters start. And my hope is, is that that works. But, you know, long heroism, short martyrdom is a good motto for anyone. And I try to remember the short martyrdom part of that.

• 2:55:31Lex Fridman?

  First of all, beautifully put. Second of all, way to end the conversation and the disagreement, which is how you hook them for the next conversation to be continued.

• 2:55:41Eric Weinstein?

  When Lex says.

• 2:55:44Lex Fridman?

  Eric, it's a huge honor. Thank you once again.

• 2:55:47Eric Weinstein?

  Lex, really appreciate every time we get together. Thanks, buddy.

• 2:55:50Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein. And thank you to our sponsors. Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Sun Basket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety into my culinary life. SEM Rush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers, but someone should. It helps you make good decisions. And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with

• 2:56:34Lex Fridman?

  five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen in a song titled Hallelujah.

• 2:56:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, maybe there's a God above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who out-drew you. And it's not a cry that you hear at night. It's not somebody who's seen the light. It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.