Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, physicist, and managing director of Thiel Capital. He formed the “intellectual dark web” which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others. Video version is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wq9x2QcZN0. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, Medium https://medium.com/@lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations.

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. He's a mathematician, economist, physicist, and a managing director of Thiel Capital. He coined the term, and you could say is the founder of the Intellectual Dark Web, which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast at MIT and beyond. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at LexFriedman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

• 1:01Eric Weinstein?

  Are you nervous about this?

• 1:03Lex Fridman?

  Scared shitless.

• 1:04Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:07Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Kung Fu Panda as one of your favorite movies. It has the usual profound master-student dynamic going on. So who was, who has been a teacher that significantly influenced the direction of your thinking and life's work? So if you're the Kung Fu Panda, who was your Shifu?

• 1:25Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, well, it's interesting because I didn't see Shifu as being the teacher.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  Who was the teacher?

• 1:30Eric Weinstein?

  Uwe, Master Uwe, the turtle.

• 1:33Lex Fridman?

  Oh, the turtle, right.

• 1:34Eric Weinstein?

  They only meet twice in the entire film, and the first conversation sort of doesn't count. So the magic of the film, in fact, its point is that the teaching that really matters is transferred during a single conversation.

• 1:55Eric Weinstein?

  And it's very brief. And so who played that role in my life? I would say either my grandfather, Harry Rubin and his wife Sophie Rubin, my grandmother, or Tom Lehrer.

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  Tom Lehrer?

• 2:12Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:13Lex Fridman?

  In which way?

• 2:14Eric Weinstein?

  If you give a child Tom Lehrer records, what you do is you destroy their ability to be taken over by later malware. And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene, that it destroys the ability to lead a normal life for many people. So if I meet somebody who's usually

• 2:40Eric Weinstein?

  really shifted from any kind of neurotypical presentation, I'll often ask them, are you a Tom Lehrer fan? And the odds that they will respond are quite high.

• 2:50Lex Fridman?

  Now, Tom Lehrer is poisoning pigeons in the park?

• 2:54Eric Weinstein?

  Tom Lehrer? That's very interesting. There are a small number of Tom Lehrer songs that broke into the general population. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Element Song, and perhaps The Vatican Rag. So when you meet somebody who knows those songs but doesn't know...

• 3:09Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you?

• 3:11Eric Weinstein?

  Harshly. No, but you're Russian, so undoubtedly you know Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, that song.

• 3:17Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:18Eric Weinstein?

  So that was a song about plagiarism that was in fact plagiarized, which most people don't know, from Danny Kaye. Where Danny Kaye did a song called Stanislavski of the Musky Arts. And so Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job of plagiarizing a song about, and making it about plagiarism, and then making it about this mathematician who worked in non-Euclidean geometry. That was like giving heroin to a child. It was extremely addictive and eventually led me to a lot of different places, one of which may have been a PhD in mathematics.

• 3:53Lex Fridman?

  And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics, I believe, at Harvard, something like that?

• 3:58Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. I just had dinner with him, in fact. When my son turned 13, we didn't tell him, but his bar mitzvah present was dinner with his hero, Tom Lehrer. And Tom Lehrer was 88 years old, sharp as a tack, irreverent and funny as hell, and just...

• 4:19Eric Weinstein?

  You know, there are very few people in this world that you have to meet while they're still here, and that was definitely one for our family.

• 4:26Lex Fridman?

  So that wit is a reflection of intelligence in some kind of deep way. Like where that would be a good test of intelligence, whether you're a Tom Lehrer fan. So what do you think that is about wit? About that kind of humor, ability to see the absurdity in existence? Do you think that's connected to intelligence? Or are we just two Jews on a mic that appreciate that kind of humor?

• 4:51Eric Weinstein?

  No, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence. You can see it. There's a place where Tom Lehrer decides that he's going to lampoon Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever, meaningless wordplay. And he has, forget the, well, let's see. He's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan wrote it. And he says, "That I, Mister, depressed her young sister, nee mister, this Mister depester she tried. Pestering sisters a festering blister, you best to resist her, say aye. The sister persisted, the Mister resisted, I kissed her all loyalty slip. When she said I could have her, her sister's cadaver must surely have turned in its crypt." That's so dense. It's so insane.

• 5:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Eric Weinstein?

  That that's clearly intelligence, because it's hard to construct something like that. If I look at my favorite Tom Lehrer lyric, you know, there's a perfectly absurd one, which is, "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then." Right? That is a different kind of intelligence. You know, you're taking something that is so horrific, and you're sort of making it palatable and funny and demonstrating also just your humanity. I mean, I think the thing that came through as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible,

• 6:10Eric Weinstein?

  horrible lines was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was, who was channeling pain through humor and through grace.

• 6:19Lex Fridman?

  I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia, that same kind of humor emerged from the generation of World War II. It seemed like that humor is required to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering of that that war created.

• 6:32Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you do need the environment to create the broad Slavic soul. I don't think that many Americans really appreciate Russian humor.

• 6:45Eric Weinstein?

  How you had to joke during the time of, let's say, Article 58 under Stalin. You had to be very, very careful. You know, the concept of a Russian satirical magazine like Crocodile doesn't make sense. So you have this cross-cultural problem that there are certain areas of human experience that it would be better to know nothing about. And quite unfortunately, Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them, which makes the, you know, the songs of Vladimir Vassiltsky so potent, the, you know, the prose of Pushkin, whatever it is. You have to appreciate the depth of the Eastern European experience. And I would think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time

• 7:30Eric Weinstein?

  of the Civil War, or maybe, you know, under slavery and Jim Crow, or even the harsh tyranny of the coal and steel employers during the labor wars. But in general, I would say it's hard for us to understand and imagine the collective culture unless we have the system of selective pressures that, for example, Russians were subjected to.

• 7:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so if there is one good thing that comes out of war, it's literature, art, and humor, and music.

• 8:08Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, I don't think so. I think almost everything is good about war, except for death and destruction.

• 8:13Lex Fridman?

  Right. Without the death, it would bring the romance of it. The whole thing is nice.

• 8:20Eric Weinstein?

  Well, this is why we're always caught up in war. We have this very ambiguous relationship to it, is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful, and at an unacceptable price, and the price has never been higher.

• 8:34Lex Fridman?

  So just jump in into AI a little bit. You, in one of the conversations you had, or one of the videos, you described that one of the things AI systems can't do and biological systems can, is self-replicate in the physical world.

• 8:51Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, no, no.

• 8:54Lex Fridman?

  In the physical world?

• 8:55Eric Weinstein?

  Well, yes, the physical robots can't self replicate. But this is a very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we've been able to create that's really complex, that has an analog of our reproductive system is software.

• 9:14Lex Fridman?

  But nevertheless, software replicates itself, if we're speaking strictly for replication in this kind of digital space. So I mean, just to begin, let me ask a question. Do you see a protective barrier or a gap between the physical world and the digital world?

• 9:32Eric Weinstein?

  Let's not call it digital. Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world.

• 9:37Lex Fridman?

  Why logical?

• 9:38Eric Weinstein?

  Well, because even though we had, let's say Einstein's brain preserved, it was meaningless to us as a physical object because we couldn't do anything with what was stored in it at a logical level. And so the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically are not necessarily, we don't always benefit from synonymizing. I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis to the logical world, but that it does warrant identification with a separate layer that need not invoke logic gates and zeros and ones.

• 10:16Lex Fridman?

  And so connecting those two worlds, the logical world and the physical world, or maybe just connecting to the logical world inside our brains, Einstein's brain, you mentioned the idea of out intelligence.

• 10:31Eric Weinstein?

  Artificial out intelligence.

• 10:32Lex Fridman?

  Artificial out intelligence.

• 10:33Eric Weinstein?

  Yes, this is the only essay that John Brockman ever invited me to write that he refused to publish in Edge.

• 10:42Lex Fridman?

  Why?

• 10:43Eric Weinstein?

  Well, maybe it wasn't, it wasn't well written, but I don't know.

• 10:47Lex Fridman?

  The idea is quite compelling. It's quite unique and new, and at least from my view of his stance point, maybe you can explain it.

• 10:55Eric Weinstein?

  Sure. What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial general intelligence, when in fact, artificial life is terrifying in and of itself, and it's already here. So in order to have a system of selective pressures, you need three distinct elements. You need Variation within a population, you need heritability and you need differential success. So what's really unique, and I've made this point, I think elsewhere, about software is that if you think about what humans know how to build, that's impressive.

• 11:36Eric Weinstein?

  So I always take a car and I say, does it have an analog of each of the physiological systems? Does it have a skeletal structure? That's its frame. Does it have a neurological structure? It has an onboard computer, has a digestive system. The one thing it doesn't have is reproductive system. But if you can call, spawn on a process, effectively you do have a reproductive system. And that means that you can create something with variation, heritability, and differential success. Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was, where do we see inanimate, non-intelligent

• 12:18Eric Weinstein?

  life, outwitting intelligent life? And I have two favorite systems and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted. One of which is the Ophry's Orchid subspecies, or subclade, I don't know what to call it.

• 12:34Lex Fridman?

  Is that a type of flower?

• 12:35Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males into engaging, it was called pseudocopulation, with the fake female, which is usually represented by the lowest petal. And there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating opportunity. But the flower doesn't have to give up energy in the form of nectar as a lure, because it's tricking the males. The other system is a particular species of mussel, Lampicillus, in the clear streams of Missouri. And it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young.

• 13:18Eric Weinstein?

  And when the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that the bass like to eat, the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the bass and also use the bass to redistribute them as they eventually release. Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent

• 13:42Eric Weinstein?

  Dupe, being fooled by a lower life form. And what is sculpting, these convincing lures? It's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies. So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, those weaker mimics fall off. They have terminal lines and only the better ones survive. So it's an arms race between the target species that is being parasitized, getting smarter, and this other less intelligent or non-intelligent object getting as if smarter.

• 14:25Eric Weinstein?

  And so what you see is, is that artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence is not needed to parasitize us. It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves. So you could have a program, let's say, you know, one of these Nigerian scams that writes letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin to figure out which aspects of the program should be kept, which should be varied and thrown away. And you don't need it to be in any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario of being parasitized by something that has no idea what it's doing.

• 15:03Lex Fridman?

  So you phrase a few concepts really eloquently. So let me try to, as a few directions this goes. So one, first of all, in the way we write software today, it's not common that we allow it to self-modify.

• 15:16Eric Weinstein?

  But we do have that ability now.

• 15:19Lex Fridman?

  We have the ability.

• 15:20Eric Weinstein?

  It's just not common.

• 15:21Lex Fridman?

  It's not just common. So your thought is that that is a serious worry if there becomes a...

• 15:31Eric Weinstein?

  But self-modifying code is available now.

• 15:35Lex Fridman?

  So there's different types of self-modification, right? There's personalization, you know, your email app, your Gmail is self-modifying to you after you log in or whatever, you can think of it that way. But ultimately, it's central, all the information is centralized. But you're thinking of ideas where you're completely, this is a unique entity operating under selective pressures and it changes.

• 16:03Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you just, if you think about... The fact that our immune systems don't know what's coming at them next, but they have a small set of spanning components. And if it's if it's a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape or binding region can be approximated with with the Lego that is present, then you can have confidence that you don't need to know what's coming at you because the combinatorics are sufficient to reach any configuration needed.

• 16:40Lex Fridman?

  So that's a beautiful, well, terrifying thing to worry about because it's so within our reach.

• 16:46Eric Weinstein?

  Whenever I suggest these things, I do always have a concern as to whether or not I will bring them into being by talking about them.

• 16:53Lex Fridman?

  So there's this thing from OpenAI, so next week to talk to the founder of OpenAI. This idea that their text generation, the new the new stuff they have for generating text is they didn't want to bring it. They didn't want to release it because they're worried about the.

• 17:14Eric Weinstein?

  I'm delighted to hear that, but they're going to end up releasing.

• 17:17Lex Fridman?

  Yes. So that's the thing is, I think, talking about it. Well, at least from my end, I'm more a proponent of technology preventing techno. So further innovation, preventing the detrimental effects of innovation.

• 17:33Eric Weinstein?

  Well, we're in a we're sort of tumbling down a hill at accelerating speed. So whether or not we're proponents or.

• 17:41Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't really.

• 17:42Eric Weinstein?

  It may not matter, but.

• 17:45Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I do feel that there are people who have held things back and, you know, died poorer than they might have otherwise been. We don't even know their names. I don't think that we should discount the idea that having the smartest people showing off how smart they are by what they've developed may be a terminal.

• 18:06Eric Weinstein?

  Process. I'm very mindful, in particular, of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller, of all people, wrote to Leo Szilard, where Szilard was trying to figure out how to control the use of atomic weaponry at the end of World War II. And Teller, rather strangely, because many of us view him as a monster, showed some very advanced moral thinking, talking about the slim chance we have for survival and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable. I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut what it is we are playing with when we are working on technical problems. And I would recommend to anyone who hasn't

• 18:45Eric Weinstein?

  seen it, a movie called The Bridge on the River Kwai, about, I believe, captured British POWs who, just in a desire to do a bridge well, end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors.

• 18:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, now you're making me question the unrestricted, open discussion of ideas in AI.

• 19:07Eric Weinstein?

  I'm not saying I know the answer. I'm just saying that I could make a decent case for either our need to talk about this and to become technologically focused on containing it, or need to stop talking about this and try to hope that the relatively small number of highly adept individuals who are looking at these problems is small enough that we should, in fact, be talking about how to contain them.

• 19:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, the way ideas, the way innovation happens, what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus, whether if he was silent, the idea would be, would emerge elsewhere, well, in the case of Newton, of course. But, you know, in the case of AI, how small is the set of individuals out of which such ideas would arise?

• 19:54Eric Weinstein?

  Well, the idea is that the researchers we know and those that we don't know, who may live in countries that don't wish us to know what level they're currently at, are very disciplined in keeping these things to themselves. Of course, I will point out that there's a religious school in Kerala that developed something very close to the calculus, certainly in terms of infinite series in...

• 20:20Eric Weinstein?

  In, I guess, religious prayer and rhyme and prose. So, you know, it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back. And I don't really believe that we have an ability to hold it back. I do think that we could change the proportion of the time we spend worrying about the effects. What if we are successful, rather than simply trying to succeed and hope that we'll be able to contain things later?

• 20:45Lex Fridman?

  Beautifully put. So, on the idea of our intelligence, what form? Treading cautiously, as we've agreed, as we tumble down the hill.

• 20:54Eric Weinstein?

  Can't stop ourselves, can't?

• 20:56Lex Fridman?

  We cannot. What form do you see it taking? So, one example, Facebook, Google, do want to, I don't know a better word. You want to influence users to behave a certain way. And so, that's one kind of example of our intelligence, is systems perhaps modifying the behavior of these intelligent human beings in order to sell more product of different kinds. But do you see other examples of this actually emerging in?

• 21:29Eric Weinstein?

  Just take any parasitic system. You know, make sure that there's some way in which that there's differential success, heritability, and variation. And those are the magic ingredients. And if you really wanted to build a nightmare machine, make sure that the system that expresses the variability has a spanning set so that it can learn to arbitrary levels by making it sufficiently expressive. That's your nightmare.

• 21:59Lex Fridman?

  So, it's your nightmare, but it could also be, it's a really powerful mechanism by which to create, well, powerful systems. So, are you more worried about the negative direction that might go versus the positive? So, you said parasitic, but that doesn't necessarily need to be what the system converges towards. It could be, what is it?

• 22:23Eric Weinstein?

  Parasitism, the dividing line between parasitism and symbiosis is not so clear.

• 22:30Lex Fridman?

  That's what they tell me about marriage. I'm still single, so I don't.

• 22:34Eric Weinstein?

  Well, um, yeah, I, we could go into that too. But, um, no, I think we have to appreciate, you know, are you infected by your own mitochondria?

• 22:47Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 22:51Eric Weinstein?

  Right?

• 22:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:52Eric Weinstein?

  So, you know, in marriage, you fear the loss of independence. But even though the American therapeutic community may be very concerned about codependence, what's to say that codependence isn't what's necessary to have a stable relationship in which to raise children who are maximally case-selected and require incredible amounts of care because you have to wait 13 years before there's any reproductive payout? And most of us don't want our 13-year-olds having kids. That's a very tricky situation to analyze. And I would say that predators and parasites drive much of our evolution. And I don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them.

• 23:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, ultimately, the, I mean, nobody knows the meaning of life or what even happiness is, but there is some metrics.

• 23:37Eric Weinstein?

  They didn't tell you?

• 23:39Lex Fridman?

  They didn't, they didn't, uh, that's why all the poetry in books are about, you know, there is some metrics under which you can kind of measure how good it is that these AI systems are roaming about. So you're more, you're more nervous about software than you are optimistic about ideas of, yeah, self-replicating large.

• 24:01Eric Weinstein?

  I don't think we've really felt where we are.

• 24:07Eric Weinstein?

  You know, occasionally we get a wake-up.

• 24:10Eric Weinstein?

  9/11 was so anomalous compared to everything we've, everything else we've experienced on American soil, that it came to us as a complete shock that that was even a possibility. What it really was, was a highly creative and determined R and D team, uh, deep in the bowels of Afghanistan, um, showing us that we had certain exploits that we were open to, that nobody had chosen to express. I can think of several of these things that I don't talk about publicly, that just seem to have to do with, um, how relatively unimaginative those who wish to cause havoc and destruction have been up until now. But the great mystery of our time.

• 24:54Eric Weinstein?

  Of this particular little era is how remarkably stable we've been since 1945, when we demonstrated the ability to use nuclear weapons in anger. And we don't know why things like that haven't happened since then. We've had several close calls, we've had mistakes, we've had brinksmanship. And what's now happened is that we've settled into a sense that, oh, it'll always be nothing. It's been so long since something was at that level of danger, that we've got a wrong idea in our

• 25:37Eric Weinstein?

  head. And that's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro Show, I talked about the need to resume above-ground testing of nuclear devices, because we have people whose developmental experience suggests that when, let's say, Donald Trump and North Korea engage on Twitter, oh, it's nothing, it's just posturing. Everybody's just in it for money. There's a sense that people are in a video game mode, which has been the right call since 1945. We've been mostly in video game mode. It's amazing.

• 26:09Lex Fridman?

  So you're worried about a generation which has not seen any existential?

• 26:13Eric Weinstein?

  We've lived under it. See, you're younger. I don't know if, and again, you came from Moscow.

• 26:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Eric Weinstein?

  There was a TV show called The Day After, that had a huge effect on a generation growing up in the US. And it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange. We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively, where we've thought about this. And I think it's one of the most irresponsible things that the elders among us have done, which is to provide this beautiful garden in which

• 26:56Eric Weinstein?

  The thorns are cut off of the of the rosebushes and all of the edges are rounded and sanded. And so people have developed this totally unreal idea, which is everything's going to be just fine. And do I think that my leading concern is AGI? Or my leading concern is thermonuclear exchange or gene drives or any one of these things? I don't know. But I know that our time here in this very long experiment here is finite because the toys that we've built are so impressive. And the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized.

• 27:35Eric Weinstein?

  And I think it's we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945. We had a lot of dangerous skilled players on the world stage, nevertheless, no matter how bad they were, managed to not embroil us in something that we couldn't come back from.

• 27:55Lex Fridman?

  The Cold War.

• 27:56Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. And the distance from the Cold War. You know, I'm very mindful of, there was a Russian tradition, actually, of on your wedding day, going to visit a memorial to those who gave their lives. Can you imagine this? Where you on your happiest day of your life, you go and you pay homage to the people who fought and died in the Battle of Stalingrad? I'm not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say, but there were a couple of things that the Russians did that were really positive in the Soviet era. And I think trying to let people know how serious life actually is, is the Russian model

• 28:41Eric Weinstein?

  of seriousness is better than the American model.

• 28:45Lex Fridman?

  And maybe, like you mentioned, there was a small echo of that after 9/11.

• 28:50Eric Weinstein?

  But we wouldn't let it form. We talk about 9/11, but it's 9/12 that really moved the needle. When we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak. We witnessed something super serious and we didn't want to run to.

• 29:11Eric Weinstein?

  Our computers and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings. And it was profound because we woke up briefly there. You know, I talk about the gated institutional narrative that sort of programs our lives. I've seen it break three times in my life, one of which was the election of Donald Trump. Another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers, when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns wasn't that important, knew that Lehman Brothers met AIG was next. And the other one was 9/11. And so if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times that the global narrative was

• 29:52Eric Weinstein?

  really interrupted, that tells you how much we've been on top of developing events. You know, I mean, we had the Murrah Federal Building explosion, but it didn't cause the narrative to break. It wasn't profound enough. Around 9/12, we started to wake up out of our slumber. And the powers that be did not want a coming together. The admonition was go shopping.

• 30:19Lex Fridman?

  And the powers that be was what is that force? Is it supposed to blame individuals?

• 30:24Eric Weinstein?

  We don't know.

• 30:25Lex Fridman?

  So whatever that...

• 30:26Eric Weinstein?

  Whatever that force is, there's a component of it that's emergent and there's a component of it that's deliberate. So give yourself a portfolio with two components. Some amount of it is emergent, but some amount of it is also an understanding that if people come together, they become an incredible force. And what you're seeing right now, I think, is there are forces that are trying to come together and there are forces that are trying to push things apart. And, you know, one of them is the globalist narrative versus the national narrative, where to the global... A globalist perspective, the nations are bad things, in essence, that they're temporary,

• 31:08Eric Weinstein?

  they're nationalistic, they're jingoistic, it's all negative. To people in the national, more in the nationality, and they're saying, "Look, this is where I pay my taxes, this is where I do my army service, this is where I have a vote, this is where I have a passport." Who the hell are you to tell me that because you've moved into someplace that you can make money globally, that you've chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special and elevated duty? And I think that these competing narratives have been pushing towards the global perspective from the elite, and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised people are saying, "Hey, I actually live in a place, and I have laws, and I speak a language, I have a culture,

• 31:50Eric Weinstein?

  and who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some faraway land, that my obligations to my fellow countrymen are so much diminished?"

• 31:59Lex Fridman?

  So these tensions between nations and so on, ultimately you see, being proud of your country and so on, which creates potentially the kind of things that led to wars and so on, they ultimately, it is human nature, and it is good for us, for wake-up calls of different kinds.

• 32:15Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I think that these are tensions, and my point isn't, I mean nationalism run amok is a nightmare, and internationalism run amok is a nightmare. And the problem is, we're trying to push these pendulums to someplace where they're somewhat balanced, where we have a higher duty of care to those who share our laws and our citizenship, but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system. I would think this is elementary, but the problem that we're facing... Concerns the ability for some to profit at the by abandoning their obligations to

• 33:00Eric Weinstein?

  others within their system. And that's what we've had for decades.

• 33:05Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned nuclear weapons. I was hoping to get answers from you, since one of the many things you've done is economics, and maybe you can understand human behavior, why the heck we haven't blown each other up yet. But, okay, so we'll get back.

• 33:19Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know the answer.

• 33:20Lex Fridman?

  Yes. It's a fast. It's really important to say that we really don't know.

• 33:24Eric Weinstein?

  A mild uptick in wisdom.

• 33:26Lex Fridman?

  A mild uptick in wisdom. That's well, Steven Pinker, who I've talked with, has a lot of really good ideas about why, but nobody really.

• 33:34Eric Weinstein?

  I don't trust his optimism.

• 33:38Lex Fridman?

  Listen, I'm Russian, so I never trust a guy who's that optimistic.

• 33:41Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, no. It's just that you're talking about a guy who's looking at a system in which more and more of the kinetic energy, like war, has been turned into potential energy, like unused nuclear weapons.

• 33:55Lex Fridman?

  Beautifully put.

• 33:55Eric Weinstein?

  And, you know, now I'm looking at that system and I'm saying, okay, well, if you don't have a potential energy term, then everything's just getting better and better.

• 34:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Wow. That's beautifully put. Only physicists could. Okay.

• 34:08Eric Weinstein?

  I'm not a physicist.

• 34:10Lex Fridman?

  Is that a dirty word?

• 34:12Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, I wish I were a physicist.

• 34:14Lex Fridman?

  Me too. My dad's a physicist. I'm trying to live up to that probably for the rest of my life. He's probably going to listen to this too. So.

• 34:21Eric Weinstein?

  He did.

• 34:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So your friend Sam Harris worries a lot about the existential threat of AI, not in the way that you've described, but in the more.

• 34:33Eric Weinstein?

  Well, he hangs out with Elon. I don't know Elon.

• 34:37Lex Fridman?

  So are you worried about that kind of, you know, about the, about either robotic systems or, you know, traditionally defined AI systems essentially becoming super intelligent, much more intelligent than human beings and getting.

• 34:55Eric Weinstein?

  Well, they already are. And they're not.

• 34:59Lex Fridman?

  When seen as a collective, you mean?

• 35:02Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I mean, I can mean all sorts of things, but certainly many of the things that we thought.

• 35:09Eric Weinstein?

  We're peculiar to general intelligence or do not require general intelligence. So that's been one of the big awakenings that you can write a pretty convincing sports story from stats alone without needing to have watched the game. So, you know, is it possible to write lively prose about politics? Yeah, no, not yet. So we were sort of all over the map. One of the things about chess, there's a question I once asked on Quora that didn't get a lot of response, which was, what is the greatest brilliancy ever produced by a computer in a chess game? Which was different than the question of what is the greatest game ever played?

• 35:52Eric Weinstein?

  So if you think about brilliancies as what really animates many of us to think of chess as an art form, those are those moves and combinations that just show such flair, panache, and soul. Computers weren't really great at that. They were great positional monsters. And, you know, recently, we've started seeing brilliancies.

• 36:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. A few grandmasters have identified with Alpha Zero that things were quite brilliant.

• 36:19Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. So that's, you know, that's an example of something. We don't think that that's AGI, but in a very restricted set of rules like chess, you're starting to see poetry of a high order. And, and so I'm not, I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI. AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives in the same way that I don't think a worm should be, you know, the C elegans shouldn't be treated as non-conscious because it only has 300 neurons. It maybe just has a very low level of consciousness because we don't understand what these things mean as they scale up. So, am I worried about this general phenomenon? Sure.

• 37:01Eric Weinstein?

  But I think that one of the things that's happening is that a lot of us are fretting about this, in part because of human needs. We've always been worried about the Gollum, right?

• 37:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, the Gollum is the artificially created.

• 37:16Eric Weinstein?

  Life, you know.

• 37:17Lex Fridman?

  It's like Frankenstein.

• 37:18Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, sure. It's a Jewish version. And Frankenberg, Franken.

• 37:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 37:27Eric Weinstein?

  Right. So the, but we've always been worried about creating something like this. And it's getting closer and closer. And there are ways in which.

• 37:40Eric Weinstein?

  We have to realize that the whole thing is kind of the whole thing that we've experienced are the context of our lives is almost certainly coming to an end. And I don't mean to suggest that we won't survive. I don't know. And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow. It could be 300, 500 years. But there's no plan that I'm aware of. If we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit that are sensible within current technological dreams, the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. And we have a very competitive civilization that is still forced into violence to sort out disputes that cannot be arbitrated.

• 38:24Eric Weinstein?

  It is not clear to me that we have a long-term future until we get to the next stage, which is to figure out whether or not the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken. And that requires our source code.

• 38:37Lex Fridman?

  Our source code, the stuff in our brains to figure out, what do you mean by our source code?

• 38:43Eric Weinstein?

  The source code of the context, whatever it is that produces the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos.

• 38:48Lex Fridman?

  Our source code. I got it. So this is...

• 38:52Eric Weinstein?

  You're talking about stuff that's written in a higher level language.

• 38:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's right. You're talking about the low level bits or lower.

• 38:58Eric Weinstein?

  That's what is currently keeping us here. We can't even imagine, you know, we have harebrained schemes for staying within the Einsteinian speed limit. You know, maybe if we could just drug ourselves and go into a suspended state, or we could have multiple generations. I think all that stuff is pretty silly. But I think it's also pretty silly to imagine that our wisdom is going to increase to the point that we can have the toys we have and we're not going to use them for 500 years.

• 39:30Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough when I realized you're just one letter away from the guy.

• 39:36Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein.

• 39:40Lex Fridman?

  It's, well, you get to pick. Okay, so unified theory, you know, you've worked, you enjoy the beauty of geometry. I don't actually know if you enjoy it. You certainly are quite good at.

• 39:52Eric Weinstein?

  I trembled before it.

• 39:53Lex Fridman?

  Trembled before it. If you're religious, that is one of the.

• 39:57Eric Weinstein?

  I don't have to be religious. It's just so beautiful. You will tremble anyway.

• 40:01Lex Fridman?

  I just read Einstein's biography and one of the ways, one of the things you've done is try to explore a unified theory, talking about a 14 dimensional observance that has the 4D spacetime continuum embedded in it. I'm just curious how you think, philosophically at a high level, about something more than four dimensions. How do you try to, what does it make you feel? Talking in the mathematical world about dimensions that are greater than the ones we can perceive. Is there something that you take away that's more than just the math?

• 40:43Eric Weinstein?

  Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me. Okay. Now, on the front of that tongue.

• 40:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Eric Weinstein?

  There was a sweet receptor. And next to that were salt receptors on two different sides. A little bit farther back, there were sour receptors. And you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue where your bitter receptor was.

• 41:06Lex Fridman?

  Show the good side always.

• 41:08Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. But that was four dimensions of taste receptors. But you also had pain receptors on that tongue and probably heat receptors on that tongue. So let's assume that you had one of each. That would be six dimensions. So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza and it's got some, some, some hot pepper on it, maybe some jalapeno. You're having a six dimensional experience, dude.

• 41:34Lex Fridman?

  Do you think we over emphasize the value of time as one of the dimensions or space? Well, we certainly over emphasize the value of time because we like things to start and end, or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to.

• 41:47Eric Weinstein?

  Well, what if you flipped one of the spatial dimensions into being a temporal dimension? And you and I were to meet in New York City and say, well, where and when should we meet? Say, how about I'll meet you on 36th and Lexington at two in the afternoon and 11 o'clock in the morning.

• 42:09Eric Weinstein?

  That would be very confusing.

• 42:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time, you mean?

• 42:16Eric Weinstein?

  We happen to be in a delicious situation in which we have three dimensions of space and one of time, and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade off a little space for a little time, but we still only have one dimension that is picked out relative to the other three. It's very much Gladys Knight and the Pips.

• 42:32Lex Fridman?

  So which one developed for who? Do we develop for these dimensions, or did the dimensions, or were they always there and it doesn't?

• 42:40Eric Weinstein?

  Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place where there are four temporal dimensions, or two and two of space and time, or three of time and one of space, and then would time not be playing the role of space? Why do you imagine that the sector that you're in is all that there is?

• 42:54Lex Fridman?

  I certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise. I mean, I haven't done ayahuasca or any of those drugs. I'd hope to one day, but-

• 43:02Eric Weinstein?

  Instead of doing ayahuasca, you could just head over to building two.

• 43:06Lex Fridman?

  That's where the mathematicians are?

• 43:07Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, that's where they hang.

• 43:08Lex Fridman?

  Just to look at some geometry?

• 43:10Eric Weinstein?

  Well, just ask about pseudo-Riemannian geometry. That's what you're interested in.

• 43:14Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 43:15Eric Weinstein?

  Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru.

• 43:18Lex Fridman?

  And then some extra money for that trip.

• 43:19Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, but you won't be able to do any calculations if that's how you choose to go about it.

• 43:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, a different kind of calculation.

• 43:25Eric Weinstein?

  So to speak.

• 43:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. One of my favorite people, Edward Frankel, Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math, great title for a book, said that you are quite a remarkable intellect to come up with such beautiful, original ideas, in terms of the unified theory and so on, but you're working outside academia. So, one question, in developing ideas that are truly original, truly interesting, what's the difference between inside academia and outside academia when it comes to developing such ideas?

• 43:56Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, it's a terrible choice. Terrible choice. So, if you do it inside of academics, you are forced to constantly-

• 44:10Eric Weinstein?

  Show great loyalty to the consensus and you distinguish yourself with small, almost microscopic heresies to make your reputation in general. And you have very competent people and brilliant people who are working together, who are, who form very deep social networks and have a very high level of behavior, at least within mathematics and at least technically within physics, theoretical physics. When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people, madmen.

• 44:51Eric Weinstein?

  And these are people who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position and almost always lose their way. And the key question is, will progress likely come from someone who has miraculously managed to stay within the system and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy? That is sort of unthinkable, in which case that will be fascinating? Or is it more likely that somebody will maintain a level of discipline from outside of academics and be able to make use of the freedom that comes from not having to constantly

• 45:35Eric Weinstein?

  affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field?

• 45:38Lex Fridman?

  So you've characterized in ways that academia, in this particular sense, is declining. You posted a plot, the older population of the faculty is getting larger, the younger is getting smaller and so on. So what's, which direction of the two are you more hopeful about?

• 45:57Eric Weinstein?

  Well, the baby boomers can't hang on forever.

• 45:59Lex Fridman?

  Was it first of all, in general, true? And second of all, in academia?

• 46:03Eric Weinstein?

  But that's really what, what this time is about.

• 46:06Lex Fridman?

  Is the baby boomers.

• 46:07Eric Weinstein?

  We didn't, we're, we're used to like financial bubbles that last a few years in length and then pop.

• 46:13Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 46:14Eric Weinstein?

  The baby boomer bubble is this really long-lived thing. And all of the ideology, all of the behavior patterns, the norms. Now, for example, string theory is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomenon. It was something that baby boomers were able to do because it required a very high level of mathematical ability.

• 46:36Lex Fridman?

  You don't think of string theory as an original idea?

• 46:41Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, I mean, it was original to Veneziano, probably is older than the baby boomers. And there are people who are younger than the baby boomers who are still doing string theory. And I'm not saying that nothing discovered within the large string theoretic complex is wrong. Quite the contrary, a lot of brilliant mathematics and a lot of the structure of physics was elucidated by string theorists. What do I think of the deliverable nature of this product that will not chip called string theory? I think that it is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and geometrically talented baby boomer physicists, so that they can say that they're working

• 47:20Eric Weinstein?

  on something within the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity. Now, there are other schemes, you know, there's like asymptotic safety. There are other things that you could imagine doing. I don't think much of any of the major programs. But to have inflicted this level of loyalty through a shibboleth, well, surely you don't question X. Well, I question almost everything in the string program. And that's why I got out of physics. When you called me a physicist, it was a great honor. But the reason I didn't become a physicist wasn't that I fell in love with mathematics. As I said, wow, in

• 47:59Eric Weinstein?

  1984, 1983, I saw the field going mad. And I saw that mathematics, which has all sorts of problems, was not going insane. And so instead of studying things within physics, I thought it was much safer to study the same objects within mathematics. There's a huge price to pay for that. You lose physical intuition. But the point is, is that it wasn't a North Korean reeducation camp either.

• 48:24Lex Fridman?

  Are you hopeful about cracking open Einstein unified theory in a way that has really, really understanding whether this uniting everything together with quantum theory and so on?

• 48:38Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, I'm trying to play this role. Myself, to do it, to the extent of handing it over to the more responsible, more professional, more competent community. So I think that they're wrong about a great number of their belief structures, but I do believe, I mean, I have a really profound love-hate relationship with this group of people.

• 49:02Lex Fridman?

  On the physics side?

• 49:04Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:05Lex Fridman?

  Because the mathematicians actually seem to be much more open-minded and...

• 49:09Eric Weinstein?

  Well, they are and they aren't. They're open-minded about anything that looks like great math, right? They'll study something that isn't very important physics, but if it's beautiful mathematics, then they'll have, they have great intuition about these things. As good as the mathematicians are, and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level, give them the edge, the theoretical physics community is bar none the most profound intellectual community that we have ever created. It is the number one. There's nobody in second place, as far as I'm concerned. Like, in their spare time, in the spare time, they invented molecular biology.

• 49:47Lex Fridman?

  What was the origin of molecular biology? You're saying physics?

• 49:50Eric Weinstein?

  Well, somebody like Francis Crick. I mean, a lot of, a lot of the early molecular biologists.

• 49:54Lex Fridman?

  Or physicists?

• 49:56Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, Schr ö ninger wrote What is Life? And that was highly inspirational. I mean, you have to appreciate that there is no community like the basic research community in theoretical physics. And it's not something, I'm highly critical of these guys. I think that they would just wasted the, you know, decades of time with, and your religious devotion to their misconceptionalization of where the problems were in physics. But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse ever witnessed within academics.

• 50:36Lex Fridman?

  You see it as a collapse or just a lull?

• 50:39Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality. We can't afford to pay these people. We can't afford to give them an accelerator just to play with in case they find something at the next energy level. These people created our economy. They gave us the Rad Lab and radar. They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II. They created the semiconductor and the transistor to power our economy through Moore's Law. As a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the World Wide Web. And we have the insolence to say, why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars? No. The question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars?

• 51:24Eric Weinstein?

  Right? These guys signed the world's worst licensing agreement.

• 51:28Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 51:29Eric Weinstein?

  And if they simply charged for every time you used a transistor or a URL or enjoyed the peace that they have provided during this period of time through the terrible weapons that they developed, or your communications devices, all of the things that power our economy, I really think came out of physics, even to the extent the chemistry came out of physics and molecular biology came out of physics. So, first of all, you have to know that I'm very critical of this community. Second of all, it is our most important community. We have neglected it, we have abused it, we don't take it seriously, we don't even care to get them to rehab after a couple of generations of failure. Right?

• 52:12Eric Weinstein?

  No one, I think the youngest person to have really contributed to the standard model at a theoretical level was born in 1951. Right? Frank Wilczek. And almost nothing has happened that, in theoretical physics after 1973, '74, that sent somebody to Stockholm.

• 52:35Eric Weinstein?

  For theoretical development, the predicted experiment. So we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves. Now, with that said, these guys have behaved abysmally, in my opinion, because they haven't owned up to where they actually are, what problems they're really facing, how definite they can actually be. They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries, which are desperately needed in other fields, like gauge theory, which at least the mathematicians can can share, which is an upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz. And they haven't shared the importance of renormalization theory, even though this should be standard operating procedure for people across the sciences dealing with different layers and different levels of phenomena.

• 53:17Eric Weinstein?

  And by shared, you mean communicated in such a way that it disseminates throughout the different sciences? These guys are sitting, both theoretical physicists and mathematicians, are sitting on top of a giant stockpile of intellectual gold. All right? They have so many things that have not been manifested anywhere. I was just on Twitter, I think I mentioned the Haberman switch pitch that shows the self-duality of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism. Now, this is like a triviality, and it makes an amazing toy that's, you know, built a market, hopefully a fortune for Chuck Haberman. Well, you have no idea how much great stuff that these priests have in their monastery.

• 54:00Eric Weinstein?

  So it's truly a love and hate relationship for you. Yeah. Well, it sounds like it's more on the love side. This building that we're in right here. Yes. Is the building in which I really put together the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation through the government university industry research roundtable to destroy the bargaining power of American academics using foreign labor. With, uh, both stocks and so on? Oh, yeah. That was done here, in this building. Isn't that weird? And I'm truly speaking with a revolutionary and a radical. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. At an intellectual level, I am absolutely garden variety. I'm just straight down the middle.

• 54:44Eric Weinstein?

  The system that we are in, this this university, is functionally insane.

• 54:51Eric Weinstein?

  Harvard is functionally insane. And we don't understand that when we get these things wrong, the financial crisis made this very clear. There was a long period where every grown up, everybody with a tie, who spoke in, you know, in baritone tones with the right degree at the end of their name.

• 55:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Eric Weinstein?

  Were talking about how we banished volatility. We were in the great moderation. Okay, they were all crazy. And who was right? It was like Nassim Taleb.

• 55:23Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 55:24Eric Weinstein?

  Nouriel Roubini. Now, what happens is that they claimed the market went crazy. But the market didn't go crazy. The market had been crazy. And what happened is that it suddenly went sane. Well, that's where we are with academics. Academics right now is mad as a hatter. And it's absolutely evident. I can show you graph after graph. I can show you the internal discussions. I can show you the conspiracies. Harvard's dealing with one right now over its admissions policies for people of color who happen to come from Asia. All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going. What we're talking about, just while we're on the topic of revolutionaries, is we're talking about the danger of an outbreak of sanity.

• 56:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you're the guy pointing out the elephant in the room here.

• 56:11Eric Weinstein?

  And the elephant has no clothes.

• 56:13Lex Fridman?

  Is that how that goes? I was gonna talk a little bit to Joe Rogan about this. We ran out of time. But I think you have some, just listening to you, you could probably speak really eloquently to academia on the difference between the different fields. So you think there's a difference between science, engineering, and then the humanities in academia in terms of tolerance that they're willing to tolerate? So from my perspective, I thought.

• 56:46Lex Fridman?

  Computer science and maybe engineering is more tolerant to radical ideas. But that's perhaps innocent of me. Because I always, you know, all the battles going on now are a little bit more on the humanity side than gender studies and so on.

• 56:59Eric Weinstein?

  Have you seen the American Mathematical Society's publication of an essay called Get Out the Way?

• 57:06Lex Fridman?

  I have not. What's, what's?

• 57:08Eric Weinstein?

  The idea is that white men who hold positions within universities in mathematics should vacate their positions so that young black women can take over, something like this.

• 57:20Lex Fridman?

  That's in terms of diversity, which I also want to ask you about, but in terms of diversity of strictly ideas.

• 57:26Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, sure.

• 57:27Lex Fridman?

  Do you think, because you're basically saying physics as a community has become a little bit intolerant to some degree to new radical ideas? Or at least you, you said?

• 57:38Eric Weinstein?

  Well, it's changed a little bit recently, which is that even string theory is now admitting, okay, we don't, this doesn't look very promising in the short term. Right? So the question is, what compiles? If you want to take the computer science metaphor. What will get you into a journal? Will you spend your life trying to push some paper into a journal? Or will it be accepted easily? What do we know about the characteristics of the submitter? And what gets taken up and what does not? All of these fields are experiencing pressure because no field is performing so brilliantly

• 58:18Eric Weinstein?

  well that it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking in the ways in which we've become accustomed.

• 58:29Lex Fridman?

  But don't you think, even in theoretical physics, a lot of times, even with theories like string theory, you could speak to this, it does eventually to what are the ways that this theory would be testable?

• 58:43Eric Weinstein?

  So ultimately, although, look, there's this thing about Popper and the scientific method that's a cancer and a disease in the minds of very smart people. That's not really how most of this stuff gets worked out. It's how it gets checked. And there is a dialogue between theory and experiment. But everybody should read Paul Dirac's 1963 American, Scientific American article where he, you know, it's very interesting. He talks about it as if it was about the Schrödinger equation and Schrödinger's failure to advance his own work because of his failure to account for some phenomenon. The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off, it won't agree with experiment, but it doesn't mean

• 59:27Eric Weinstein?

  that the theory is actually wrong. But Dirac could as easily have been talking about his own equation in which he predicted that the electrons should have an antiparticle. And since the only positively charged particle that was known at the time was the proton, Heisenberg pointed out, well, shouldn't your antiparticle, the proton, have the same mass as the electron? And doesn't that invalidate your theory? So I think that Dirac was actually being quite, potentially quite sneaky and talking about the fact that he had been pushed off of his own theory to some extent by Heisenberg. But, look, we've fetishized the scientific method and Popper and falsification because it protects us from crazy ideas entering

• 1:00:11Eric Weinstein?

  the field. So, you know, it's a question of balancing type one and type two error. And we're pretty, we were pretty maxed out in one direction.

• 1:00:18Lex Fridman?

  The opposite of that. Let me say what comforts me. Sort of biology or engineering, at the end of the day, does the thing work?

• 1:00:27Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Lex Fridman?

  You can test the crazies away. The crazy, well, see, now you're saying, but some ideas are truly crazy and some are actually correct. So.

• 1:00:37Eric Weinstein?

  Well, there's pre-correct currently crazy.

• 1:00:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Eric Weinstein?

  Right? And so you don't want to get rid of everybody who's pre-correct and currently crazy. The problem is, is that we don't have standards in general for trying to determine who has to be put to the sword in terms of their career and who has to be protected as some sort of giant time-suck pain in the ass who may change everything.

• 1:01:04Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that's possible, creating a mechanism of those selected?

• 1:01:08Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you're not going to like the answer, but here it comes.

• 1:01:10Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:01:11Eric Weinstein?

  It has to do with very human elements. We're trying to do this at the level of like rules and fairness. It's not going to work. Because the only thing that really understands this. You ever read the, read The Double Helix?

• 1:01:28Lex Fridman?

  It's a book?

• 1:01:29Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, you have to read this book. Not only did Jim Watson half discover this three-dimensional structure of DNA, he was also one hell of a writer before he became an ass. That, no, he's tried to destroy his own reputation.

• 1:01:46Lex Fridman?

  I knew about the ass. I didn't know about the good writer.

• 1:01:48Eric Weinstein?

  Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living. And as I've said before, Jim Watson is too important a legacy to be left to Jim Watson. That book tells you more about what actually moves the dial. And there's another story about him, which I don't, don't agree with, which is that he stole everything from Rosalind Franklin. I mean, the problems that he had with Rosalind Franklin are real, but we should actually honor that tension in our history by delving into it rather than having a simple solution. Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick being a pain in the ass that everybody secretly

• 1:02:26Eric Weinstein?

  knew was super brilliant. And there's an encounter between Chargaff, who came up with the, the equimolar relations between the nucleotides, who should have gotten the structure of DNA, and Watson and Crick. And, you know, he talks about missing a shiver in the heartbeat of biology. And this stuff is so gorgeous. It just makes you tremble even thinking about it. Look, we know very often who is to be feared, and we need to fund the people that we fear. The people who are wasting our time need to be excluded from the conversation.

• 1:03:06Eric Weinstein?

  You see, and, you know, maybe we'll make some errors in both directions. But we have known our own people. We know the pains in the asses that might work out. And we know the people who are really just blowhards, who really have very little to contribute most of the time. It's not 100%, but you're not going to get there with rules.

• 1:03:26Lex Fridman?

  Right. It's using some kind of instinct. I mean, to be honest, I'm gonna make you roll your eyes for a second. But, and the first time I heard that there is a large community of people who believe the earth is flat. Actually made me pause and ask myself the question.

• 1:03:43Eric Weinstein?

  Why would there be such a community?

• 1:03:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Is it possible the earth is flat? So I had to like, wait a minute. I mean, then you go through a thinking process that I think is really healthy. It ultimately ends up being a geometry thing, I think. It's an interesting, it's an interesting thought experiment, at the very least.

• 1:04:00Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I do a different version of it. I say, why is this community stable?

• 1:04:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's a good way to analyze it.

• 1:04:07Eric Weinstein?

  Well, interesting that whatever we've done has not erased the community. So, you know, they're taking a long shot bet that won't pan out, you know? Maybe we just haven't thought enough about the rationality of the square root of two, and somebody brilliant will figure it out. Maybe we will eventually land one day on the surface of Jupiter and explore it. Right? These are crazy things that will never happen.

• 1:04:30Lex Fridman?

  So much of social media operates by AI algorithms. You talked about this a little bit, recommending the content you see. So on this idea of radical thought, how much should AI show you things you disagree with? On Twitter and so on, in the Twitterverse?

• 1:04:49Eric Weinstein?

  I hate this question.

• 1:04:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah?

• 1:04:51Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Lex Fridman?

  Because you don't know the answer?

• 1:04:54Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, no, no. Look, we've been, they've pushed out this cognitive Lego to us that will just lead to madness. It's good to be challenged with things that you disagree with. The answer is no. It's good to be challenged with interesting things with which you currently disagree, but that might be true. So I don't really care about whether or not I disagree with something or don't disagree. I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing is being pushed out. Is it because it's likely to be true? Is it because, is there some reason? Because I can write, I can write a computer generator. To come up with an infinite number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at. So, please, before you push things at me that are disagreeable, tell me why.

• 1:05:39Lex Fridman?

  There is an aspect in which that question is quite dumb, especially because it's being used to almost very generically by these different networks to say, well, we're trying to work this out. But, you know, basically, how much do you see the value of seeing things you don't like? Not you disagree with, because it's very difficult to know exactly what you articulated, which is the stuff that's important for you to consider that you disagree with. That's really hard to figure out. The bottom line is the stuff you don't like. If you're a Hillary Clinton supporter, you may not want to, it might not make you feel good to see anything about Donald Trump.

• 1:06:22Lex Fridman?

  That's the only thing algorithms can really optimize for currently.

• 1:06:25Eric Weinstein?

  No, they can do better. This is, we're

• 1:06:28Lex Fridman?

  You think so?

• 1:06:29Eric Weinstein?

  No, we're engaged in some moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people who are capable of building Google, Facebook, Twitter are having us in these incredibly low-level discussions. Do they not know any smart people? Do they not have the phone numbers of people who can elevate these discussions?

• 1:06:52Lex Fridman?

  They do, but this, they're optimizing for a different thing, and they are pushing those people out of those rooms.

• 1:06:59Eric Weinstein?

  They're, they're optimizing for things we can't see. And yes, profit is there. Nobody, nobody's questioning that. But they're also optimizing for things like political control, or the fact that they're doing business in Pakistan, and so they don't want to talk about all the things that they're going to be bending to in Pakistan. So, we're involved in a fake discussion.

• 1:07:24Lex Fridman?

  You think so? You think these conversations at that depth are happening inside Google? You don't think they have some basic metrics under user engagement?

• 1:07:32Eric Weinstein?

  You're having a fake conversation with us, guys. We know you're having a fake conversation. I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation.

• 1:07:40Eric Weinstein?

  You know how to cool, you know, these units, you know, high availability like nobody's business. My Gmail never goes down, almost.

• 1:07:49Lex Fridman?

  So you think just because they can do incredible work on the software side with infrastructure, they can also deal with some of these difficult questions about human behavior, human understanding, you're not.

• 1:08:04Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, I've seen the, I've seen the developers' screens that people take shots of inside of Google.

• 1:08:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Eric Weinstein?

  And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple. We're not, we're engaged, they're engaging us in the wrong conversations. We are not at this low level. Here's one of my favorite questions. Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase in tech space equipped as a listening device? Where's my physical shutter to cover my lens? We had this in the 1970s. It cameras that had lens caps, you know? How much would it cost to have a security model? Pay five extra bucks. Why is my indicator light software controlled? Why, when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on by putting it as something

• 1:08:54Eric Weinstein?

  that cannot be bypassed? Why have you set up my, all of my devices at some difficulty to yourselves as listening devices? And we don't even talk about this. This is, this thing is total fucking bullshit.

• 1:09:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, I hope, so these discussions are happening about privacy. Is there more difficult than you're giving them credit for?

• 1:09:14Eric Weinstein?

  It's not just privacy.

• 1:09:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Eric Weinstein?

  It's about social control. We're talking about social control. Why do I not have controls over my own levers? Just have a really cute UI where I can switch, I can dial things, or I can at least see what the algorithms are.

• 1:09:29Lex Fridman?

  But you, you think that there is some deliberate choices being made here?

• 1:09:34Eric Weinstein?

  There is emergence and there is intention. There are two dimensions. The vector does not collapse onto either axis. But the idea that anybody who suggests that intention is completely absent is a child.

• 1:09:51Lex Fridman?

  That's really beautifully put. And like many things you've said is going to make me think.

• 1:09:55Eric Weinstein?

  Can I turn, can I turn this around slightly?

• 1:09:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Eric Weinstein?

  I sit down with you and you say that you're obsessed with my feed. I don't even know what my feed is. What are you seeing that I'm not?

• 1:10:06Lex Fridman?

  I was obsessively looking through your feed on Twitter because it was really enjoyable because there's the Tom Lehrer element is the humor in it.

• 1:10:14Eric Weinstein?

  By the way, that feed is Eric R Weinstein on Twitter.

• 1:10:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Eric Weinstein?

  At Eric R Weinstein.

• 1:10:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Eric Weinstein?

  Seriously, why?

• 1:10:23Lex Fridman?

  Why did I find it enjoyable or what was I seeing?

• 1:10:26Eric Weinstein?

  What are you looking for? Why are we doing this? What is this podcast about? I know you've got all these interesting people. I'm just some guy who's sort of a podcast guest.

• 1:10:37Lex Fridman?

  Sort of a podcast. You're not even wearing a tie. I mean, it's not even a serious interview.

• 1:10:44Lex Fridman?

  I'm searching for meaning, for happiness, for a dopamine rush. So, short term and long term.

• 1:10:51Eric Weinstein?

  And how are you finding your way to me? What is? I don't honestly know what I'm doing to reach you.

• 1:10:58Lex Fridman?

  The representing ideas which feel common sense to me and not many people are speaking. So it's kind of like the intellectual dark web folks, right? They, these folks from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson to yourself are saying things where it's like you're like saying, look, there's an elephant. He's not wearing any clothes. And I say, yeah, yeah, let's have more of that conversation. That's how I'm finding you.

• 1:11:27Eric Weinstein?

  I'm desperate to try to change the conversation we're having. I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020. I don't think we can afford four more years of a misinterpreted message, which is what Donald Trump was. And I don't want the destruction of our institutions. They all seem hell bent on destroying themselves. So I'm trying to save theoretical physics, trying to save the New York Times, trying to save our various processes. And I think it feels delusional to me that this is falling to a tiny group of people who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out that everything they say will be misinterpreted and that their lives will be ruined through the process.

• 1:12:09Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, I think we're in an absolutely bananas period of time and I don't believe it should fall to such a tiny number of shoulders to shoulder this way.

• 1:12:19Lex Fridman?

  So I have to ask you, on the capitalism side, you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism or has effects that are. Well, not unintended, but not what economists would predict or speak of capitalism creating. I just want to talk to you about in general, the effect of even then, artificial intelligence or technology automation, taking away jobs and these kinds of things, and what you think is the way to alleviate that, whether the Andrew Eng presidential candidate with universal basic income, UBI, what are your thoughts there? How do we fight off the negative effects of technology that?

• 1:12:59Eric Weinstein?

  All right, you're a software guy, right?

• 1:13:00Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:13:01Eric Weinstein?

  A human being is a worker is an old idea.

• 1:13:05Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:13:06Eric Weinstein?

  A human being has a worker is a different object, right?

• 1:13:10Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:13:10Eric Weinstein?

  So if you think about object oriented programming as a paradigm, a human being has a worker and a human being has a soul. We're talking about the fact that for a period of time, the worker that a human being has was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has. However, we have two separate claims on the value in society. One is as a worker and the other is as a soul. And the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity, it needs meaning, it needs purpose. As long as your means of support is not highly repetitive, I think you have a while to go before you need to start worrying.

• 1:13:53Eric Weinstein?

  But if what you do is highly repetitive and it's not terribly generative, you are in the crosshairs of for loops and while loops. And that's what computers excel at, repetitive behavior. And when I say repetitive, I may mean things that have never happened through combinatorial possibilities, but as long as it has a looped characteristic to it, you're in trouble. We are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address the fact that a worker may not be able to make claims. A relatively undistinguished median member of our society is still has needs to reproduce, needs to dignity.

• 1:14:37Eric Weinstein?

  And when capitalism abandons the median individual, or the bottom 10th, or whatever it's going to do, it's flirting with revolution. And what concerns me is that the capitalists aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand this.

• 1:14:56Eric Weinstein?

  You really want to court authoritarian control in our society because you can't see that people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the marginal product of their labor is too low to feed their dignity as a soul? So my great concern is that our free society has to do with the fact that we are self organized. I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan when Lehman Brothers collapsed and thinking, who's going to tell all these people that they need to show up at work when they don't have a financial system to incentivize them to show up at work? So my complaint is, first of all, not with the socialists, but with the capitalists, which is you guys are being idiots.

• 1:15:41Eric Weinstein?

  You're courting revolution by continuing to harp on the same old ideas that, well, you know, try harder, bootstrap yourself. Yeah, to an extent that works, to an extent. But we are clearly headed in a place that there's nothing that ties together our need to contribute and our need to consume. And that may not be provided by capitalism because it may have been a temporary phenomenon. So check out my article on anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy. I think people are late getting the wake up call and we would be doing a better job saving capitalism from itself because I don't want this done under authoritarian control.

• 1:16:22Eric Weinstein?

  And the more we insist that everybody who's not thriving in our society during their reproductive years in order to have a family is failing at a personal level. I mean, what a disgusting thing that we're saying. What a horrible message. Who the hell have we become that we've so bought into the Chicago model that we can't see the humanity that we're destroying in that process? And it's, I hate, I hate the thought of communism. I really do. My family has flirted with it decades past. It's a wrong, bad idea. But we are going to need to figure out how to make sure that those souls are nourished and respected and capitalism better have an answer. And I'm betting on capitalism, but I gotta tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with my team.

• 1:17:06Lex Fridman?

  So you're still on the capitalism team. You just, uh, there's a theme here.

• 1:17:11Eric Weinstein?

  Radical, radical capital.

• 1:17:12Lex Fridman?

  Hyper capitalism.

• 1:17:13Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I want, I think hyper capitalism is going to have to be coupled to hyper socialism. You need to allow the most productive people to create wonders. And you've got to stop bogging them down with all of these extra nice requirements. You know, nice is dead. Good has a future. Nice doesn't have a future. Because nice ends up with, with gulegs.

• 1:17:36Lex Fridman?

  Damn, that's a good line. Okay, last question. You tweeted today, a simple, quite insightful equation. Saying, uh, imagine that every unit F of fame you picked up, S stalkers and H haters. So I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame, perhaps a little bit.

• 1:17:56Eric Weinstein?

  Well, it's not as simple. People always take these things literally when you have like 280 characters to explain yourself.

• 1:18:03Lex Fridman?

  So you mean that that's not a mathematical, uh?

• 1:18:06Eric Weinstein?

  No, there's no law.

• 1:18:07Lex Fridman?

  Okay, alright.

• 1:18:08Eric Weinstein?

  I just said, I put the word imagine because I still have a mathematician's desire for precision. Imagine that this were true.

• 1:18:14Lex Fridman?

  But it was a beautiful way to imagine that there is a law that has those variables in it. And, uh, you've become quite famous these days. So how do you yourself optimize that equation with the peculiar kind of fame that you have gathered along the way?

• 1:18:30Eric Weinstein?

  I want to be kinder. I want to be kinder to myself. I want to be kinder to others. I want to be able to have heart.

• 1:18:38Eric Weinstein?

  Compassion, these things are really important. And, uh, I have a pretty spectrum-y kind of approach to analysis. I'm quite literal. I can go full Rain Man on you at any given moment. No, I can, I can. Uh, it's faculty of autism, if you like, and people are going to get angry because they want autism to be respected, but. When you see me coding, or you see me doing mathematics, I'm, you know, I speak with speech apnea.

• 1:19:06Eric Weinstein?

  Be right down to dinner, you know.

• 1:19:09Eric Weinstein?

  We have to try to integrate ourselves and those tensions between, you know, it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul. Many of us are optimizing one to the, at the expense of the other. And I struggle with social media and I struggle with people making threats against our families and I struggle with just how much pain people are in. And if there's one message I would like to push out there, you're responsible, everybody, all of us, myself included, with struggling. Struggle, struggle mightily because you, it's nobody else's job to do your struggle for you. Now, with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure out how to better yourself and where you failed, where you've let down your family,

• 1:19:54Eric Weinstein?

  your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break, you know. If, if, if it's not working out, I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success. There's been no period of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another. And I do wish to say that a lot of times people think this is glamorous. I'm about to go, you know, do a show with Sam Harris. People are gonna listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage. It's completely crazy. I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum value. And that's why I'm doing this podcast, you know. Just give yourself a break. You owe us, you owe us your struggle.

• 1:20:37Eric Weinstein?

  You don't owe your family or your coworkers or your lovers or your family members success. As long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up, recognize that this, this new situation with the economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions has caused the people who've risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel. Everybody is lying at the moment. Nobody's really a truth teller.

• 1:21:05Eric Weinstein?

  Try to keep your humanity about you. Try to recognize that if you're failing, if things aren't where you want them to be, and you're struggling, and you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, what you could do, it's not necessarily all your fault. We are in a global situation. I have not met the people who are honest, kind, good, successful. Nobody that I've met is checking all the boxes. Nobody's getting all tens. So I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough. Either people want to hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable. You have to struggle. You have to try. Or they want to say you're 100% responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense.

• 1:21:48Eric Weinstein?

  Beautifully put. Eric, thank you so much for talking today. Thanks for having me, buddy.