#88 – Eric Weinstein: Geometric Unity and the Call for New Ideas, Leaders & Institutions

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of The Portal podcast, a part of which, he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of Geometric Unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts in arriving at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics. Support this podcast by signing up with these sponsors: – Cash App – use code “LexPodcast” and download: – Cash App (App Store): https://apple.co/2sPrUHe – Cash App (Google Play): https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w 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 Graph, Wall, Tome wiki: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Graph,_Wall,_Tome This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. 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. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584, follow on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL, or support it on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 02:08 – World War II and the Coronavirus Pandemic 14:03 – New leaders 31:18 – Hope for our time 34:23 – WHO 44:19 – Geometric unity 1:38:55 – We need to get off this planet 1:40:47 – Elon Musk 1:46:58 – Take Back MIT 2:15:31 – The time at Harvard 2:37:01 – The Portal 2:42:58 – Legacy

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 second time we've spoken on this podcast. He's a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of the Portal Podcast, a part of which he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of geometric unity. That is at the center of his lifelong efforts to arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics. This conversation was recorded recently in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  crisis, I'm sending love your way. Stay strong. We're in this together. We'll beat this thing. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at LexFriedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LexPodcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App does fractional share trading, let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes to create the

• 1:26Lex Fridman?

  abstraction of the fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel. So, big props to the Cash App engineers for solving a hard problem that in the end provides an easy interface that takes a step up to the next layer of abstraction over the stock market, making trading more accessible to new investors and diversification much easier. So, again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code LexPodcast, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

• 2:26Lex Fridman?

  Do you see a connection between World War II and the crisis we're living through right now?

• 2:31Eric Weinstein?

  Sure. The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these abstractions, like, everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do for himself and leave everyone else alone, none of these abstractions work in a global crisis. And this is just a reminder that we didn't somehow put all that behind us.

• 2:54Lex Fridman?

  When I hear stories about my grandfather, who was in the army, and so the Soviet Union, where most people die when you're in the army, there's a brotherhood that happens, there's a love that happens. Do you think that's something we're going to see here?

• 3:08Eric Weinstein?

  Well, we're not there. I mean, what the Soviet Union went through, I mean, the enormity of the war on the Russian doorstep.

• 3:19Lex Fridman?

  This is different. What we're going through now is not...

• 3:22Eric Weinstein?

  We can't talk about Stalingrad and COVID in the same breath yet. We're not ready. And the, the sort of, you know, the, just the sense of like the Great Patriotic War and the way in which, I was very moved by the Soviet custom of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day. Like, the happiest day of your life, you have to say thank you to the people who made it possible. We're not there. We're, we're just restarting history. We, you know, I've called this, on the Rogan program, I called it the Great Nap. The 75 years with very little, by historical standards, in, in terms of really profound disruptions. And so...

• 4:04Lex Fridman?

  When you call it the Great Nap, meaning lack of deep global tragedy?

• 4:09Eric Weinstein?

  Well, lack of realized global tragedy. So I think that the development, for example, of the hydrogen bomb, you know, was something that happened during the Great Nap.

• 4:20Eric Weinstein?

  And that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel fear, didn't know anxiety, but it was to say that most of the violent potential of the human species was not realized. It was in the form of potential energy. And this is the thing that I've sort of taken issue with, with the description of Steven Pinker's optimism, is that if you look at the realized kinetic variables, things have been getting much better for a long time, which is the great nap. But it's not as if our fragility has not grown, our dependence on electronic systems, our vulnerability to disruption. And so all sorts of things have gotten much better, other things have gotten much worse, and the destructive potential has skyrocketed.

• 5:05Eric Weinstein?

  Is tragedy the only way we wake up from the big nap? Well, no, you could also have jubilation about positive things, but it's harder to get people's attention. Can you give an example of a big global positive thing? Well, I think, I think that when, for example, just historically speaking, HIV went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with for a very long period of time, it would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday, right? Like all at once, like you knew that things had changed. And so the bleed in somewhat kills the sort of the Wednesday effect where it all happens on a particular day at a particular moment. I think if you look at the stock market here, you know, there's a very clear

• 5:50Eric Weinstein?

  moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus. I think that with respect to positives, the moon landing was the best example of a positive that happened at a particular time, or recapitulating the Soviet-American link-up in terms of Skylab and Soyuz, right? Like, that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting in orbit. And so, yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful and amazing happens, you know, but it's just, there are fewer of them. That's why, that's

• 6:30Eric Weinstein?

  why, as much as I can't imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event, when you have like 30,000 people waiting and, you know, like, she says yes, it's pretty exciting. So I think that we shouldn't, we shouldn't discount that.

• 6:46Lex Fridman?

  So how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of the global suffering that we're going to experience with this with this crisis?

• 6:56Eric Weinstein?

  I can't figure this one out. I'm just not smart enough. Something is going weirdly wrong. They're almost like two separate storylines. In one storyline, we aren't taking things nearly seriously enough. We see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses. We hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage. And that's a very terrifying story. On the other hand, there's this other story, which says there are tons of ventilators someplace. We've got lots of masks, but they haven't been released. We've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used.

• 7:40Eric Weinstein?

  And it's very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling that they both must be true simultaneously, and they can't both be true in any kind of standard way. And I don't know whether it's just that I'm dumb, but I can't get one or the other story to quiet down. So I think weirdly, this is much more serious than we had understood it. And it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the same time, and that we're not being given the tools to actually understand, oh, here's how to interpret the data, or here's the issue with the personal protective equipment is actually a jurisdictional battle or a question of who pays for it, rather than a question of whether it's present or absent.

• 8:24Eric Weinstein?

  I don't understand the details of it, but something is wildly off in our ability to understand where we are.

• 8:30Lex Fridman?

  So that's that's policy. That's institutions. What about, do you think about the quiet suffering of millions of people that have lost their job? Is this a temporary thing? I mean, what I'm My ears not to the suffering of those people who have lost their job, or the 50% possibly of small businesses that are going to go bankrupt. Do you think about that quiet suffering?

• 8:56Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 8:56Lex Fridman?

  And how that might arise itself?

• 8:58Eric Weinstein?

  Could be not quiet, too. I mean,

• 9:01Lex Fridman?

  Right, that's the...

• 9:02Eric Weinstein?

  Could be a depression. This could go from recession to depression, and depression could go to armed conflict and then to war. So it's not a very abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where we can begin with quiet suffering and anxiety and all of these sorts of things, and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress and all sorts of things. But, look, anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in a...

• 9:33Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, think about this as an incredible experiment. Imagine that you proposed, "Hey, I want to do a bunch of research. Let's figure out what changes in our emissions profiles for our carbon footprints when we're all indoors, or what happens to traffic patterns, or what happens to the vulnerability of retail sales as Amazon gets stronger, you know, et cetera, et cetera." I believe that in many of those situations,

• 10:04Eric Weinstein?

  we're running an incredible experiment. And am I worried for us all? Yes, there are some bright spots, one of which is that when you're ordered to stay indoors, people are going to feel entitled. And the usual thing that people are going to hit when they hear that they've lost your job, you know,

• 10:22Eric Weinstein?

  there's this kind of tough,

• 10:27Eric Weinstein?

  tough love attitude that you see, particularly in the United States. Like, "Oh, you lost your job, poor baby. Well, go retrain, get another one." I think there's going to be a lot less appetite for that because we've been asked to sacrifice, to risk, to act collectively. And that's the interesting thing. What does that reawaken in us? Maybe the idea that we actually are nations and that, you know, your fellow countrymen may start to mean something to more people. It certainly means something to people in the military. But I wonder how many people who aren't in the military start to think about this as like, "Oh, yeah, we are kind of running separate experiments and we are not China."

• 11:09Lex Fridman?

  So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come? From my perspective, we are a part of experiment, but I don't feel like we have access to the full data, the full data of the experiment. We're just like little mice.

• 11:23Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Lex Fridman?

  In a large.

• 11:25Eric Weinstein?

  Does this one make sense to you, Lex?

• 11:28Lex Fridman?

  I'm romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to World War II. So I keep connecting to historical events and making sense of them through that way. Or reading the plague by Camus. Like, almost kind of telling narratives and stories, but my, I'm not hearing the suffering that people are going through. Because I think that's quiet. Everybody's numb currently. They're not realizing what it means to have lost your job and to have lost your business. There's kind of a, I don't, I, um, I'm afraid how that fear will materialize itself once the numbness wears out.

• 12:13Lex Fridman?

  And especially if this lasts for many months. And if it's connected to the incompetence of the CDC and the WHO and our government. And perhaps the election process. You know, my biggest fear is that the, you know, elections get delayed or something like that. So the, the, the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have that turns to panic, that turns to anger, that anger.

• 12:48Eric Weinstein?

  Can I just play with that for a little bit?

• 12:49Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 12:51Eric Weinstein?

  What if, in fact, all of that structure that you grew up thinking about? And again, you grew up in two places, right? So when you were inside the US, we tend to look at all of these things as museum pieces. Like, how often do we amend the Constitution anymore? And in some sense, if you think about the Jewish tradition of Simchat Torah, you've got this beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn in calligraphy. That's very valuable and it's very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered.

• 13:33Eric Weinstein?

  And so we, one day a year, we dance with the Torah and we hold this incredibly vulnerable document up and we treat it as if, you know, it was Ginger Rogers being led by Fred Astaire. Well, that is how you become part of your country. In fact, maybe the, maybe the election will be delayed. Maybe extraordinary powers will be used. Maybe any one of a number of things will indicate that you're actually living through history. This isn't a museum piece that you were handed by your great, great grandparents.

• 14:05Lex Fridman?

  But you're kind of suggesting that there might be a, like a community thing that pops up, like, as opposed to an angry revolution, it might have a positive effect of.

• 14:19Eric Weinstein?

  Well, for example, are you telling me that if the right person stood up and called for us to sacrifice PPE for our nurses and our, our MDs who are on the front lines, that like people wouldn't reach down deep in their own supply that they've been like stocking and carefully storing and just say, here, take it. Like, right now, an actual leader would use this time to bring out the heroic character, and I'm gonna just go wildly patriotic because I friggin' love this country.

• 14:58Eric Weinstein?

  We've got this dormant population in the US that loves leadership and country and pride in our freedom and not being told what to do. And we still have this thing that binds us together and all of them, the merchants of division, just be gone.

• 15:17Lex Fridman?

  I totally agree with you. There's a, I think there is a deep hunger for that leadership. Why hasn't that, why, why hasn't one arisen?

• 15:25Eric Weinstein?

  Because we don't have the right surgeon general. We have guys saying, you know, come on, guys, don't buy masks. They don't really work for you. Save them for our healthcare professionals. No, you can't do that. You have to say, you know what? These masks actually do work and they more work to protect other people from you. But they would work for you. They'll keep you somewhat safer if you wear them. Here's the deal. You've got somebody who's taking huge amounts of viral load all the time because the patients are shedding. Do you want to protect that person who's volunteered to be in the front line, who's up sleepless nights? You just change the message. You stop lying to people. You just, you level with them. It's like, it's bad.

• 16:06Lex Fridman?

  Absolutely. But that's, that's a little bit specific. So you, you have to be just honest about the facts of the situation, yes. But I think you were referring to something bigger than just that.

• 16:16Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Lex Fridman?

  It's inspiring, like, you know, rewriting the constitution, sort of rethinking how we work as a nation.

• 16:25Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I think you should probably, you know, amend the constitution once or twice in a lifetime so that you don't get this distance from the foundational documents. And, you know, part of the problem is that we've got two generations on top that feel very connected to the US. They feel bought in and we've got three generations below. It's a little bit like watching your parents riding the tricycle that they were supposed to pass on to you. And it's like, you're now too old to ride a tricycle and they're still whooping it up, ringing the bell with the streamers coming off the handlebars. And you're just thinking, do you guys never get bored? Do you never pass a torch? Do you really want it? We had five septuagenarians, all born in the 40s, running for president of the United

• 17:10Eric Weinstein?

  States when Klobuchar dropped out. The youngest was Warren. We had Warren, Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg and Trump from like 1949 to 1941, all who had been the, the oldest president at inauguration. And nobody, nobody says, grandma, grandpa, you're embarrassing us.

• 17:30Lex Fridman?

  Except Joe Rogan. Let me put it on you. You have a big platform. You're somewhat of an intelligent, eloquent guy. What, what role do you somewhat, what role do you play? Why aren't you that leader? Or you're, I mean, I would argue that you're in, in ways becoming that leader.

• 17:49Eric Weinstein?

  So I haven't taken enough risk. Is that your idea? What should I do or say at the moment?

• 17:55Lex Fridman?

  No, you're a little bit, no, you have taken quite a big risks and we'll, we'll talk about it.

• 18:00Eric Weinstein?

  All right.

• 18:01Lex Fridman?

  But you're also on the outside shooting in. Meaning you're dismantling the institution from the outside as opposed to becoming the institution.

• 18:18Eric Weinstein?

  Do you remember that thing you brought up when you were on The View?

• 18:22Lex Fridman?

  The View?

• 18:23Eric Weinstein?

  I'm sorry, when you were on Oprah?

• 18:25Lex Fridman?

  I didn't make, I didn't get the invite.

• 18:27Eric Weinstein?

  I'm sorry. When you were on Bill Maher's program, what was that thing you were saying? They don't know we're here. They may watch us.

• 18:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Eric Weinstein?

  They may quietly slip us a direct message, but they pretend that this internet thing is some dangerous place where only lunatics play.

• 18:50Lex Fridman?

  Well, who has the bigger platform, the portal or Bill Maher's program or The View?

• 18:56Eric Weinstein?

  Bill Maher and The View.

• 18:58Lex Fridman?

  In terms of viewership or in terms of what's the metric of size?

• 19:01Eric Weinstein?

  Well, first of all, the key thing is, um, take, take a newspaper and even imagine that it's completely fake. Okay. And then there's very little in the way of circulation. Yet imagine that it's a hundred year old paper and that it's still part of this game, this internal game of media. The key point is, is that those sources that have that kind of.

• 19:28Eric Weinstein?

  Mark of respectability to the institutional structures matter in a way that even if I say something on a very large platform that makes a lot of sense, if it's outside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative or GIN, it sort of doesn't matter to the institutions. So the game is if it happens outside of the club, we can pretend that it never happened.

• 19:53Lex Fridman?

  How can you get the credibility and the authority from outside the gated institutional narrative?

• 20:00Eric Weinstein?

  Well, first of all, you and I both share institutional credibility coming from our associations. So we were both at MIT.

• 20:12Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 20:13Eric Weinstein?

  Were you at Harvard at any point?

• 20:15Lex Fridman?

  Nope.

• 20:15Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, well.

• 20:17Lex Fridman?

  I lived in Harvard Square.

• 20:19Eric Weinstein?

  So did I. But, you know, at some level, the issue isn't whether you have credentials in that sense. The key question is can you be trusted to file a flight plan and not deviate from that flight plan when you are in an interview situation? Will you stick to the talking points? I will not. And that's why you're not going to be allowed in the general conversation which amplifies these sentiments.

• 20:46Lex Fridman?

  But I'm still trying to.

• 20:47Eric Weinstein?

  So your point would be is that, let's say, both, so you've done how many, Joe Rogan?

• 20:53Lex Fridman?

  Four.

• 20:53Eric Weinstein?

  I've done four too, right? So both of us are somewhat frequent guests. The show is huge. You know the power as well as I do. And people are going to watch this conversation. Huge number watched our last one. By the way, I want to thank you for that one. That was a terrific, terrific conversation. Really did change my life. Lex, you're a brilliant interviewer. So thank you.

• 21:13Lex Fridman?

  Thank you. You changed my life too, that you gave me a chance. So that was.

• 21:19Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, I'm so glad I did that one. What I would say is, is that we keep mistaking how big the audience is for whether or not you have the kiss. And the kiss is a different thing.

• 21:29Lex Fridman?

  Kiss?

• 21:29Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Lex Fridman?

  What does that stand for?

• 21:31Eric Weinstein?

  It's not an acronym yet.

• 21:32Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 21:33Eric Weinstein?

  It's, thank you for asking. It's a question of are you part of the interoperable institution friendly discussion? And that's the discussion which we ultimately have to break into.

• 21:47Lex Fridman?

  But that's what I'm trying to get at is how do we, how do you, how does Eric Weinstein become the president of the United States?

• 21:53Eric Weinstein?

  I shouldn't become the president of the United States, not interested, thank you very much for asking.

• 21:57Lex Fridman?

  Okay, get into a leadership position where, I guess I don't know what that means, but where you can inspire millions of people to, inspire the sense of community, inspire the, the kind of actions required to overcome hardship, the kind of hardship that we may be experiencing, to inspire people to work hard and face the difficult hard facts of the realities we're living through, all those kinds of things that you're talking about. That leader, you know, can that leader emerge from the current institutions? Or alternatively, can it also emerge from the outside? I guess that's what I was asking.

• 22:40Eric Weinstein?

  So my belief is, is that this is the last hurrah for the elderly centrist kleptocrats.

• 22:49Lex Fridman?

  Can you define each of those terms?

• 22:51Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Elderly, I mean, people who were born at least a year before I was. That's a joke, you can laugh.

• 23:01Eric Weinstein?

  No, because I'm born in the cusp of the Gen X boomer divide.

• 23:06Eric Weinstein?

  Centerist, they're pretending, you know, there are two parties, Democrat and Republican Party in the United States. I think it's easier to think of the mainstream of both of them as part of a, an aggregate party that I sometimes call the looting party, which gets us to kleptocracy, which is ruled by thieves. And the great temptation has been to treat the US like a trough and you just have to get yours because it's not like we're doing anything productive. So everybody's sort of looting the family mansion and somebody stole the silver and somebody's cutting the pictures out of the frames. You know, roughly speaking, we're watching our elders live it up in a way that doesn't make sense to the rest of us.

• 23:46Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so if it's the last hurrah. This is the time for leaders to step up.

• 23:51Eric Weinstein?

  Well, no, we're not ready yet. We're not ready.

• 23:54Lex Fridman?

  I just disagree with that.

• 23:55Eric Weinstein?

  I call, I call out, you know, the head of the CDC should resign.

• 24:01Eric Weinstein?

  Should resign. The surgeon general should resign. Trump should resign. Pelosi should resign. de Blasio should resign.

• 24:08Lex Fridman?

  They're not going to resign.

• 24:09Eric Weinstein?

  I understand that. So that's why, so we'll wait.

• 24:12Lex Fridman?

  No, but that's not how revolutions work. You don't wait for people to resign. You step up and inspire the alternative.

• 24:21Eric Weinstein?

  Do you remember the Russian Revolution of 1907?

• 24:25Lex Fridman?

  It's before my time.

• 24:27Eric Weinstein?

  But there wasn't a Russian Revolution of 1907.

• 24:29Lex Fridman?

  So you're thinking we're in 1907, not 1917?

• 24:31Eric Weinstein?

  I'm saying we're too, you're too early.

• 24:33Lex Fridman?

  But we got this, you know, Spanish flu came in 17, 18. So I would argue that there's a lot of parallels there. World War I.

• 24:42Eric Weinstein?

  I think it's not time yet. Like John Prine, the songwriter, just died of COVID. That was a pretty big.

• 24:51Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 24:52Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Lex Fridman?

  By the way, you, yes, of course, I, every time we do this, we discover our, our mutual appreciation of obscure, brilliant, witty songwriter.

• 25:04Eric Weinstein?

  Well, he's really, he's really quite good, right?

• 25:06Lex Fridman?

  He's, he's really good. Yeah. He died.

• 25:10Eric Weinstein?

  My understanding is that he passed recently due to complications of Corona. So we haven't had large enough, enough large, large enough shocking deaths yet. Picturesque deaths, deaths of a family that couldn't get treatment. There are stories that will come and break our hearts. And we have not had enough of those. The visuals haven't come in.

• 25:34Lex Fridman?

  But I think they're coming.

• 25:35Eric Weinstein?

  Well, we'll find out.

• 25:36Lex Fridman?

  But that you gotta, you have to be there, you have to be there when they come. I mean.

• 25:40Eric Weinstein?

  But we didn't get the visual, for example, of Falling Man from 9/11.

• 25:45Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 25:45Eric Weinstein?

  So the outside world did, but Americans were not. It was thought that we would be too delicate. So just the way you remember Pulitzer Prize winning photographs from the Vietnam era, you don't easily remember the photographs from all sorts of things that have happened since because something changed in our immediate. We are insensitive. We cannot feel or experience our own lives and the tragedy that would animate us to action.

• 26:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I think there, again, I think there's going to be that suffering that's going to build and build and build in terms of businesses, mom and pop shops that close. And I like, I think for myself, I think often like that I'm being weak and, and like, I feel like I should be doing something. Like I should be becoming a leader on a small scale.

• 26:38Eric Weinstein?

  You can't. This is not World War II and this is not Soviet Russia.

• 26:43Lex Fridman?

  Why not? Why not?

• 26:46Eric Weinstein?

  Because our internal programming, the malware that sits between our ears is much different than the propagandized malware of the Soviet era. I mean, people were both very indoctrinated and also knew that somehow it was BS. They had a double mind. I don't know. There must be a great word in Russian for being able to think both of those things simultaneously.

• 27:16Lex Fridman?

  You don't think people are actually sick of the partisanship, sick of incompetence?

• 27:23Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, but I called for revolt the other day on Joe Rogan. People found it quixotic.

• 27:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, because I think you're not, I think revolt is different. I think as like.

• 27:34Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, I'm really angry. I'm furious. I cannot stand that this is my country at the moment. I am embarrassed.

• 27:42Lex Fridman?

  So let's build a better one.

• 27:44Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Lex Fridman?

  That's the.

• 27:45Eric Weinstein?

  I'm in.

• 27:47Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so, well, that's something I think about.

• 27:49Eric Weinstein?

  So let's take over a few universities. Let's start running a different experiment at some of our better universities. Like, when I did this experiment, and I said, what, at this, if this were 40 years ago, the median age, I believe, of a university president was 51. That would have the person in Gen X, and we'd have a bunch of millennial presidents, a bunch of, you know, more than half Gen X. It's almost 100% baby boom at this moment. And how did that happen? We can get into how they changed retirement, but this generation above us does not feel, or even the older generation, the silent generation. I had Roger Penrose on my program.

• 28:34Lex Fridman?

  Excellent class.

• 28:35Eric Weinstein?

  And I, thank you, really appreciate that. And I asked him a question that was very important to me. I said, "Look, you're in your late 80s. Is there anyone you could point to as a successor that we should be watching? We can get excited." You know, I said, "Here's an opportunity to pass the baton." And he said, "Well, let me, let me hold off on that." I was like, "Oh, is it ever the right moment to point to somebody younger than you to keep your flame alive after you're gone?" And also, like, I don't know whether, I'm just gonna admit to this. People treat me like I'm crazy for caring about the world after I'm dead. Or wanting to be remembered after you're gone. Like, "Well, what does it matter to you? You're gone." It's this deeply sort of secular, somatic perspective on everything, where we don't,

• 29:18Eric Weinstein?

  you know that phrase in "As Time Goes By"? It says, "It's still the same old story. A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die." I don't think people imagined then that there wouldn't be a story about fighting for love and glory. And like, we are so out of practice about fighting, you know, rivals for love and, and, and fighting for glory and something bigger than yourself.

• 29:51Lex Fridman?

  But the hunger is there.

• 29:53Eric Weinstein?

  Well, that was the point then, right? The whole idea is that Rick was, you know, he was like Han Solo of his time. He's just like, I stick my neck out for nobody. You know, it's like, oh, come on, Rick. You're just pretending. You actually have a big soul, right? And so at some level, that's the question. Do we have a big soul or is it just all bullshit?

• 30:11Lex Fridman?

  See, I think, I think there's huge Manhattan Project style projects, whether you're talking about physical infrastructure or going to Mars, you know, the SpaceX, NASA efforts or huge, huge scientific efforts.

• 30:27Eric Weinstein?

  Well, we need to get back into the institutions and we need to remove the weak leadership, that we have weak leaders and the weak leaders need to be removed and they need to seat people more dangerous than the people who are currently sitting in a lot of those chairs.

• 30:39Lex Fridman?

  Or build new institutions.

• 30:41Eric Weinstein?

  Good luck.

• 30:43Lex Fridman?

  Well, so one of the nice things of, uh, from the internet is, for example, somebody like you can have a bigger voice than almost anybody at the particular institutions we're talking about.

• 30:57Eric Weinstein?

  That's true, but the thing is I might say something. You can count on the fact that the, you know, provost at Princeton isn't going to say anything.

• 31:07Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean? Too afraid?

• 31:08Eric Weinstein?

  Well, if, if that person were to give an interview, how are things going in, in, in research at Princeton? Well, I'm hesitant to say it, but they're perhaps as good as they've ever been and I think they're going to get better. Oh, is that right? All fields? Yep. I don't see a weak one. And I was just like, okay, great. Who are you and what are you even saying? We're just used to total nonsense 24/7.

• 31:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What do you think might be a beautiful thing that comes out of this? Like, what, is there a hope that, like a little inkling, a little fire of hope you have about our time right now?

• 31:48Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I think one thing is coming to understand that the freaks, weirdos, mutants, and other ne'er do wells, sometimes referred to as grifters, I like that one, grifters, and gadflies, were very often the earliest people on the coronavirus. That's a really interesting question. Why was that? And it seems to be that they had already paid such a social price that they weren't going to be beaten up by being told, "Oh, my God, you're xenophobic. You just hate China." You know, or, "Wow, you sound like a conspiracy theorist."

• 32:31Eric Weinstein?

  So if you'd already paid those prices, you were free to think about this. And everyone in an institutional framework was terrified that they didn't want to be seen as the alarmist, the Chicken Little. And so that's why you have this confidence where, you know, de Blasio says, you know, "Get on with your lives. Get back in there and celebrate Chinese New Year in Chinatown," despite coronavirus. It's like, okay, really? So you just always thought everything would automatically be okay if you adapted, sorry, if you adopted that posture.

• 33:05Lex Fridman?

  So you think this time reveals the weakness of our institutions and reveals the strength of our gadflies and the weirdos and the...

• 33:15Eric Weinstein?

  No, not necessarily the strength, but the value of freedom. Like, a different way of saying it would be, wow, even your gadflies and your grifters were able to beat your institutional folks because your institutional folks were playing with a giant mental handicap. So just imagine, like, we were in the story of Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut, and our smartest people were all subjected to distracting noises every seven seconds. Well, they would be functionally much dumber because they couldn't continue a thought through all the disturbance. So in some sense, that's a little bit like what belonging to an institution is, is that if you have to make a public statement, of course, the surgeon general's going to be the worst.

• 33:59Eric Weinstein?

  Because they're just playing with too much of a handicap. There are too many institutional players are like, don't screw us up. And so the person has to say something wrong. We're going to back propagate a falsehood. And this is very interesting. Some of my socially oriented friends say, Eric, I don't understand what you're on about. Of course, masks work, but you know what they're trying to do? They're trying to get us not to buy up the masks for the doctors. And I think, OK, so you imagine that we can just create scientific fiction at will so that you can run whatever social program you want? This is what I, you know, my point is get out of my lab. Get out of the lab. You don't belong in the lab. You're not meant for the lab. You're constitutionally incapable of being around a lab. You need to leave the lab.

• 34:41Lex Fridman?

  You think the CDC and WHO knew that masks work? And we're trying to sort of imagine that people are kind of stupid and they would buy masks in excess if they were told that masks work? Is that like, uh? Because this does seem to be a particularly clear example of mistakes made.

• 35:06Eric Weinstein?

  You're asking me this question?

• 35:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Eric Weinstein?

  No, you're not. What do you think, Lex?

• 35:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, I actually probably disagree with you a little bit.

• 35:13Eric Weinstein?

  Great, let's do it.

• 35:16Lex Fridman?

  I think it's not so easy to be honest with the populace when the danger of panic is always around the corner. So I, I think the kind of honesty you exhibit appeals to a certain class of brave intellectual minds that appeals to me, but I don't know. From the perspective of WHO, I don't know if it's so obvious that they should be honest 100% of the time with people.

• 35:54Eric Weinstein?

  I'm not saying you should be perfectly transparent and 100% honest. I'm saying that the quality of your lies has to be very high and it has to be public spirited. There's a big difference between, so I'm not, I'm not a child about this. I'm not saying that when you're at war, for example, you turn over all of your plans to the enemy because it's important that you're transparent with 360 degree visibility. Far from it. What I'm saying is

• 36:21Eric Weinstein?

  Something has been forgotten, and I forgot who it was who told it to me. But it was a fellow graduate student in the Harvard math department. And he said, you know, I learned one thing being out in the workforce, because he was one of the few people who had had a work life in the department as a grad student. And he said, you can be friends with your boss. But if you're going to be friends with your boss, you have to be doing a good job at work. And there's an analog here, which is if you're going to be reasonably honest with the population, you have to be doing a good job at work as the surgeon general or as the head of the CDC. So if you're doing a terrible job, you're supposed to resign.

• 37:04Eric Weinstein?

  And then the next person is supposed to say, look, I'm not going to lie to you. I inherited the situation. It was in a bit of disarray. But I had several requirements before I agreed to step in and take the job, because I needed to know I could turn it around. I needed to know that I had clear lines of authority. I needed to know that I had the resources available in order to rectify the problem. And I needed to know that I had the ability and the freedom to level with the American people directly as I saw fit. All of my wishes were granted, and that's why I'm happy here on Monday morning. I've got my sleeves rolled up. Boy, do we got a lot to do. So please come back in two weeks and then ask me how I'm doing then. And I hope to have something to show you. That's how you do it. So why is that excellence and basic competence missing? The big nap.

• 37:49Eric Weinstein?

  You see, you come from multiple traditions where it was very important to remember things. The Soviet tradition made sure that you remembered the sacrifices that came in that war. And the Jewish tradition, we're doing this on Passover, right? Okay, well, every year we tell one simple story. Well, why can't it be different every year? Maybe we could have a rotating series of seven stories. Because it's the one story that you need. It's like, you know, you work with the Men in Black group, right? And it's the last suit that you'll ever need. This is the last story that you ever need. Don't think I fell for your neuralizer last time. In any event, we tell one story because it's the get out of Dodge story.

• 38:33Eric Weinstein?

  There's a time when you need to not wait for the the bread to rise. And that's the thing, which is even if you live through a great nap, you deserve to know what it feels like to have to leave everything that has become comfortable and and unworkable.

• 38:51Lex Fridman?

  It's sad that you need, you need that tragedy, I imagine, to have the tradition of remembering. It's sad to, to think that because things have been nice and comfortable means that we can't have great competent leaders. Which is kind of the implied statement, like, can we have great leaders who take big risks, who are, who inspire hard work, who deal with difficult truth, even though things have been comfortable?

• 39:25Eric Weinstein?

  Well, we know what those people sound like. I mean, you know, if, for example, Jaco Willink suddenly threw his hat into the ring, everyone would say, okay. Right? Party's over. It's time to get up at 4:30 and really work hard and we've got to get back into fighting shape. And...

• 39:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but Jaco is a very special, I think that whole group of people by profession put themselves in the way of, into hardship on a daily basis. And he's not, I don't, well, I don't know, but he's probably not going to be, well, could Jaco be president?

• 40:09Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, but it doesn't have to be Jaco, right? Like, in other words, if it was Kai Lenny, or if it was Alex Honnold from rock climbing.

• 40:18Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 40:19Eric Weinstein?

  They're just serious people. They're serious people who can't afford your BS.

• 40:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but why do we have serious people that do rock climbing and don't have serious people who lead the nation? That seems to...

• 40:38Eric Weinstein?

  Because that was a, those skills needed in rock climbing.

• 40:43Eric Weinstein?

  Are not good during the big nap. And at the tail end of the big nap, they would get you fired.

• 40:48Lex Fridman?

  But I don't, don't you think there's a fundamental part of human nature that desires to excel, to be exceptionally good at your job?

• 40:57Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, but what is your job? I mean, in other words, my, my, my point to you is if you, if you're a general in a peacetime army and your major activity is playing war games. What if the skills needed to win war games are very different than the skills needed to win wars? Because you know how the war games are scored and you've, you've done Moneyball, for example, with war games. You figured out how to win games on paper. So then the advancement skill becomes divergent from the ultimate skill that it was proxying for.

• 41:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you create, we're good as human beings to, I mean, at least me, I can't do a big nap. So at any one moment, when I finish something, a new dream pops up. So going to Mars.

• 41:44Eric Weinstein?

  What, what do you like to do? You like to do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu?

• 41:47Lex Fridman?

  Well, first of all, I like to do every.

• 41:49Eric Weinstein?

  You like to play guitar?

• 41:50Lex Fridman?

  Guitar.

• 41:51Eric Weinstein?

  You do this podcast, you do theory, you're always, you're constantly taking risks and exposing yourself. Right? Why? Because you got one of those crazy, I'm sorry to say it, you got an Eastern European Jewish personality, which I'm still tied to. And I'm a couple of generations more distant than you are. And I've held on to that thing because it's valuable to me.

• 42:13Lex Fridman?

  You don't think there's a huge percent of the populace, even in the United States, that's, that's that. It might be a little bit dormant, but.

• 42:21Eric Weinstein?

  Do you, do you know Anna Chachin from the Red Scare podcast?

• 42:25Lex Fridman?

  Did you interview her?

• 42:25Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I listen, yeah, yeah, she was great.

• 42:28Eric Weinstein?

  She was great, right?

• 42:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, she was fun.

• 42:30Eric Weinstein?

  She's, she's terrific, but she also has the same thing going on. And I made a joke in the liner notes for that episode, which is somewhere on the road from Stalingrad to Forever 21, something was lost. Like, how can Stalingrad and Forever 21 be in the same sentence? And, you know, in part, it's that weird thing. It's like trying to remember even words like, I mean, Russian and Hebrew, things like, it's like, but pommiat and liskor, you know, these words have much more potency about memory. And.

• 43:03Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. I do. I think I think there's still a dormant populace that craves leaders on a small scale and large scale. And I hope to be that leader on a small scale. And I think you, sir, have a role to be a leader.

• 43:21Eric Weinstein?

  You kids go ahead without me. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna do a little bit of weird podcasting.

• 43:27Lex Fridman?

  See, now you're, you're putting on your Joe Rogan hat. He says, I'm just a comedian.

• 43:32Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, no, I'm not.

• 43:33Lex Fridman?

  You say, I'm just a...

• 43:34Eric Weinstein?

  It's not that. If I say I want to lead too much because of the big nap, there's like a group, a chorus of automated idiots. And their first thought is like, ah, I knew it. It was a power grab all along. Why should you lead? You know, just like, and so the the idea is you're just trying to skirt around not stepping on all of the idiot landmines. It's like, okay. So now I'm gonna hear that in my inbox for the next three days.

• 43:58Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So lead by example, just live.

• 44:01Eric Weinstein?

  No, I mean, the issue...

• 44:02Lex Fridman?

  On a large platform.

• 44:02Eric Weinstein?

  Look, we should take over the institutions. There are institutions. We've got bad leadership. We should mutiny. And we should inject a, I don't know, 15%, 20% disagreeable, dissident, very aggressive, loner individual, mutant freaks, all the people that you go to see Avenger movies about, or the X-Men, or whatever it is, and stop pretending that everything good comes out of some great giant inclusive communal 12-hour meeting. It's like, stop it. That's not how shit happens.

• 44:37Lex Fridman?

  You recently published the video of a lecture you gave at Oxford, presenting some aspects of a theory, theory of everything called geometric unity. So this was a work of 30, 30-plus years. This is life's work. Let me ask sort of the silly old question. How do you feel as a human? Excited, scared, the experience of posting it?

• 45:05Eric Weinstein?

  You know, it's funny. One of the, one of the things that you, you learn to feel as an academic is the great sins you can commit in academics is to show yourself to be a non-serious person, to show yourself to have delusions, to avoid the standard practices, which everyone has signed up for.

• 45:30Eric Weinstein?

  And, you know, it's weird because like you know that those people are gonna be angry. He did what? You know, why would he do that?

• 45:40Lex Fridman?

  And And what we're referring to, for example, is traditions of sort of publishing incrementally, certainly not trying to have a theory of everything, perhaps working within the academic departments.

• 45:54Eric Weinstein?

  Yep.

• 45:54Lex Fridman?

  All those things.

• 45:55Eric Weinstein?

  That's true.

• 45:57Lex Fridman?

  And so you're going outside of all of that.

• 45:59Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I mean, I was going inside of all of that. And we did not come to terms when I was inside. And what they did was so outside to me, was so weird, so freakish. Like, the most senior respectable people at the most senior respectable places were functionally insane, as far as I could tell. And again, it's like being functionally stupid if you're the head of the CDC or something, where, you know, you're giving recommendations out that aren't based on what you actually believe. They're based on what you think you have to be doing. Well, in some sense, I think that that's a lot of how I saw the math and physics world as... The physics world was really crazy and the math world was considerably less crazy,

• 46:43Eric Weinstein?

  just very strict and kind of dogmatic.

• 46:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, we'll psychoanalyze those folks, but I really wanna maybe linger on it a little bit longer of how you feel, because this is such a special moment in your life.

• 46:56Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I really appreciate it. It's a great question. So if we can pare off some of that other, those other issues. It's new, being able to say what the observance is, which is my attempt to replace spacetime with something that is both closely related to spacetime and not spacetime. So I used to carry the number 14 as a closely guarded secret in my life. And where 14 is really four dimensions of space and time, plus 10 extra dimensions of rulers and protractors, or for the cool kids out there, symmetric two tensors.

• 47:38Lex Fridman?

  So you had a geometric, a complicated, beautiful geometric view of the world that you carried with you for a long time.

• 47:45Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Lex Fridman?

  Did you, did you have friends that you, colleagues that you-

• 47:50Eric Weinstein?

  Essentially, no.

• 47:51Lex Fridman?

  Talked?

• 47:52Eric Weinstein?

  No. In fact, part of these, part of, some of these stories are me coming out- To my friends, and I use the phrase coming out because I think that gays have monopolized the concept of a closet. Many of us are in closets having nothing to do with our sexual orientation. Yeah, I didn't really feel comfortable talking to almost anyone. So this was a closely guarded secret, and I think that I let on in some ways that I was up to something and probably, but it was a very weird life. So I had to have a series of things that I pretended to care about so that I could use that as the stalking horse for what I really cared about. And to your point, I never understood this whole thing about theories of everything.

• 48:36Eric Weinstein?

  Like, if you were going to go into something like theoretical physics, isn't that what you would normally pursue? Like, wouldn't it be crazy to do something that difficult and that poorly paid if you were going to try to do something other than figure out what this is all about?

• 48:51Lex Fridman?

  Now, I have to reveal my cards, my sort of weaknesses and lack in understanding of the music of physics and math departments, but there's an analogy here to artificial intelligence. And often, folks come in and say, okay, so there's a giant department working on quote unquote, "artificial intelligence," but why is nobody actually working on intelligence? Like, you're all just building little toys.

• 49:21Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 49:22Lex Fridman?

  You're not actually trying to understand, and that breaks a lot of people. They, it confuses them, because like, okay, so I'm at MIT, I'm at Stanford, I'm at Harvard, I'm here, I dreamed of being, working on artificial intelligence. Why is everybody not actually working on intelligence? And I have the same kind of sense that that's what working on the theory of everything is, that strangely, you somehow become an outcast for even...

• 49:49Eric Weinstein?

  But we know why this is, right?

• 49:51Lex Fridman?

  Why?

• 49:52Eric Weinstein?

  Well, it's because, let's take the artificial, let's play with AGI, for example.

• 49:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Eric Weinstein?

  I think that the idea starts off with, nobody really knows how to work on that. And so if we don't know how to work on it, we choose instead to work on a program that is tangentially related to it. So we do a component of a program that is related to that big question, because it's felt like, at least I can make progress there. And that wasn't where I was. Where I was in, it's funny, there was this book of called Frieden Ullinbeck, and it had this weird mysterious line in the beginning of it. And I tried to get clarification of this weird mysterious line, and everyone said wrong things. And then I said, okay, well, so I can tell that nobody's thinking properly, because I just asked the

• 50:41Eric Weinstein?

  entire department, and nobody has a correct interpretation of this. And so, you know, it's a little bit like you see a crime scene photo, and you have a different idea. Like, there's a smoking gun, and you figure, that's actually a cigarette lighter. I don't really believe that. And then, there's like a pack of cards, and you think, oh, that looks like the blunt instrument that the person was beaten with. You know, so you have a very different idea about how things go. And very quickly, you realize that there's no one thinking about that.

• 51:12Lex Fridman?

  There's a few human sides to this, and technical sides, both of which I'd love to try to get down to. So the human side, I can tell from my perspective, I think it was before April 1st, April Fools, maybe the day before, I forget. But I was laying in bed in the middle of the night, and somehow, it popped up, you know, on my feed somewhere, that your beautiful face is speaking live. And I clicked. And, you know, it's kind of weird how the universe just brings things together in this kind of way. And all of a sudden, I realized that there's something big happening at this particular moment. It's

• 51:53Lex Fridman?

  strange, like any, on a day like any day. And all of a sudden, you were thinking of, you had this somber tone, like you were serious, like you were going through some difficult decision. And

• 52:10Lex Fridman?

  It seems strange. I almost thought you were maybe joking, but there's a serious decision being made and it was a wonderful experience to go through with you.

• 52:18Eric Weinstein?

  I really appreciate it. It was April 1st.

• 52:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's kind of fascinating. I mean, it's just the whole experience and and

• 52:26Lex Fridman?

  and so I want to ask, I mean, thank you for letting me be part of that kind of journey of decision making that took 30 years, but why now? Why did you think, why did you struggle so long not to release it? And decide to release it now? And while the whole world is on lockdown, on April Fools, is it just because you like the comedy of absurd ways that the universe comes together?

• 52:56Eric Weinstein?

  I don't think so. I think that the COVID epidemic is the end of the big nap.

• 53:04Eric Weinstein?

  And I think that I actually tried this seven years earlier in Oxford. So I and it was too early.

• 53:14Lex Fridman?

  Which part was too, is it the platform? Because your platform is quite different now, actually, the internet. I remember you, I read several of your brilliant answers that people should read for the edge questions. One of them was related to the internet and

• 53:28Eric Weinstein?

  That was the first one.

• 53:29Lex Fridman?

  Was it the first one?

• 53:30Eric Weinstein?

  An essay called Go Virtual, Young Man.

• 53:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's like forever ago now.

• 53:35Eric Weinstein?

  Well, that was 10 years ago and that's exactly what I did is I decamped to the internet, which is where the portal lives, the portal, the portal, the portal.

• 53:44Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's the theme, the ominous theme music, which you just listen to forever.

• 53:50Eric Weinstein?

  I actually started recording tiny guitar licks for the audio portion, not for the video portion. You kind of inspired me with bringing your guitar into the story, but keep going.

• 54:03Lex Fridman?

  So you thought, so the Oxford was like step one and you kind of, you put your foot into the, in the water to sample it, but it was too cold at the time. So you didn't want to step in.

• 54:13Eric Weinstein?

  I was just really disappointed.

• 54:15Lex Fridman?

  What was disappointing about that experience?

• 54:17Eric Weinstein?

  It's very, it's a hard thing to talk about. It has to do with the fact that

• 54:22Eric Weinstein?

  And I can see this, you know, this mirrors a disappointment within myself. There are two separate issues. One is the issue of making sure that the idea is actually heard and explored. And the other is the, is the question about, will I become disconnected from my work? Because it will be ridiculed, it will, it will be immediately improved. It will be found to be derivative of something that occurred in some paper in 1957. When the community does not want you to gain a voice. It's a little bit like a policeman deciding to weirdly enforce all of these little known regulations against you and, you know, sometimes nobody else.

• 55:05Eric Weinstein?

  And I think that's kind of, you know, this weird thing where I just don't believe that we can reach the final theory necessarily within the political economy of academics. So if you think about how academics are tortured by each other and how they're paid and where they have freedom and where they don't. I actually weirdly think that that system of selective pressures is going to eliminate anybody who's going to make real progress.

• 55:35Lex Fridman?

  So that's interesting. So if you look at the story of Andrew Wiles, for example, with, for my last term. I mean, he, as far as I understand, he pretty much isolated himself from the world of academics in terms of the big, the bulk of the work he did. And it, from my perspective, is dramatic and fun to read about, but it seemed exceptionally stressful, the first step he took, the first steps he took when actually making the work public. That seemed, to me, would be hell.

• 56:06Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, but it's like so artificially dramatic. You know, he, he leads up to it at a series of lectures. He doesn't want to say it. And then he finally says it at the end, because obviously this comes out of a body of work where, I mean, the funny part about Fermat's Last Theorem is it wasn't originally thought to be a deep and meaningful problem. It was just an easy to state one that had gone unsolved. But if you think about it, it became attached to the body of regular theory. So he built up this body of regular theory, gets all the way up to the end, announces. And then like, there's this whole drama about, okay, somebody's checking the proof. I don't understand what's going on in line 37. You know, and like, oh, is it serious? It seems a little bit more serious than we knew.

• 56:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, do you see parallels? Do you share the concern that your experience might be something similar?

• 56:55Eric Weinstein?

  Well, in his case, I think that if I recall correctly, his original proof was unsalvageable. He actually came up with a second proof with a colleague, Richard Taylor. And it was that second proof which carried the day. So it was a little bit that he got put under incredible pressure and then had to succeed in a new way, having failed the first time, which is like even a weirder and stranger story.

• 57:20Lex Fridman?

  That's an incredible story in some sense. But I mean, you, I'm trying to get a sense of the kind of stress.

• 57:27Eric Weinstein?

  I think that this is, okay, but I'm rejecting. What I don't think people understand with me is the scale of the critique. It's like, I don't, you, people say, well, you must implicitly agree with this and implicitly agree. It's like, no, try me. Ask before you decide that I am mostly in agreement with the community about how these things should be handled or what these things mean.

• 57:51Lex Fridman?

  Can you elaborate? And also, just why this criticism matter so much here? So you seem to dislike the burden of criticism that it will choke away all.

• 58:06Eric Weinstein?

  There's different kinds of criticism. There's constructive criticism and there's destructive criticism. And what I don't like is I don't like a community that can't, first of all, like, if you take the physics community, just the way we screwed up on masks in PPE, just the way we screwed up in the financial crisis and mortgage-backed securities, we screwed up on string theory.

• 58:30Lex Fridman?

  Can we just forget the string theory happened?

• 58:33Eric Weinstein?

  Sure. But then somebody should say that, right? Somebody should say, you know, it didn't work out.

• 58:41Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, but you're asking this, like, why do you guys get to keep the prestige after failing for 35 years? That's an interesting question.

• 58:49Lex Fridman?

  Who's the you guys? Because to me-

• 58:51Eric Weinstein?

  Whoever the profession, look, these things, if there is a theory of everything to be had, right? It's going to be a relatively small group of people where this will be sorted out.

• 59:01Lex Fridman?

  Absolutely.

• 59:01Eric Weinstein?

  It's not tens of thousands, it's probably hundreds at the top.

• 59:07Lex Fridman?

  But within that, within that community, there's the assholes. There's the, I mean, you have, you always in this world have people who are kind, open-minded.

• 59:22Eric Weinstein?

  Kind, it's a question about, okay, let's imagine, for example, that you have a story where you believe that ulcers are definitely caused by stress.

• 59:35Eric Weinstein?

  And you've never questioned it, or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of the blue and attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Right? And now somebody introduces a new idea to you, which is like, what if it isn't stress at all? Or what if we actually tried to make Resource Star of Japan attack us somewhere in the Pacific so we could have Cassius Beltway to enter the Asian theater? And the person's original idea is like, what? What are you even saying? You know, it's like, too crazy. Well, when Dirac in 1963 talked about the importance of beauty as a guiding principle in physics, and he wasn't talking about the scientific method, that was crazy talk. But he was actually making a great point.

• 1:00:18Eric Weinstein?

  And he was using Schrodinger, and I think it was, Schrodinger was standing in for him. And he said that if your equations don't agree with experiment, that's kind of a minor detail. If they have true beauty in them, you should explore them because very often the agreement with experiment is an issue of fine tuning of your model, of the instantiation.

• 1:00:39Eric Weinstein?

  And so it doesn't really tell you that your model is wrong. Of course, Heisenberg told Dirac that his model was wrong because that the proton and the electron should be the same mass if they are each other's antiparticles. And that was an irrelevant kind of silliness, rather than a real threat to the Dirac theory.

• 1:01:00Lex Fridman?

  But, okay, so amidst all this silliness, I'm hoping that we could talk about the journey that geometric unity has taken and will take as an idea, and an idea that will see the light.

• 1:01:12Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Lex Fridman?

  That, so first of all, let's, I'm thinking of writing a book called Geometric Unity for Idiots.

• 1:01:20Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:01:21Lex Fridman?

  And I need you as a consultant, so can we?

• 1:01:23Eric Weinstein?

  First of all, I hope I have the trademark on geometric unity.

• 1:01:26Lex Fridman?

  You do, good. Can you give a basic introduction of the goals of geometric unity, the basic tools of mathematics used, the viewpoints in general for idiots?

• 1:01:41Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 1:01:42Lex Fridman?

  Like me.

• 1:01:43Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, great, fun.

• 1:01:44Lex Fridman?

  So what's the goal of geometric unity?

• 1:01:46Eric Weinstein?

  The goal of geometric unity is to start with something so completely bland that you can simply say, well, that's a, the something that begins the game is as close to a mathematical nothing as possible. In other words, I can't answer the question, why is there something rather than nothing? But if there has to be a something that we begin from, let it begin from something that's like a blank canvas.

• 1:02:09Lex Fridman?

  Let's even more basic, so what is something? What are we trying to describe here?

• 1:02:15Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Right now, we have a model of our world, and it's got two sectors. One of the sectors is called general relativity, and the other is called the standard model. So we'll call it GR for general relativity and SM for standard model.

• 1:02:33Lex Fridman?

  What's the difference, you need to, what do the two describe?

• 1:02:35Eric Weinstein?

  So, general relativity gives pride of place to gravity.

• 1:02:42Eric Weinstein?

  And everything else is acting as a sort of a backup singer. Gravity is the star of the show. Gravity is the star of general relativity. Yeah. And in the standard model, the other three non-gravitational forces, so if there are four forces that we know about, three of the four are non-gravitational, that's where they get to shine. Great. So tiny little particles and how they interact with each other. So photons, gluons, and so-called intermediate vector bosons. Those are the things that the standard model showcases and general relativity showcases, gravity, and then you have matter, which is accommodated in both theories,

• 1:03:26Eric Weinstein?

  but much more beautifully inside of the standard model. So what does a theory of everything do? So first of all, I think that that's the first place where we haven't talked enough. We assume that we know what it means, but we don't actually have any idea what it means. And what I claim it is, is that it's a theory where the questions beyond that theory are no longer of a mathematical nature.

• 1:03:54Eric Weinstein?

  In other words, if I say, let us take X to be a four-dimensional manifold. To a mathematician or a physicist, I've said very little. I've simply said, there's some place for calculus and linear algebra to dance together and to play.

• 1:04:15Eric Weinstein?

  And that's what manifolds are. They're the most natural place where our two greatest math theories can really intertwine. Which are the two? Oh, you mean calculus and linear algebra? Yep, right. Okay, now the question is beyond that. So it's sort of like saying, I'm an artist and I want to order a canvas.

• 1:04:38Eric Weinstein?

  Now the question is, does the canvas paint itself?

• 1:04:44Eric Weinstein?

  Does the canvas come up with an artist?

• 1:04:49Eric Weinstein?

  And paint in ink, which then paint the canvas. Like, that's the, that's the hard part about theories of everything, which I don't think people talk enough about.

• 1:04:58Lex Fridman?

  Can we just, you bring up Escher and the hand that draws itself.

• 1:05:02Eric Weinstein?

  The fire that lights itself, or drawing hands.

• 1:05:06Lex Fridman?

  The drawing hands.

• 1:05:06Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Lex Fridman?

  And every time I start to think about that, my mind, like, shuts down.

• 1:05:12Eric Weinstein?

  No, don't do that.

• 1:05:13Lex Fridman?

  It, there's a spark.

• 1:05:15Eric Weinstein?

  No, but this is the most beautiful part. We should do this together.

• 1:05:18Lex Fridman?

  No, it's beautiful, but this robot's brain sparks fly. So can we try to say the same thing over and over in different ways about what, what, what you mean by that having to be a thing we have to contend with?

• 1:05:34Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 1:05:35Lex Fridman?

  Like, why, why do you think that creating a theory of everything, as you call the source code, our, understanding our source code, require a view like the hand that draws itself?

• 1:05:49Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, well, here's what goes on in the regular physics picture. We've got these two main theories, general relativity and the standard model, right? Think of general relativity as more or less the theory of the canvas. Okay? Maybe you, you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape, maybe you've measured it, so it's got length and it's got angle, but more or less, it's just canvas and length and angle. And that's all that really general relativity is, but it allows the canvas to warp a bit. Then we have the second thing, which is this import of foreign libraries where, which

• 1:06:31Eric Weinstein?

  aren't tied to space and time. So we've got this crazy set of symmetries called SU3 cross SU2 cross U1. We've got this collection of 16 particles in a generation, which are these sort of twisted spinners. And we've got three copies of them. Then we've got this weird Higgs field that comes in and, like, de Saini solves all the problems that have been created in the play that can't be resolved otherwise.

• 1:06:59Lex Fridman?

  So that's the standard model, quantum field theory, just plopped on top of this.

• 1:07:03Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, it's a problem of the, the double origin story. One origin story is about space and time. The other origin story is about what we would call internal quantum numbers and internal symmetries. And...

• 1:07:17Eric Weinstein?

  Then there was an attempt to get one to follow from the other called Kaluza Klein theory, which didn't work out. And this is sort of in that vein.

• 1:07:28Lex Fridman?

  So you said origin story. So in the hand that draws itself, what is it?

• 1:07:33Eric Weinstein?

  So it's, it's as if you had the canvas and then you ordered up, also give me paintbrushes, paints, pigments, pencils and artists.

• 1:07:43Lex Fridman?

  But you're saying that's like, if you want to create a universe from scratch, the canvas should be generating the paintbrushes and the paintbrushes should be generating the canvas.

• 1:07:52Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

• 1:07:54Lex Fridman?

  Who's the artist in this analogy?

• 1:07:55Eric Weinstein?

  Well, this is, sorry. Then we're going to get into a religious thing and I don't want to do that.

• 1:08:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:08:01Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you know, my shtick, which is that we are the AI. We have two great stories about the simulation and artificial general intelligence. In one story, man fears that some program we've given birth to will become self-aware, smarter than us and will take over. In another story, there are genius simulators and we live in their simulation. And we haven't realized that those two stories are the same story. In one case, we are the simulator. In another case, we are the simulated. And if you buy those and you put them together, we are the AGI. And whether or not we have simulators, we may be trying to wake up by learning our

• 1:08:46Eric Weinstein?

  own source code. So this could be our Skynet moment, which is one of the reasons I have some issues around it.

• 1:08:52Lex Fridman?

  I think we'll talk about that because I.

• 1:08:54Eric Weinstein?

  Well, that's the issue of the emergent artist within the story. Just to get back to the point. Okay. So, so now the key point is the standard way we tell the story is that Einstein sets the canvas and then we order all the stuff that we want. And then that paints the picture that is our universe. So you order the, the paint, you order the artist, you order the brushes. And that then, when you collide the two, gives you two separate origin stories. The canvas came from one place and everything else came from somewhere else.

• 1:09:30Lex Fridman?

  So what are the mathematical tools required to, to construct consistent geometric theory?

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  You know, make this concrete.

• 1:09:43Eric Weinstein?

  Well, somehow you need to get three copies, for example, of generations with 16 particles each, right? And so the question would be like, well, there's a lot, there's a lot of special personality in those symmetries. Where would they come from? So for example, you've got what would be called grand unified theories that sound like SU5, the George I Glashow theory, there's something that should be called spin 10, but physicists insist on calling it SO10. There's something called the petit salon theory that tends to be called SU4 cross SU2 cross SU2, which should be called spin 6 cross spin 4.

• 1:10:27Eric Weinstein?

  I can get into all of these.

• 1:10:29Lex Fridman?

  Now, what are they all accomplishing?

• 1:10:31Eric Weinstein?

  They're all taking the known forces that we see and packaging them up to say, we can't get rid of the second origin story, but we can at least make that origin story more unified. So they're trying grand unification is the attempt to do.

• 1:10:46Lex Fridman?

  And that's a mistake in your, in your.

• 1:10:48Eric Weinstein?

  It's not a mistake. The problem is, is it was born lifeless. When, when George I and Glashow first came out with the SU5 theory, it was very exciting because it could be tested in a South Dakota mine filled up with like, I don't know, cleaning fluid or something like that. And they looked for proton decay and didn't see it. And then they gave up because in that day, when your experiment didn't work, you gave up on the theory. It didn't come to us born of a fusion between Einstein and, and, and Bohr, you know? And that was kind of the problem is it had this weird parenting where it was just on the Bohr side. There was no Einsteinian contribution.

• 1:11:33Eric Weinstein?

  Lex, how can I help you most? I'm trying to figure what questions you want to ask so that you get the most satisfying answers.

• 1:11:41Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of questions I want to ask. I mean, one, and I'm trying to sneak up on you somehow to reveal in an accessible way the nature of our universe.

• 1:11:56Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I can just give you a guess, right? We have to be very careful that we're not claiming that this has been accepted. This is a speculation. But I will make the speculation that what I think what you would want to ask me is how can the canvas generate all the stuff that usually has to be ordered separately? All right, should we do that?

• 1:12:16Lex Fridman?

  Let's go there.

• 1:12:17Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. So, the first thing is, is that you have a concept in computers called technical debt. You're coding and you cut corners and you know you're going to have to do it right before the thing is safe for the world. But you're piling up some series of IOUs to yourself and your project as you're going along. So the first thing is, we can't figure out, if you have only four degrees of freedom and that's what your canvas is, how do you get at least Einstein's world? Einstein says, look, it's not just four degrees of freedom, but there need to be rulers and protractors to measure length and angle in the world.

• 1:12:58Eric Weinstein?

  You can't just have a flabby four degrees of freedom. So the first thing you do is you create 10 extra variables, which is like, if we can't choose any particular set of rulers and protractors to measure length and angle, let's take the set of all possible rulers and protractors. And that would be called symmetric non-degenerate two tensors on the tangent space of the four manifold X4.

• 1:13:25Eric Weinstein?

  Now, because there are four degrees of freedom, you start off with four dimensions. Then you need four rulers for each of those different directions. So that's four. That gets us up to eight variables. And then between four original variables, there are six possible angles. So four plus four plus six is equal to 14. So now you've replaced X four with another space, which in the lecture, I think I called U 14, but I'm now calling Y 14. This is one of the big problems of working on something in private is every time you pull it out, you sort of can't remember it. You name something, something new. Okay, so you've got a 14 dimensional world, which is the original four dimensional world, plus a lot of extra gadgetry for measurement.

• 1:14:10Eric Weinstein?

  And because you're not in the four dimensional world, you don't have the technical debt. No, now you've got a lot of technical debt because now you have to explain away a 14 dimensional world, which is a big, you're taking a huge advance on your payday check. Right? But aren't more dimensions allow you more freedom to? Maybe, but you have to get rid of them somehow because we don't perceive them. So eventually you have to collapse it down to the thing that we perceive. Or you have to sample a four dimensional filament within that 14 dimensional world, known as a section of a bundle.

• 1:14:43Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, so how do we get from the 14 dimensional world where I imagine a lot of? Oh, wait, wait, wait. Yep. You're cheating. The first question was, how do we get something from almost nothing? Like, how do we get the, if I've said that the who and the what in the newspaper story that is a theory of everything are bosons and fermions? So let's make the who the fermions and the what the bosons. Think of it as the players and the equipment for a game. Are we supposed to be thinking of actual physical things with mass? Sure. Or energy? Yep. Okay. So think about everything you see in this room. So from chemistry, you know, it's all protons, neutrons and electrons.

• 1:15:25Eric Weinstein?

  But from a little bit of late 1960s physics, we know that the protons and neutrons are all made of up quarks and down quarks. So everything in this room is basically up quarks, down quarks, and electrons stuck together with the what, the equipment. Okay. Now, the way we see it currently is we see that there are spacetime indices, which we would call spinners, that correspond to the who, that is, the fermion, the matter, the stuff, the up quarks, the down quarks, the electrons. And there are also 16 degrees of freedom that come from this space of internal quantum numbers.

• 1:16:10Eric Weinstein?

  So in my theory, in 14 dimensions, there's no internal quantum number space that figures in. It's all just spinorial. So spinners in 14 dimensions without any festooning with extra linear algebraic information. There's a concept of spinners, which is natural if you have a manifold with length and angle. And Y14 is almost a manifold with length and angle. It's so close.

• 1:16:51Eric Weinstein?

  It's, in other words, because you're looking at the space of all rulers and protractors, maybe it's not that surprising that a space of rulers and protractors might come very close to having rulers and protractors on it itself. Like, can you measure the space of measurements? And you almost can't. And in a space that has length and angle, if it doesn't have a topological obstruction, comes with these objects called spinners. Now, spinners are the stuff of our world. We are made of spinners. They are the most important, really deep object that I can tell you about. They were very surprising. What is a spinner? So famously, there are these weird things that require 720 degrees of rotation.

• 1:17:39Eric Weinstein?

  In order to come back to normal. And that doesn't make sense. And the reason for this is that there's a knottedness in our three dimensional world that people don't observe. And you know, you can famously see it by this Dirac string trick. So if you take a glass of water, imagine that this was a tumbler and I didn't want to spill any of it. And the question is, if I rotate the cup without losing my grip on the base, 360 degrees, and I can't go backwards, is there any way I can take a sip? And the answer is this weird motion, which is go over first and under second.

• 1:18:22Eric Weinstein?

  And that that's 720 degrees of rotation to come back to normal so that I can take a sip. Well, that weird principle, which sometimes is known as the Philippine wine glass dance, because waitresses in the Philippines apparently learned how to do this. That that move defines, if you will, this hidden space that nobody knew was there of spinners, which Dirac figured out when he took the square root of something called the Klein-Gordon equation, which I think had earlier work incorporated from Cartan and Killing and Company in mathematics. So spinners are one of the most profound aspects of human existence.

• 1:19:04Lex Fridman?

  I mean, forgive me for the perhaps dumb questions, but would a spinner be the mathematical objects that's the basic unit of our universe?

• 1:19:13Eric Weinstein?

  When you, when you start with a manifold, which is just like something like a donut or a sphere or a circle or a Mobius band, a spinner is usually the first wildly surprising thing that you found was hidden in your original purchase. So you, you order a manifold and you didn't even realize, it's like buying a house and finding a panic room inside that you hadn't counted on. It's very surprising when you understand that spinners are running around in your spaces.

• 1:19:48Lex Fridman?

  Again, perhaps a dumb question, but we're talking about 14 dimensions and four dimensions. What is the manifold we're operating under?

• 1:19:57Eric Weinstein?

  So in my case, it's proto spacetime. It's before Einstein can slap rulers and protractors on spacetime.

• 1:20:06Lex Fridman?

  What you mean by that, sorry to interrupt, is spacetime is the 4D manifold?

• 1:20:11Eric Weinstein?

  Spacetime is a four dimensional manifold with extra structure.

• 1:20:17Lex Fridman?

  What's the extra structure?

• 1:20:18Eric Weinstein?

  It's called a semi-Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian metric. And in essence, there is something akin to a four by four symmetric matrix, which is equivalent to length and angle. So when I talk about rulers and protractors, or I talk about length and angle, or I talk about Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian or semi-Riemannian manifolds, I'm usually talking about the same thing. Can you measure how long something is and what the angle is between two different rays or vectors? So that's what Einstein gave us as his arena, his place to play, his canvas.

• 1:21:01Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of questions I can ask here, but like I said, I'm working on this book, Geometric Unity for Idiots. And I think what would be really nice, as your editor, to have beautiful, maybe even visualizations that people could try to play with, try to reveal small little beauties about the way you're thinking about this world.

• 1:21:28Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I usually use the Joe Rogan program for that. Sometimes I have him doing the Philippine wine glass dance. I had the hop vibration. The part of the problem is that most people don't know this language about spinners, bundles, metrics, gauge fields. And they're very curious about the theory of everything, but they have no understanding of even what we know about our own world.

• 1:21:52Lex Fridman?

  Is it a hopeless? Pursuit, so like even gauge theory.

• 1:21:57Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:21:57Lex Fridman?

  Just this, I mean, it seems to be very inaccessible. Is there some aspect of it that could be made accessible?

• 1:22:03Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, I could go to the board right there and give you a five minute lecture on gauge theory that would be better than the official lecture on gauge theory. You would know what gauge theory was.

• 1:22:14Lex Fridman?

  So it is, it's possible to make it accessible.

• 1:22:17Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, but nobody does, like, in other words, you're gonna watch over the next year, lots of different discussions about quantum entanglement, or, you know, the multiverse, where are we now?

• 1:22:29Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:22:29Eric Weinstein?

  Or, you know, many worlds, are they all equally real?

• 1:22:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Eric Weinstein?

  Right?

• 1:22:35Lex Fridman?

  I mean, yeah, that's.

• 1:22:36Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, but you're not gonna hear anything about the HOP vibration, except if it's from me, and I hate that.

• 1:22:42Lex Fridman?

  Why, why can't you be the one?

• 1:22:44Eric Weinstein?

  Well, because I'm going a different path. I think that we've made a huge mistake, which is, we have things we can show people about the actual models. We can push out visualizations where they, they're not listening by analogy, they're watching the same thing that we're seeing. And as I've said to you before, this is like choosing to perform sheet music that hasn't been performed in a long time, or, you know, the experts can't afford orchestras, so they just trade Beethoven symphonies as sheet music, and they, oh, wow, that was beautiful. But it's like, nobody heard anything, they just looked at the score. Well, that's how mathematicians and physicists trade papers and ideas, is that they, they write down the things that represent stuff. I want to at least close out this thought line that you started.

• 1:23:29Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:23:30Eric Weinstein?

  Which is, how does the canvas order all of this other stuff into being? So I at least want to say some incomprehensible things about that, and then we'll, we'll have that much done, all right?

• 1:23:45Lex Fridman?

  On that just point, does it have to be incomprehensible?

• 1:23:50Eric Weinstein?

  Do you know what the Schrödinger equation is?

• 1:23:52Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:23:53Eric Weinstein?

  Do you know what the Dirac equation is?

• 1:23:55Lex Fridman?

  What does no mean?

• 1:23:57Eric Weinstein?

  Well, my point is, you're gonna have some feeling that you know what the Schrödinger equation is.

• 1:24:01Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:24:02Eric Weinstein?

  Soon as we get to the Dirac equation, your eyes are gonna get a little bit glazed, right?

• 1:24:09Eric Weinstein?

  So now, why is that? Well, the answer to me is that you, you want to ask me about the theory of everything, but you haven't even digested the theory of everything as we've had it since 1928, when Dirac came out with his equation. So for whatever reason, and this isn't a hit on you.

• 1:24:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Eric Weinstein?

  You haven't been motivated enough in all the time that you've been on Earth to at least get as far as the Dirac equation. And this was very interesting to me after I gave the talk in Oxford. New scientist who had done kind of a hatchet job on me to begin with, sent a reporter to come to the third version of the talk that I gave. And that person had never heard of the Dirac equation. So you have a person who is completely professionally not qualified to ask these questions, wanting to know, well, how does, how does your theory solve new problems? And it's like, well, in the case of the Dirac equation, well, tell me about that. I don't know what that is. So then the point is, okay, I got it.

• 1:25:18Eric Weinstein?

  You're not even caught up minimally to where we are now. And that's not a knock on you. Almost nobody is.

• 1:25:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Eric Weinstein?

  But then, how does it become my job to digest what has been available for like over 90 years?

• 1:25:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, to me, the open question is whether what's been available for over 90 years can be, there could be a blueprint of a journey that one takes to understand it not to be

• 1:25:48Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, I want to do that with you. And I, one of the things I think I've been relatively successful at, for example, you know, when you ask other people what gauge theory is, you get these very confusing responses. And my response is much simpler. It's, oh, it's the theory of differentiation, where when you calculate the instantaneous rise over run, you measure the rise not from a flat horizontal, but from a custom endogenous reference level. What do you mean by that? It's like, okay. And then I do this thing with Mount Everest, which is, Mount Everest is how high? Then they give the height. I say, above what? Then they say sea level. And I say, which sea is that in Nepal? They're like, oh, I guess there isn't a sea because it's landlocked. It's like, okay, well, what do you mean by sea level?

• 1:26:32Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, there's this thing called the geoid I'd never heard of. Oh, that's the reference level. It's a custom reference level that we imported. So you, all sorts of people have remembered the exact height of Mount Everest without ever knowing what it's a height from. Well, in this case, in gauge theory, there's a hidden reference level where you measure the rise in rise over run to give the slope of the line. What if you have different concepts of what, of where that rise should be measured from? That vary within the theory, that are endogenous to the theory. That's what gauge theory is. Okay, we have a video here, right? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to use my phone.

• 1:27:16Eric Weinstein?

  If I want to measure my hand and its slope, this is my attempt to measure it using standard calculus. In other words, the reference level is apparently flat and I measure the rise above that phone using my hand. Okay. If I want to use gauge theory, it means I can do this, or I can do that, or I can do this, or I can do this, or I could do what I did from the beginning. Okay. At some level, that's what gauge theory is. Now, that is an act, no. I've never heard anyone describe it that way. So while the community may say, well, who is this guy? And why does he have the right to talk in public? I'm waiting for somebody to jump out of the woodwork and say, you know, Eric's whole shtick about rulers and protractors

• 1:28:01Eric Weinstein?

  leading to a derivative, derivatives are measured as rise over run above reference level, the reference level is not fit to get like, I go through this whole shtick in order to make it accessible. I've never heard anyone say it. I'm trying to make, Prometheus would like to discuss fire with everybody else. All right, I'm going to just say one thing to close out the earlier line, which is what I think we should have continued with. When you take the naturally occurring spinners, the unadorned spinners, the naked spinners.

• 1:28:31Eric Weinstein?

  Not on this 14 dimensional manifold, but on something very closely tied to it, which I've called the chimeric tangent bundle. That is, the object which stands in for the thing that should have had length and angle on it, but just missed, okay?

• 1:28:48Eric Weinstein?

  When you take that object and you form spinners on that and you don't adorn them, so you're still in the single origin story, you get very large spinorial objects upstairs on this 14 dimensional world Y14, which is part of the observers. When you pull that information back from Y14 down to X4,

• 1:29:13Eric Weinstein?

  it miraculously looks like the adorned spinners, the festooned spinners, the spinners that we play with in ordinary reality. In other words, the 14 dimensional world looks like a four dimensional world plus a 10 dimensional complement. So 10 plus 4 equals 14. That 10 dimensional complement, which is called a normal bundle, generates spin properties, internal quantum numbers, that look like the things that give our particles personality, that make, let's say, up quarks and down quarks charged by negative 1/3 or plus 2/3, you know, that kind of stuff,

• 1:29:55Eric Weinstein?

  or whether or not, you know, some quarks feel the weak force and other quarks do not.

• 1:30:04Eric Weinstein?

  So the X4 generates Y14. Y14 generates something called the chimeric tangent bundle. Chimeric tangent bundle generates unadorned spinners. The unadorned spinners get pulled back from 14 down to 4, where they look like adorned spinners. And we have the right number of them. You thought you needed 3, you only got 2. But then something else that you'd never seen before broke apart on this journey. And it broke into another copy of the thing that you already have two copies of. One piece of that thing broke off. So now you have two generations plus an imposter third generation, which is... I don't know why we never talk about this possibility in regular physics. And then you've got a bunch of stuff that we haven't seen, which has descriptions.

• 1:30:49Eric Weinstein?

  So people always say, does it make any falsifiable predictions? Yes, it does. It says that the matter that you should be seeing next has particular properties that can be read off.

• 1:31:02Lex Fridman?

  Like?

• 1:31:03Eric Weinstein?

  Like weak isospin, weak hypercharge, like the responsiveness to the strong force. The one I can't tell you is what energy scale it would happen at.

• 1:31:13Lex Fridman?

  So you can't say if those characteristics can be detected with the current.

• 1:31:19Eric Weinstein?

  It may be that somebody else can. I'm not a physicist. I'm not a quantum field theorist. I can't. I don't know how you would do that.

• 1:31:27Lex Fridman?

  The hope for me is that there's some simple explanations for all of it.

• 1:31:34Eric Weinstein?

  Lex, should we have a drink?

• 1:31:36Lex Fridman?

  You're having fun.

• 1:31:37Eric Weinstein?

  No, I'm trying to have fun with you.

• 1:31:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of fun things.

• 1:31:42Eric Weinstein?

  Which are very serious.

• 1:31:44Lex Fridman?

  To talk about here.

• 1:31:46Eric Weinstein?

  Anyway, that was how I got what I thought you wanted, which is

• 1:31:52Eric Weinstein?

  if you think about the fermions as the artists and the bosons as the brushes and the paint. What I told you is that's how we get the artists.

• 1:32:05Lex Fridman?

  What are the open questions for you in this? What were the challenges? So you're not done.

• 1:32:11Eric Weinstein?

  Well, there's things that I would like to have in better order. So a lot of people will say, see, the reason I hesitate on this is I just have a totally different view than the community. So for example, I believe that general relativity began in 1913 with Einstein and Grossman. Now, that was the first of like four major papers. In this line of thinking, to most physicists, general relativity happened when Einstein produced a divergence-free gradient, which turned out to be the gradient of the so-called Hilbert or Einstein-Hilbert action.

• 1:32:54Eric Weinstein?

  And from my perspective, that wasn't true. This is that it began when Einstein said, look, this is about differential geometry, and the final answer is going to look like a curvature tensor on one side and matter and energy on the other side. And that was enough. And then he published a wrong version of it, where it was the Ricci tensor, not the Einstein tensor. Then he corrected the Ricci tensor to make it into the Einstein tensor. Then he corrected that to add a cosmological constant. I can't stand that the community thinks in those terms. There's some things about which, like, there's a question about which contraction do I use? There's an Einstein contraction, there's a Ricci contraction.

• 1:33:38Eric Weinstein?

  They both go between the same spaces. I'm not sure what I should do. I'm not sure which contraction I should choose. This is called a Sheab operator for ship in a bottle in my stuff.

• 1:33:49Lex Fridman?

  You have this big platform, in many ways, that inspires people's curiosity about physics and mathematics.

• 1:34:01Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:34:02Lex Fridman?

  Now, and I'm one of those people.

• 1:34:04Eric Weinstein?

  Well, great.

• 1:34:06Lex Fridman?

  But then you start using a lot of words that I don't understand. And, like, I might know them, but I don't understand. And what's unclear to me, if I'm supposed to be listening to those words, or if it's just, if this is one of those technical things that's intended for a very small community, or if I'm supposed to actually take those words and start, you know, a multi-year study, not a serious study, but a kind of study when you're interested in learning about machine learning, for example, or any kind of discipline. That's where I'm a little bit confused. So you speak beautifully about ideas.

• 1:34:50Lex Fridman?

  You often reveal the beauty in geometry. And I'm unclear in what are the steps I should be taking.

• 1:35:00Lex Fridman?

  I'm curious, how can I explore? How can I play with something? How can I play with these ideas?

• 1:35:05Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:35:06Lex Fridman?

  And enjoy the beauty of not necessarily understanding the depth of a theory that you're presenting, but start to share in the beauty. As opposed to sharing and enjoying the beauty of just the way, the passion with which you speak, which is in itself fun to listen to, but also starting to be able to understand some aspects of this theory that I can enjoy it to, and start to build an intuition, what the heck we're even talking about? Because you're basically saying, we need to throw a lot of our ideas of views of the universe out. And I'm trying to find accessible ways in.

• 1:35:51Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:35:51Lex Fridman?

  Long, not in this conversation.

• 1:35:54Eric Weinstein?

  No, I appreciate that. So one of the things that I've done is I've picked on one paragraph from Edward Witten. And I said, this is the paragraph. If I could only take one paragraph with me, this is the one I'd take. And it's almost all in prose, not in equations. And he says, look, this is our knowledge of the universe at its deepest level. And he was writing this during the 1980s. And he has three separate points that constitute our deepest knowledge. And those three points refer to equations. One to the Einstein field equation, one to the Dirac equation, and one to the Yang Mills Maxwell equation. Now, one thing I would do is take a look at that paragraph and say, okay,

• 1:36:38Eric Weinstein?

  what do these three lines mean? Like, it's a finite amount of verbiage. You can write down every word that you don't know.

• 1:36:45Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful.

• 1:36:45Eric Weinstein?

  You can say, what do I think?

• 1:36:48Lex Fridman?

  Done.

• 1:36:48Eric Weinstein?

  Now, young man.

• 1:36:50Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:36:51Eric Weinstein?

  There's a beautiful wall in Stony Brook, New York, built by someone who I know you will interview, named Jim Simons.

• 1:37:01Eric Weinstein?

  And Jim Simons, he's not the artist, but he's the guy who funded it. World's greatest hedge fund manager. And on that wall contain the three equations that Witten refers to in that paragraph. And so that is the transmission from the paragraph or graph to the wall. Now that wall needs an owner's manual, which Roger Penrose has written called The Road to Reality. Let's call that the tome. So this is the subject of the so-called graph wall tome project that is going on in our Discord server and our general group around the portal community, which is how do you take something

• 1:37:43Eric Weinstein?

  that purports in one paragraph to say what the deepest understanding man has of the universe in which he lives?

• 1:37:52Eric Weinstein?

  It's memorialized on a wall, which nobody knows about, which is an incredibly gorgeous piece of art. And that was written up in a book, which is, has been written for no man. Right? Maybe, maybe it's for a woman, I don't know. But no, no one should be able to read this book because either you're a professional and you know a lot of this book, in which case it's kind of a refreshers to see how Roger thinks about these things. Or you don't even know that this book is a self-contained invitation to understanding our deepest nature. So I would say find yourself in the graph wall tome transmission sequence and join the graph wall tome project. If that's of interest.

• 1:38:34Lex Fridman?

  Okay, beautiful. Now, just to linger on a little longer, what kind of journey do you see geometric unity taking?

• 1:38:41Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know. I mean, that's the thing is that first of all, the professional community has to get very angry and outraged. And they have to work through their feeling that this is nonsense. This is bullshit or like, no, wait a minute. This is really cool. Actually, I need some clarification over here. So there's going to be some sort of weird coming back together process.

• 1:39:00Lex Fridman?

  Are you already hearing murmurings of that?

• 1:39:04Eric Weinstein?

  It's very funny. Officially, I've seen very little.

• 1:39:09Lex Fridman?

  So it's perhaps happening quietly.

• 1:39:11Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Lex Fridman?

  You you often talk about we need to get off this planet.

• 1:39:15Eric Weinstein?

  Yep.

• 1:39:18Lex Fridman?

  Can I try to sneak up on that by asking what in your kind of view is the difference? The gap between the science of it, the theory, and the actual engineering of building something that leverages the theory to do something like, how big is that?

• 1:39:33Eric Weinstein?

  We don't know.

• 1:39:34Lex Fridman?

  Gap?

• 1:39:35Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, if you have 10 extra dimensions to play with

• 1:39:39Eric Weinstein?

  that are the rulers and protractors of the world themselves, can you gain access to those dimensions?

• 1:39:46Lex Fridman?

  Do you have a hunch? So?

• 1:39:47Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know. I don't want to get ahead of myself because you have to appreciate I can have hunches and I can I can jaw off.

• 1:39:56Eric Weinstein?

  But one of the ways that I'm succeeding in this world is to not bow down to my professional communities nor to ignore them. Like, I'm actually interested in the criticism. I just want to denature it so that it's not mostly interpersonal and irrelevant.

• 1:40:16Eric Weinstein?

  I believe that they don't want me to speculate, and I don't need to speculate about this. I can simply say I'm open to the idea that it may have engineering prospects and it may be a death sentence. We may find out that there's not enough new here that even if it were right, that there would be nothing new to do. Can't tell you.

• 1:40:34Lex Fridman?

  That's what you mean by death sentences. There would not be exciting breakthroughs.

• 1:40:38Eric Weinstein?

  Wouldn't it be terrible if you couldn't like, you can do new things in an Einsteinian world that you couldn't do in a Newtonian world?

• 1:40:46Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:40:46Eric Weinstein?

  You know, like you have twin paradoxes or Lorentz contraction of length or any one of a number of new, cool things happen in relativity theory that didn't happen for Newton. What if there wasn't new stuff to do at the next and final level?

• 1:41:02Lex Fridman?

  So first of all, that would be quite sad. Let me ask a silly question, but.

• 1:41:08Eric Weinstein?

  We'll say it with a straight face.

• 1:41:12Lex Fridman?

  Impossible. So let me mention Elon Musk. What are your thoughts about he's more? You're more on the physics theory side of things. He's more on the physics engineering side of things in terms of SpaceX efforts. What do you think of his efforts to get off this planet?

• 1:41:36Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I think he's the other guy who's semi-serious about getting off this planet.

• 1:41:44Eric Weinstein?

  I think there are two of us who are semi-serious about getting off the planet.

• 1:41:47Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about his methodology and yours? When you look at them?

• 1:41:51Eric Weinstein?

  Don't. I don't want to be against Elon because like I was so excited that like your top video was Ray Kurzweil. And then I did your podcast and we had some chemistry. So it zoomed up and I thought, okay, I'm going to beat Ray Kurzweil. So just as I'm coming up on Ray Kurzweil, you're like, and now Alex Friedman's special Elon Musk. And he blew me out of the water. So I don't want to be petty about it. I want to say that I don't, but I am.

• 1:42:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. But here's the funny part. He's not taking enough risk. Like he's trying to get us to Mars. Imagine that he got us to Mars, the moon, and we'll throw in Titan.

• 1:42:29Eric Weinstein?

  And nowhere good enough. The diversification level is too low. Now, there's a compatibility. First of all, I don't think Elon is serious about Mars. I think Elon is using Mars.

• 1:42:44Lex Fridman?

  As a, as a narrative, as a story, as a dream?

• 1:42:47Eric Weinstein?

  To make the moon jealous.

• 1:42:48Lex Fridman?

  To make the?

• 1:42:49Eric Weinstein?

  No.

• 1:42:52Eric Weinstein?

  I think he's using it as a story to organize us, to reacquaint ourselves with our need for space, our need to get off this planet. It's a concrete thing. He's shown that many people think that he's shown that he's the most brilliant and capable person on the planet. I don't think that's what he showed. I think he showed that the rest of us have forgotten our capabilities. And so he's like the only guy who has still kept the faith and is like, what's wrong with you people?

• 1:43:19Lex Fridman?

  So you think the lesson we should draw from Elon Musk is there's a, there's a capable person within, within a lot of us?

• 1:43:25Eric Weinstein?

  Elon makes sense to me.

• 1:43:27Lex Fridman?

  In what way?

• 1:43:28Eric Weinstein?

  He's doing what any sensible person should do. He's trying incredible things and he's partially succeeding, partially failing.

• 1:43:35Lex Fridman?

  To try to solve the obvious problems before.

• 1:43:37Eric Weinstein?

  Duh. You know, but he comes up with things like, you know, I got it. We'll come up with a battery company, but batteries aren't sexy. So we'll, we'll make a car around it. It's like, great. You know, or any one of a number of things.

• 1:43:53Eric Weinstein?

  Elon is behaving like a sane person and I view everyone else as insane. And my feeling is, is that we really have to get off this planet. We have to get out of this, we have to get out of the neighborhood.

• 1:44:07Lex Fridman?

  To linger on a little bit, do you think that's a physics problem or an engineering problem?

• 1:44:12Eric Weinstein?

  I think it's a cowardice problem. I think that we're afraid that we had 400 hitters of the mind, like Einstein and Dirac. And that, that era is done. And now we're just sort of copy editors.

• 1:44:27Lex Fridman?

  So is some of it money? Like if we become brave enough to go outside the solar system, can we afford to financially?

• 1:44:36Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I think that that's not really the issue. The issue is, look what Elon did well. He amassed a lot of money.

• 1:44:46Eric Weinstein?

  And then he, you know, he plowed it back in and he spun, he spun the wheel and he made more money. And now he's got FU money. Now, the problem is, is that a lot of the people who have FU money are not people whose middle finger you ever want to see. I want to see Elon's middle finger. I want to see.

• 1:45:06Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean by that? Or like when you say, fuck it, I'm going to do the biggest.

• 1:45:09Eric Weinstein?

  He's going to do whatever the fuck he wants.

• 1:45:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:11Eric Weinstein?

  Right? Fuck you. Fuck anything that gets in his way that he can afford to push out of his way.

• 1:45:16Lex Fridman?

  And you're saying he's not actually even doing that enough?

• 1:45:19Eric Weinstein?

  No, I'm.

• 1:45:20Lex Fridman?

  He's not going.

• 1:45:20Eric Weinstein?

  Please, I'm going to go, Elon's doing fine with his money. I just want him to enjoy himself, have the most, you know, Dionysian.

• 1:45:29Lex Fridman?

  But you're saying Mars is playing it safe.

• 1:45:33Eric Weinstein?

  He doesn't know how to do anything else. He knows rockets.

• 1:45:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Eric Weinstein?

  And he might know some physics at a fundamental level.

• 1:45:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I guess, okay, just let me just go right back to you. How much physics do you really, how much brilliant breakthrough ideas on the physics side do you need to get off this planet?

• 1:45:58Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know, and I don't know whether, like, in my most optimistic dream, I don't know whether my stuff gets us off the planet, but it's hope. It's hope that there's a more fundamental theory that we can access, that we don't need, you know, whose elegance and beauty will suggest that this is probably the way the universe goes. Like, you have to say this weird thing, which is, this I believe. And this I believe is a very dangerous statement, but this I believe, I believe that my theory points the way. Now, Elon might or might not be able to access my theory. I don't know, I don't know what he knows. But keep in mind, why are we all so focused on Elon?

• 1:46:43Eric Weinstein?

  It's really weird. It's kind of creepy, too.

• 1:46:45Lex Fridman?

  Why? He's just the person who's just asking the obvious questions and doing whatever he can.

• 1:46:51Eric Weinstein?

  But he makes sense to me. You see, Craig Venter makes sense to me. Jim Watson makes sense to me.

• 1:46:56Lex Fridman?

  But we're focusing on Elon because he's somehow is rare.

• 1:47:01Eric Weinstein?

  Well, that's the weird thing. Like, we've come up with a system that eliminates all Elon from our pipeline. And Elon somehow snuck through when they weren't quality adjusting everything, you know?

• 1:47:15Lex Fridman?

  And this, this idea of, of DISC, right? Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.

• 1:47:22Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:22Lex Fridman?

  Is that what's bringing the Elons of the world down?

• 1:47:27Eric Weinstein?

  You know, it's so funny, like, he's asking Joe Rogan, like, is that a joint? You know, it's like, well, what, what will happen if I smoke it? What will happen to the stock price? What will happen if I scratch myself in public? What will happen if I say what I think about Thailand or COVID or who knows what? And everybody's like, don't say that. Say this. Go do this. Go do that. Well, it's crazy making. It's absolutely crazy making. And if you think about what we put through people through.

• 1:47:58Eric Weinstein?

  We need to get people who can use FU money, the FU money they need to insulate themselves from all of the people who know better. Because my nightmare is that, why did we only get one Elon? What if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of Elons? And the weird thing is like, this is all that remains. You're looking at like Obi-Wan and Yoda. And it's like, this is the only, this is all that's left after Order 66 has been executed. And that's the thing that's really upsetting to me is we used to have Elons five deep. And then we could talk about Elon in the context of his cohort.

• 1:48:41Eric Weinstein?

  But this is like, if you were to see a giraffe in the Arctic with no trees around, you'd think, why the long neck? What a strange sight, you know?

• 1:48:50Lex Fridman?

  How do we get more Elons? How do we change these? So I think that you suppose, so we know MIT.

• 1:48:58Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59Lex Fridman?

  And Harvard. So maybe returning to our previous conversation. My sense is that the Elons of the world are supposed to come from MIT and Harvard.

• 1:49:07Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:49:08Lex Fridman?

  And how do you change?

• 1:49:10Eric Weinstein?

  Let's think of one that MIT sort of killed. Have any names in mind? Aaron Schwartz leaps to my mind.

• 1:49:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:20Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Are we MIT supposed to shield the Aaron Schwartz's from, I don't know, journal publishers? Or are we supposed to help the journal publishers so that we can throw 35 year sentences in his face? Or whatever it is that we did that depressed him? Okay, so here's my point.

• 1:49:40Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:49:41Eric Weinstein?

  I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz. And if you want to send Aaron Schwartz to a state where he's looking at 35 years in prison or something like that, you are my sworn enemy. You are not MIT.

• 1:50:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:01Eric Weinstein?

  You are the traitorous, irresponsible, middlebrow, pencil pushing, green eye shade fool that needs to not be in the seat at the presidency of MIT, period, the end. Get the fuck out of there and let one of our people sit in that chair.

• 1:50:21Lex Fridman?

  And the thing that you've articulated is that the people in those chairs are not the way they are because they're evil or somehow morally compromised is that it's just that that's the distributed nature, is that there's some kind of aspect of the system that's just...

• 1:50:37Eric Weinstein?

  These are people who wed themselves to the system. They adapt every instinct. And the fact is, is that they're not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt.

• 1:50:49Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a silly question. Do you think institutions generally just tend to become that?

• 1:50:55Eric Weinstein?

  No. We get some of the institutions. We get Caltech. Here's what we're supposed to have. We're supposed to have Caltech. We're supposed to have Reed. We're supposed to have Deep Springs. We're supposed to have MIT. We're supposed to have a part of Harvard. And when the sharp elbow crowd comes after the sharp mind crowd, we're supposed to break those sharp elbows and say, don't come around here again.

• 1:51:20Lex Fridman?

  So what are the weapons that the sharp minds are supposed to use in our modern day? So to reclaim MIT? What is the, what's the future?

• 1:51:29Eric Weinstein?

  Are you kidding me? First of all, assume that this is being seen at MIT. Hey, everybody.

• 1:51:34Lex Fridman?

  Definitely is.

• 1:51:35Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Hey, everybody. Try to remember who you are. You're the guys who put the police car on top of the great dump. You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge. You created a Tetris game in the green building. Now, what is your problem? They killed one of your own. You should make their life a living hell. You should be the ones who keep the memory of Aaron Schwartz alive. And all of those hackers and all of those mutants.

• 1:52:07Eric Weinstein?

  You know, it's like, it's either our place or it isn't. And if we have to throw 12 more pianos off of the roof, right? If Harold Edgerton was taking those photographs, you know, with slow mo back in the 40s.

• 1:52:27Eric Weinstein?

  If Noam Chomsky is on your faculty, what the hell is wrong with you kids? You are the most creative and insightful people and you can't figure out how to defend Aaron Schwartz? That's on you guys.

• 1:52:39Lex Fridman?

  So some of that is giving more power to the young, like you said, to the brave, to the bold.

• 1:52:44Eric Weinstein?

  Taking power from the feeble and the middle brow.

• 1:52:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but how do you, what is the mechanism to me?

• 1:52:50Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know. You, you have some nine volt batteries?

• 1:52:53Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:52:53Eric Weinstein?

  Copper wire?

• 1:52:55Lex Fridman?

  I, I tend to.

• 1:52:57Eric Weinstein?

  Do you have a capacitor?

• 1:52:59Lex Fridman?

  I tend to believe you have to create an alternative and make the alternative so much better that it makes MIT obsolete unless they change. And that's what forces change. So as opposed to somehow.

• 1:53:13Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, so use projection mapping.

• 1:53:16Lex Fridman?

  What's projection mapping?

• 1:53:17Eric Weinstein?

  Where you take some complicated edifice and you map all of its planes. And then you actually project some unbelievable graphics, reskining a building, let's say at night.

• 1:53:26Lex Fridman?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 1:53:27Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. So you want to do some graffiti art with light?

• 1:53:29Lex Fridman?

  You basically want to hack the system.

• 1:53:31Eric Weinstein?

  No, I'm saying, look, listen to me, Len.

• 1:53:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:33Eric Weinstein?

  We're smarter than they are and they, you know what they say? They say things like, I think we need some geeks. Get me two PhDs.

• 1:53:43Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:53:44Eric Weinstein?

  You treat PhDs like that, that's a bad move. Because PhDs are capable and we act like our job is to peel grapes for our betters.

• 1:53:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's a strange thing and I, you speak about it very eloquently. It's how we treat basically the greatest minds in the world, which is like at their prime, which is PhD students, like we pay them nothing.

• 1:54:11Eric Weinstein?

  I'm done with it.

• 1:54:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Eric Weinstein?

  Right? We got to take what's ours. So, so take back MIT, become ungovernable, become ungovernable. And by the way, when you become ungovernable, don't do it by throwing food. Don't do it by pouring salt on the lawn like a jerk. Do it through brilliance, because what you Caltech and MIT can do, and maybe Rensselaer Polytechnic or Worcester Polytech, I don't know, Lehigh, god damn it, what's wrong with you technical people? You act like you're a servant class.

• 1:54:48Lex Fridman?

  It's unclear to me how you reclaim it, except with brilliance, like you said. But to me, that the way you reclaim it with brilliance is to go outside the system.

• 1:54:57Eric Weinstein?

  Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class. What you guys gonna do about it? Right? The super capable people need to flex, need to be individual. They need to stop giving away all their power to, you know, a zeitgeist or a community or this or that. You're not, you're not indoor cats. You're outdoor cats. Go be outdoor cats.

• 1:55:17Lex Fridman?

  Do you think we're gonna see this?

• 1:55:19Eric Weinstein?

  You were the one asking me, you know, before, like, what about the World War II generation? What I'm trying to say is that there's a technical revolt coming. Here's, you want to talk about-

• 1:55:28Lex Fridman?

  But I'm trying to lead it, right? I'm trying to see-

• 1:55:30Eric Weinstein?

  No, you're not trying to lead it.

• 1:55:32Lex Fridman?

  I'm trying to get a blueprint here.

• 1:55:33Eric Weinstein?

  All right, Lex.

• 1:55:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:34Eric Weinstein?

  How angry are you about our country pretending that you and I can't actually do technical subjects so that they need an army of kids coming in from four countries in Asia? It's not about the four countries in Asia. It's not about those kids. It's about lying about us, that we don't care enough about science and technology, that we're incapable of it, as if we don't have Chinese and Russians and Koreans and Croatians. Like, we've got everybody here. The only reason you're looking outside is that you want to hire cheap people from the family business because you don't want to pass the family business on. And you know what? You didn't really build the family business. It's

• 1:56:15Eric Weinstein?

  not yours to decide. You, the boomers, and you, the silent generation, you did your bit, but you also filed a lot of stuff up. And you're custodians. You are caretakers. You were supposed to hand something. What you did instead was to gorge yourself-

• 1:56:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:32Eric Weinstein?

  -on cheap foreign labor, which you then held up as being much more brilliant than your own children, which was never true.

• 1:56:40Lex Fridman?

  See, but I'm trying to understand how we create a better system without anger, without revolution.

• 1:56:44Eric Weinstein?

  Ah.

• 1:56:45Lex Fridman?

  Not, not by kissing and hugs and, and, but by, I mean, I don't understand within MIT, what the mechanism of building a better MIT is.

• 1:56:57Eric Weinstein?

  We're not going to pay Elsevier. Aaron Schwartz was right. Jay Store is, is an abomination.

• 1:57:02Lex Fridman?

  But why, who within MIT, who within institutions is going to do that when, just like you said, the people who are running the show are more senior.

• 1:57:12Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know. Get Frank Wilczek to speak out.

• 1:57:15Lex Fridman?

  So you're, it's basically individuals that step up. I mean, one of the surprising things about Elon is that one person can inspire so much.

• 1:57:24Eric Weinstein?

  He, he's got academic freedom. It just comes from money.

• 1:57:28Lex Fridman?

  I don't agree with that. That you think money, okay, so yes, certainly.

• 1:57:36Eric Weinstein?

  Sorry, and testicles.

• 1:57:37Lex Fridman?

  You've, yes, but I think that testicles are more important than money.

• 1:57:40Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:57:41Lex Fridman?

  Or guts. I, I think, I, I do agree with you. You speak about this a lot, that because the money in the academic institutions has been so constrained that people are misbehaving in, in, in horrible ways.

• 1:57:53Eric Weinstein?

  Yes.

• 1:57:53Lex Fridman?

  But I, I don't think that if we reverse that and give a huge amount of money, people will all of a sudden behave well. I think it also takes guts.

• 1:58:01Eric Weinstein?

  No, you need to give people security.

• 1:58:03Lex Fridman?

  Security, yes.

• 1:58:04Eric Weinstein?

  Like, you need to know that you have a job.

• 1:58:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:07Eric Weinstein?

  On Monday, when on Friday you say, I'm not so sure I really love diversity and inclusion. And somebody's like, wait, what? You didn't love diverse? We had a statement on diversity and inclusion and you wouldn't sign? Are you against the inclusion part? Or are you against diverse? Do you just not like people like you? You're like, actually, that has nothing to do with anything. You're making this into something that it isn't. I don't want to sign your goddamn stupid statement and get out of my lab. Right? Get out of my lab. It all begins from the middle finger. Get out of my lab. The administrators need to find other work.

• 1:58:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, listen, I agree with you and I I hope to seek your advice and wisdom as we change this because I'd love to see.

• 1:58:53Eric Weinstein?

  I will visit you in prison if that's what you're asking.

• 1:58:56Lex Fridman?

  I have no, I think prison is great. You get a lot of reading done and and good working out. Well, let me ask the, something I brought up before is the Nietzsche quote of beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you. Are you worried that your focus on the flaws in the system that we've just been talking about has damaged your mind or the part of the mind of your mind that's able to see the beauty in the world in the system? That because you have so sharply been able to see the flaws in the system,

• 1:59:40Lex Fridman?

  you can no longer step back and appreciate its beauty?

• 1:59:43Eric Weinstein?

  Look, I'm the one who's trying to get the institutions to save themselves by getting rid of their inhabitants, but leaving the institution like a neutron bomb that removes the unworkable leadership class, but leaves the structures. So I.

• 2:00:00Lex Fridman?

  People. So the leadership class is really the problem.

• 2:00:02Eric Weinstein?

  The leadership class is the problem.

• 2:00:04Lex Fridman?

  Like the professors, the individual scholars.

• 2:00:06Eric Weinstein?

  The professors are going to have to go back into training to remember how to be professors. Like, people are cowards at the moment because if they're not cowards, they're unemployed.

• 2:00:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's one of the disappointing things I've encountered is, to me, tenure.

• 2:00:23Eric Weinstein?

  But they don't, nobody has tenure now.

• 2:00:27Lex Fridman?

  Well, whether they do or not, they certainly don't have care, not the kind of character and fortitude that I was hoping to see. To me.

• 2:00:40Eric Weinstein?

  But they'd be gone. But see, you're dreaming about the people who used to live at MIT.

• 2:00:50Eric Weinstein?

  You're dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university. And if you looked at somebody like, you know, Isidore Singer is very old. I don't know what state he's in, but that guy was absolutely the real deal. And if you look at Noam Chomsky, tell me that Noam Chomsky has been muzzled. Right?

• 2:01:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Eric Weinstein?

  Now, what I'm trying to get at is you're talking about younger, energetic people. But those people, like when I say something like, I'm against, I'm for inclusion and I'm for diversity, but I'm against diversity and inclusion TM, like the movement.

• 2:01:29Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I couldn't say that if I was a professor.

• 2:01:33Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, my God, he's against our sacred document. Okay, well, in that kind of a world, do you want to know how many things I don't agree with you on? Like, we could go on for days and days and days, all the nonsense that you've parroted inside of the institution. Any sane person like has no need for it. They have no want or desire.

• 2:01:54Lex Fridman?

  Do you think you have to have some patience for nonsense? When many people work together in a system?

• 2:02:01Eric Weinstein?

  How long has string theory gone on for? And how long have I been patient? Okay, so you're talking about-

• 2:02:06Lex Fridman?

  There's a limit to patience.

• 2:02:07Eric Weinstein?

  You're talking about like 36 years of modern nonsense in string theory.

• 2:02:12Lex Fridman?

  So you can do like eight to 10 years, but not more?

• 2:02:15Eric Weinstein?

  I can do 40 minutes. This is 36-

• 2:02:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, you've done now over two hours already.

• 2:02:21Eric Weinstein?

  No, but it's-

• 2:02:21Lex Fridman?

  I appreciate it.

• 2:02:22Eric Weinstein?

  But it's been 36 years of nonsense since the anomaly cancellation in, in string theory. It's like, what are you talking about, about patience? I mean, Lex, you're not even acting like yourself.

• 2:02:35Lex Fridman?

  No, I, well-

• 2:02:36Eric Weinstein?

  You're trying to stay in the system.

• 2:02:37Lex Fridman?

  I'm not trying, I'm not, I'm trying to see if perhaps, so, so my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it, which you highlight, and the fundamentals of the system are broken. Because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken, then I just don't see a way for MIT to succeed. Like-

• 2:03:02Lex Fridman?

  I don't see how young people take over MIT. I don't see how.

• 2:03:07Eric Weinstein?

  By inspiring us. You know, the great part about being at MIT, like when you saw the genius in these pranks, the heart, the irreverence.

• 2:03:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:19Eric Weinstein?

  It's like, don't, we were talking about Tom Lehrer the last time. Tom Lehrer was as naughty as the day is long. Agreed?

• 2:03:26Lex Fridman?

  Agreed.

• 2:03:27Eric Weinstein?

  Was he also a genius? Was he well spoken? Was he highly cultured? He was so talented, so intellectual that he could just make fart jokes morning, noon and night.

• 2:03:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:37Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. Well, in part, the right to make fart jokes, the right to, for example, put a functioning phone booth that was ringing on top of the great dome at MIT, has to do with, we are such badasses that we can actually do this stuff. Well, don't tell me about it anymore. Go break the law. Go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not want to prosecute you. Break the law in a way that lets us know that you're calling us out on our bullshit, that you're filled with love, and that our technical talent has not gone to sleep, it's not incapable, you know? And if the idea is, is that you're gonna dig a moat around the university and fill it with tiger sharks,

• 2:04:20Eric Weinstein?

  that's awesome. Because I don't know how you're gonna do it. But if you actually manage to do that, I'm not gonna prosecute you, prosecute you under reckless endangerment.

• 2:04:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. That's beautifully put. I hope those, first of all, they'll listen. I hope young people at MIT will take over in this, in this kind of way. In the introduction to your podcast episode on Jeffrey Epstein, you give to me a really moving story, but unfortunately for me, too brief, about your experience with a therapist and a lasting terror that permeated your mind. Can you?

• 2:05:00Eric Weinstein?

  Can you go there? Can you tell? I don't think so. I mean, I appreciate what you're saying. I said it obliquely. I said enough.

• 2:05:09Eric Weinstein?

  There are bad people who cross our paths. And the current vogue is to say, oh, I'm a survivor.

• 2:05:18Eric Weinstein?

  I'm a victim. I can do anything I want. This is a broken person. And I don't know why I was sent to a broken person as a kid. And to be honest with you, I also felt like in that story, I say that I was able to say no. You know, and this was like the entire weight of authority.

• 2:05:38Eric Weinstein?

  And he was misusing his position. And I was also able to say no. What I couldn't say no to was having him re-inflicted in my life. Right, so you were sent back a second time? I tried to complain about what had happened. I tried to do it in a way that did not

• 2:05:59Eric Weinstein?

  immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself. Because I didn't, we don't have the tools to deal with sexual misbehavior. We have nuclear weapons. We don't have any way of saying,

• 2:06:18Eric Weinstein?

  this is probably not a good place or a role for you at this moment as an authority figure. And something needs to be worked on. So in general, when we see somebody who is misbehaving in that way, our immediate instinct is to treat the person as, you know, Satan.

• 2:06:39Eric Weinstein?

  And we understand why. We don't want our children to be at risk.

• 2:06:45Eric Weinstein?

  Now, I personally believe that I fell down on the job and did not call out the Jeffrey Epstein thing early enough because I was terrified of what Jeffrey Epstein represents. And this recapitulated the old terror trying to tell the world, this therapist is out of control. And when I said that, the world responded by saying, well, you have two appointments booked and you have to go for the second one. So I got re-inflicted into this office on this person who was now convinced that I was about to tear down his career and his reputation. It might have been on the verge of suicide for all I know. I don't know. But he was very, very angry. And he was furious with me that I had breached a sacred confidence of his office.

• 2:07:28Lex Fridman?

  What kind of ripple effects does that have? Has that had to the rest of your life? The absurdity and the cruelty of that? I mean, there's no sense to it.

• 2:07:40Eric Weinstein?

  Well, see, this is the thing people don't really grasp, I think.

• 2:07:46Eric Weinstein?

  There's an academic who I got to know many years ago

• 2:07:52Eric Weinstein?

  named Jennifer Frye, who has a theory of betrayal, which she calls institutional betrayal. And her gambit is that when you were betrayed by an institution that is sort of like a fiduciary or a parental obligation to take care of you, that you find yourself in a far different situation with respect to trauma than if you were betrayed by somebody who's a peer.

• 2:08:19Eric Weinstein?

  And so I think that in my situation,

• 2:08:24Eric Weinstein?

  I kind of repeat a particular dynamic with authority. I come in not following all the rules, trying to do some things, not trying to do others, blah, blah, blah. And then I get into a weird relationship with authority. And so I have more experience with what I would call institutional betrayal. Now, the funny part about it is that when you don't have masks or PPE in a influenza-like pandemic and you're missing ICU beds and ventilators, that is ubiquitous institutional betrayal. So I believe that in a weird way, I was very early.

• 2:09:07Eric Weinstein?

  The idea of, and this is like the really hard concept,

• 2:09:13Eric Weinstein?

  pervasive or otherwise universal institutional betrayal, where all of the institutions, you can count on any hospital to not charge you properly for what their services are. You can count on no pharmaceutical company to produce the drug that will be maximally beneficial to the people who take it. You know that your financial professionals are not simply working in your best interest. And that issue had to do with the way in which growth left our system. So I think that the weird thing is, is that this first institutional betrayal by a therapist left me very open to the idea of, okay, well, maybe the schools are bad, maybe the hospitals are bad, maybe the drug companies are bad, maybe our food is off, maybe our journalists are not

• 2:09:57Eric Weinstein?

  serving journalistic ends. And that was what allowed me to sort of go all the distance and say, huh, I wonder if our problem is that something is causing all of our sense-making institutions to be off. That was the big insight. And that, tying that to a single ideology, what if it's just about growth? They were all built on growth, and now we've promoted people who are capable of keeping quiet that their institutions aren't working. So we've, the privileged, silent aristocracy, the people who can be counted upon, not to mention a fire when a raging fire is tearing through a building.

• 2:10:37Lex Fridman?

  But nevertheless, it's, how big of a psychological burden is that?

• 2:10:42Eric Weinstein?

  It's huge. It's terrible. It's crushing. It's very-

• 2:10:45Lex Fridman?

  It's very comforting to be the parental, I mean, I don't know, I treasure, I mean, we were just talking about MIT, we can, I can intellectualize and agree with everything you're saying, but there's a comfort, a warm blanket of being within the institution. And-

• 2:11:04Eric Weinstein?

  Up until Aaron Schwartz, let's say. In other words, now, if I look at the provost and the president as mommy and daddy, you did what to my big brother?

• 2:11:17Eric Weinstein?

  You did what to our family? You sold us out in which way? What secrets left for China? You hired which workforce? You did what to my wages? You took this portion of my grant for what purpose? You just stole my retirement through a fringe rate? What did you do?

• 2:11:37Lex Fridman?

  But can you still, I mean- The thing is about this view you have is it often turns out to be sadly correct.

• 2:11:45Eric Weinstein?

  Well, this is the thing.

• 2:11:47Lex Fridman?

  And but let me just in this silly, hopeful thing. Do you still have hope in institutions? Can you within your psychologically?

• 2:11:56Eric Weinstein?

  Yes.

• 2:11:57Lex Fridman?

  I'm referring not intellectually because you have to carry this burden. Can you still have a hope? Like within you, when you sit at home alone and as opposed to seeing the darkness within these institutions, seeing a hope.

• 2:12:11Eric Weinstein?

  Well, but this is the thing I want to confront.

• 2:12:16Eric Weinstein?

  Not for the purpose of a dust up. I believe, for example, if you've heard episode 19, that the best outcome is for Carol Greider. To come forward. As we discussed in episode 19.

• 2:12:30Lex Fridman?

  With your brother Brett Weinstein.

• 2:12:31Eric Weinstein?

  And say, you know what? I screwed up. He did call, he did suggest the experiment. I didn't understand that it was his theory that was producing it. Maybe I was slow to grasp it. But my bad. And I don't want to pay for this bad.

• 2:12:52Eric Weinstein?

  Choice on my part. Let's say. For the rest of my career, I want to own up and I want to help make sure that. We do what's right with what's left.

• 2:13:02Lex Fridman?

  And that's one little case within the institution that you would like to see made.

• 2:13:06Eric Weinstein?

  I would like to see MIT very clearly come out and say, you know, Margot O'Toole was right when she said David Baltimore's lab here.

• 2:13:17Eric Weinstein?

  Produced some stuff that was not reproducible with Teresa Minishikari's research. I want to see the courageous people. I would like to see the Aaron Schwartz wing. Of the computer science department. Yeah, wouldn't know, let's think about it. Wouldn't that be great if we said, you know, an injustice was done and we're gonna, we're gonna right that wrong, just as if this was Alan Turing?

• 2:13:43Lex Fridman?

  Which I don't think they've righted that wrong.

• 2:13:46Eric Weinstein?

  Well, then let's have the Turing Schwarz wing.

• 2:13:48Lex Fridman?

  Turing Schwarz, they're, they're starting a new college of computing. Wouldn't it be wonderful to call it the Turing Schwarz?

• 2:13:54Eric Weinstein?

  I would like to have the Madame Wu wing of the physics department. And I'd love to have the Emmy Nerdre statue in front of the math department. I mean, like, you want to get excited about actual diversity and inclusion?

• 2:14:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:06Eric Weinstein?

  Well, let's go with our absolute best people who never got theirs. Because there is structural bigotry, you know? But if we don't actually start celebrating the beautiful stuff that we're capable of when we're handed heroes and we fumble them into the trash? What the hell? I mean, Lex, this is such nonsense. We ju- just pulling our head out.

• 2:14:33Eric Weinstein?

  You know, on everyone's secom should be tattooed, if you can read this, you're too close.

• 2:14:42Lex Fridman?

  Beautifully put. And I'm a dreamer just like you. So I don't see as much of the darkness genetically or due to my life experience. But I do share the hope from MIT, institution that we care a lot about.

• 2:14:59Eric Weinstein?

  You both do.

• 2:15:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And Harvard institution I don't give a damn about, but you do.

• 2:15:05Eric Weinstein?

  I love Harvard.

• 2:15:06Lex Fridman?

  I'm just kidding.

• 2:15:07Eric Weinstein?

  I love Harvard, but Harvard and I have a very difficult relationship. And part of what, you know, when you love a family that isn't working, I don't want to trash, I, I didn't bring up the name of the president of MIT during the Aaron Schwartz period. It's not vengeance. I want the rot cleared out. I don't need to go after human beings.

• 2:15:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Just like you said, with the, with the disc formulation, the individual human beings aren't, don't necessarily carry the...

• 2:15:40Eric Weinstein?

  It's those chairs that are so powerful that, in which they sit.

• 2:15:43Lex Fridman?

  It's the chairs, not the humans.

• 2:15:45Eric Weinstein?

  It's not the humans.

• 2:15:48Lex Fridman?

  Without naming names, can you tell the story of your struggle during your time at Harvard? Maybe in a way that tells the bigger story of the struggle of young, bright minds that are trying to come up with big, bold ideas within the institutions that we're talking about?

• 2:16:11Eric Weinstein?

  You can start. I mean, in part, it starts with coffee, with a couple of Croatians in the math department at MIT. And we used to talk about music and dance and math and physics and love and all this kind of stuff, as Eastern Europeans love to, and I ate it up. And my friend Gordina, who was an instructor in the MIT math department when I was a graduate student at Harvard, said to me, and I'm probably gonna do a bad version of her accent.

• 2:16:53Lex Fridman?

  There we go.

• 2:16:55Eric Weinstein?

  "Iri, will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar?" And I said, "What secret seminar?" "Iri, don't joke." And I said, "I'm not used to this style of humor, Gordina." "Iri, the secret seminar that your advisor is running." I said, "What are you talking about?" "Ha, ha, ha, ha. You know, your advisor is running a secret seminar on this aspect." I think it was like the Chern Simons invariant. I'm not sure what the topic was again, but she gave me the room number and the time, and she was like not cracking a smile. I've never known her to make this kind of a joke, and I thought this was crazy. And I was trying to have an advisor.

• 2:17:39Eric Weinstein?

  I didn't want an advisor, but people said you have to have one, so I took one. And I went to this room like 15 minutes early, and there was not a soul inside it. It was outside of the math department. And I was still in the same building, the Science Center at Harvard. And I sat there and I let five minutes go by, I let seven minutes go by, 10 minutes go by, there's nobody. I thought, okay, so this was all an elaborate joke. And then like three minutes to the hour, this graduate student walks in and like sees me and does a double take. And then I start to see the professors in geometry and topology

• 2:18:20Eric Weinstein?

  start to file in. And everybody's like very disconcerted that I'm in this room. And finally, the person who was supposed to be my advisor walks in to the seminar and sees me and goes white as a ghost. And I realized that the secret seminar is true, that the department is conducting a secret seminar on the exact topic that I'm interested in, not telling me about it, and that these are the reindeer games that the Rudolphs of the department are not invited

• 2:18:58Eric Weinstein?

  to. And so then I realized, okay, I did not understand it. There's a parallel department. And that became the beginning of an incredible odyssey, in which I came to understand that the game that I had been sold about publication, about blind refereeing, about openness and scientific transmission of information, was all a lie. I came to understand that at the very top, there's a second system that's about closed

• 2:19:42Eric Weinstein?

  meetings and private communications and agreements about citation and publication that the rest of us don't understand. And that in large measure, that is the thing that I won't submit to. And so when you ask me questions like, well, why wouldn't you feel good about, you know, talking to your critics or why wouldn't you feel? The answer is, oh, you don't know. Like, if you stay in a nice hotel, you don't realize that there is an entire second structure inside of that hotel where like, there's usually a workers cafe in a resort complex that isn't available to the people who are staying in the hotel.

• 2:20:21Eric Weinstein?

  And then there are private hallways inside the same hotel that are parallel structures. So that's what I found, which was, in essence, just the way you can stay hotels your whole life and not realize that inside of every hotel is a second structure that you're not supposed to see as the guest. There is a second structure inside of academics that behaves totally differently with respect to how people get dinged, how people get their grants taken away, how this person comes to have that thing named after them. And by pretending that we're not running a parallel structure, I have no patience for that anymore.

• 2:21:03Eric Weinstein?

  So I got a chance to see how the game, how hardball is really played at Harvard. And I'm now eager to play hardball back with the same people who played hardball with me.

• 2:21:18Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask two questions on this. So, one, do you think it's possible? So I call those people assholes. That's the technical term. Do you think it's possible that that's just not the entire system, but a part of the system? Sort of that there's, you can navigate, you can swim in the waters and find the groups of people who do aspire to.

• 2:21:43Eric Weinstein?

  The guy who rescued my PhD was one of the people who filed in to the secret seminar.

• 2:21:52Lex Fridman?

  Right, but are there people outside of this?

• 2:21:55Eric Weinstein?

  Is he an asshole?

• 2:21:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, yes, I was a bad.

• 2:21:59Eric Weinstein?

  No, but I'm trying to make this point, which is this isn't my failure to correctly map these people. It's yours. You have a simplification that isn't going to work.

• 2:22:10Lex Fridman?

  I think, okay, asshole is the wrong term. I would say lacking of character and.

• 2:22:16Eric Weinstein?

  What would you have had these people do? Why did they do this? Why have a secret seminar?

• 2:22:23Lex Fridman?

  I don't understand the exact dynamics of a secret seminar, but I think the right thing to do is to, I mean, to see individuals like you. There might be a reason to have a secret seminar, but they should detect that an individual like you, a brilliant mind, who's thinking about certain ideas could be damaged by this.

• 2:22:42Eric Weinstein?

  I don't think that they see it that way. The idea is we're going to sneak food to the children we want to survive.

• 2:22:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so that that's highly problematic and there should be people within that room.

• 2:22:54Eric Weinstein?

  I'm trying to say, this is the thing, the ball that can't, is thrown but won't be caught. The problem is they know that most of their children won't survive.

• 2:23:06Eric Weinstein?

  And they can't say that.

• 2:23:09Lex Fridman?

  I see. Sorry to interrupt. You mean that the fact that the whole system is underfunded, that they naturally have to pick favorites?

• 2:23:19Eric Weinstein?

  They live in a world which reached steady state at some level, let's say, you know, in the early seventies.

• 2:23:28Eric Weinstein?

  And in that world,

• 2:23:31Eric Weinstein?

  before that time, you have a professor like Norman Steenrod and you'd have 20 children. That is graduate students and all of them would go on to be professors and all of them would want to have 20 children. Right? So you start like taking higher and higher powers of 20. And you see that the system could not, it's not just about money. The system couldn't survive. So the way it's supposed to work now is that we should shut down the vast majority of PhD programs. And we should let the small number of truly top places populate.

• 2:24:05Eric Weinstein?

  Mostly teaching and research departments that aren't PhD producing. We don't want to do that because we use PhD students as a labor force. The whole thing has to do with growth, resources, dishonesty. And in that world, you see all of these adaptations to a ruthless world where the key question is, where are we going to bury this huge number of bodies of people who don't work out? So my problem was I wasn't interested in dying.

• 2:24:35Lex Fridman?

  So you clearly highlight that there is aspects of the system that are broken. But as an individual, is your role to exit the system? Or just acknowledge that it's a game and win it?

• 2:24:49Eric Weinstein?

  My role is to survive and thrive in the public eye. In other words, when you have an escapee of the system.

• 2:25:00Lex Fridman?

  Like yourself.

• 2:25:00Eric Weinstein?

  Such as? And that person says, you know, I wasn't exactly finished. Let me show you a bunch of stuff. Let me show you that the theory of telomeres never got reported properly. Let me show you that all of marginal economics is supposed to be redone with a different version of the differential calculus. Let me show you that you didn't understand the self dual Yang Mills equations correctly in topology and physics, because they're in fact much more broadly found, and it's only the mutations that happen in special dimensions. There are lots of things to say, but this particular group of people, like if you just

• 2:25:41Eric Weinstein?

  take, where are all the Gen X and millennial university presidents?

• 2:25:48Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:25:48Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, they're all, they're all in a holding pattern. Now, where, why in this story, you know, was it of telomeres? Was it an older professor and a younger graduate student? It's this issue of what would be called interference competition. So for example, orcas try to drown minke whales by covering their blowholes so that they suffocate because the needed resource is air.

• 2:26:17Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, well, what do universities do? They try to make sure that you can't be viable, that you need them, that you need their grants. You need to be zinged with overhead charges or fringe rates or all of the games that the locals love to play. Well, my point is, okay, what's the cost of this? How many people died as a result of these interference competition games? You know, when you take somebody like Douglas Prasher, who did green fluorescent protein, and he drives a shuttle bus, right? Because his grant runs out and he has to give away all of his research. And all of that research gets a Nobel Prize and he gets to drive a shuttle bus for $35,000 a year.

• 2:26:58Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean by died? Do you mean their career, their dreams, their passions?

• 2:27:01Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, as an academic, Doug Prasher was dead for a long period of time.

• 2:27:08Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so as a person who's escaped the system.

• 2:27:12Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:13Lex Fridman?

  Can't you, because you also have in your mind a powerful theory that may turn out to be useful, maybe not?

• 2:27:22Eric Weinstein?

  Let's hope.

• 2:27:23Lex Fridman?

  Can't you also play the game enough, like with the children? So like publish and but also.

• 2:27:31Eric Weinstein?

  If you told me that this would work, really what I want to do, you see, is I would love to revolutionize a field with an H-index of zero.

• 2:27:45Eric Weinstein?

  Like, we have these proxies that count how many papers you've written, how cited are the papers you've written? All this is nonsense.

• 2:27:53Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting aside. What do you mean by a field with an H-index as zero? So a totally new field.

• 2:27:57Eric Weinstein?

  H-index is count somehow how many papers have you gotten that get so many citations?

• 2:28:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:03Eric Weinstein?

  Let's say H-index undefined.

• 2:28:07Eric Weinstein?

  Like, for example, I don't have an advisor for my PhD. But I have to have an advisor as far as something called the Math Genealogy Project that tracks who advised who, who advised whom down the line. So I am my own advisor, which sets up a loop, right? How many students do I have? An infinite number, or descendants. They don't want to have that story. So I have to be, I have to have formal advisor, Raul Bot. And my Wikipedia entry, for example, says that I was advised by Raul Bot, which is not true. So you get fit into a system that says, well, we have to know what your H-index is.

• 2:28:48Eric Weinstein?

  We have to know, you know, where are you a professor if you want to apply for a grant? It makes all of these assumptions. What I'm trying to do is in part to show all of this is nonsense. This is proxy BS that came up in the institutional setting. And right now, it's important for those of us who are still vital, like Elon. It would be great to have Elon as a professor of physics and engineering.

• 2:29:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:11Eric Weinstein?

  Right?

• 2:29:12Lex Fridman?

  It seems ridiculous to say, but...

• 2:29:14Eric Weinstein?

  No, just as a shot, just as a shot in the arm.

• 2:29:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:18Eric Weinstein?

  You know, like, it'd be great to have Elon at Caltech, even one day a week.

• 2:29:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:24Eric Weinstein?

  One day a month. Okay, well, why can't we be in there? It's the same reason. Why can't you be on The View? Why can't you be on Bill Maher? We need to know what you're going to do before we take you on the show. Well, I don't want to tell you what I'm going to do.

• 2:29:38Lex Fridman?

  Do you think you need to be able to dance the dance a little bit?

• 2:29:41Eric Weinstein?

  I can dance the dance fine.

• 2:29:43Lex Fridman?

  To be on The View?

• 2:29:44Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, come on.

• 2:29:45Lex Fridman?

  So you can't, yeah, you do. You're not...

• 2:29:47Eric Weinstein?

  I can do that fine. Here's where it's, the place that it goes south is there, like, a set of questions that get you into this more adversarial stuff. And you've, in fact, asked some of those more adversarial questions this setting. And they're not things that are necessarily aggressive, but they're things that are making assumptions.

• 2:30:06Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:30:07Eric Weinstein?

  Right? So when you make, I have a question, it's like, you know, Lex, are you avoiding your critics?

• 2:30:14Eric Weinstein?

  You know, it's just like, okay, well, why did you frame that that way? Or the next question would be like, um, do you think that you should have a special exemption? And that you should have the right to break rules and everyone else should have to follow them? Like, that question I find enervating.

• 2:30:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:27Eric Weinstein?

  It doesn't really come out of anything meaningful. It's just like, we feel we're supposed to ask that of the other person to show that we're not captured by their madness? That's not the real question you want to ask me. If you want to get really excited about this, you want to ask, do you think this thing is right? Yeah, weirdly, I do. Do you think that it's going to be immediately seen to be right? I don't. I think it's gonna, it's gonna have an interesting fight and it's gonna have an interesting evolution. And, well, what do you hope to do with it in non-physical terms? Gosh, I hope it revolutionizes our relationship of, well, with people outside of the institutional framework, and it reinflicts us into the institutional framework where we can do the most good to bring the institutions back to health.

• 2:31:12Eric Weinstein?

  You know, it's like, these are positive uplifting questions. And if you had Frank Wilczek, you wouldn't say, Frank, let's be honest, you have done very little with your life after the original huge show that you used to break under the physics scene. Like, we weirdly ask people different questions based upon how they sit down.

• 2:31:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's very strange, right? But you have to understand that, so here's the thing, I get these days a large number of emails from people with the equivalent of a theory of everything for AGI.

• 2:31:46Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:47Lex Fridman?

  And I use my own radar, BS radar, to detect unfairly, perhaps, whether they're full of shit or not.

• 2:31:58Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 2:31:59Lex Fridman?

  Because...

• 2:32:00Eric Weinstein?

  I love what you're, where you're going with this, by the way.

• 2:32:02Lex Fridman?

  And my, my concern I often think about is, there's elements of brilliance in what people write to me. And I, and I'm trying to, right now, as you made it clear, the kind of judgments and assumptions we make, how am I supposed to deal with you who are not an outsider of the system? And think about... What you're doing, because my radar is saying you're not full of shit.

• 2:32:32Eric Weinstein?

  But I'm also not completely outside of the system.

• 2:32:35Lex Fridman?

  That's right. You've danced beautifully. You've actually got all the credibility that you're supposed to get, all the nice little stamps of approval. Not all, but a large enough amount. You, I mean, it's hard to put into words exactly why

• 2:32:55Lex Fridman?

  you sound, whether your theory turns out to be good or not, you sound like a special human being.

• 2:33:04Eric Weinstein?

  I appreciate that, and thank you very much.

• 2:33:05Lex Fridman?

  In a good way.

• 2:33:06Eric Weinstein?

  All right.

• 2:33:07Lex Fridman?

  So, but what am I supposed to do with that flood of emails from AGI?

• 2:33:12Eric Weinstein?

  Why do I sound different?

• 2:33:14Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. And I would like to systemize that. I don't know.

• 2:33:18Eric Weinstein?

  Look, you know, when you're talking to people, you very quickly can surmise, like, am I claiming to be a physicist? No, I say it every turn. I'm not a physicist. Right? When I say, when you say something about bundles, you say, well, can you explain it differently? You know, I'm pushing around

• 2:33:39Eric Weinstein?

  on this, this area, that lever over there. I'm trying to find something that we can play with and engage. And you know, another thing is, is that I'll say something at scale. So if I was saying completely wrong things about bundles on the Joe Rogan program, you don't think that we wouldn't hear a crushing chorus?

• 2:33:59Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:33:59Eric Weinstein?

  And, you know, same thing with geometric unity. So I put up this, um, this video from this Oxford lecture. I understand that's not a standard lecture. But you haven't heard, you know, the most brilliant people in the field say, well, this is obviously nonsense. They don't know what to make of it.

• 2:34:21Eric Weinstein?

  And they're gonna hide behind, well, he hasn't said enough details. Where's the paper?

• 2:34:25Lex Fridman?

  Where's the paper? I've, I've seen the criticism. I've gotten the same kind of criticism. I've published a few things and, um, like especially stuff related to Tesla. We did studies on Tesla vehicles and the kind of criticism I've gotten showed that they're completely.

• 2:34:42Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, right. Like the guy who had Elon Musk on his program twice is gonna give us an accurate assessment next.

• 2:34:47Lex Fridman?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:34:48Eric Weinstein?

  It's just very low level.

• 2:34:50Lex Fridman?

  Like without actually ever addressing, um,

• 2:34:52Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:53Lex Fridman?

  the content.

• 2:34:57Eric Weinstein?

  You know, Lex, I think that in part you're trying to solve a puzzle that isn't really your puzzle. I think you know that I'm sincere. You don't know whether the theory is going to work or not. And you know that it's not coming out of somebody who's coming out of left field. Like, the story makes sense. There's enough that's new and creative and different in other aspects where you can check me, that your real concern is, are you really telling me that when you start breaking the rules, you see the system for what it is, and it's become really vicious and aggressive? And the answer is yes. And I had to break the rules in part because of learning issues, because I came into this field, you know, with a totally different set of attributes. My profile just doesn't

• 2:35:41Eric Weinstein?

  look like anybody else's remotely. But as a result, what that did is it showed me, is the system true to its own ideals? Or does it just follow these weird procedures? And then when you take it off the rails, it behaves terribly. And that's really what my story, I think, does, is it just says, well, he completely takes the system into new territory, where it's not expecting to have to deal with somebody with these confusing sets of attributes. And I think what he's telling us is he believes it behaves terribly. Now, if you take somebody with perfect standardized tests, and, you know, a winner of math competitions,

• 2:36:21Eric Weinstein?

  and you put them in a PhD program, they're probably going to be okay. I'm not saying that the system, you know, breaks down for everybody under all circumstances. I'm saying when you present the system with a novel situation, at the moment, it will almost certainly break down with probability approaching 100%.

• 2:36:46Lex Fridman?

  But to me, the painful and the tragic thing is it, sorry to bring out my motherly instinct, but it feels like it's too much, it could be too much of a burden to exist outside the system.

• 2:36:59Eric Weinstein?

  Maybe, but...

• 2:37:00Lex Fridman?

  Psychologically.

• 2:37:01Eric Weinstein?

  First of all, I've got a podcast that I, that's kind of like, and I've got amazing friends. I have a life which has more interesting people passing through it than I know what to do with. And they haven't managed to kill me off yet. So, so far, so good.

• 2:37:19Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of which, you host an amazing podcast that we've mentioned several times, but should mention over and over, The Portal, where you somehow manage, every single conversation is a surprise. You go, I mean, not just the guests, but just the places you take them, the kind of ways they become challenging and how you recover from that. I mean, it's, uh, there's just, it's full of genuine human moments. So I really appreciate what you're, it's a fun, fun podcast to listen to. Let me ask some silly questions about it. What have you learned about conversation, about human to human conversation?

• 2:38:02Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I have a problem that I haven't solved on The Portal, which is that in general, when I ask people questions, they usually find their deeply grooved answers. And I'm not so interested in all of the deeply grooved answers. And so there's a complaint, which I'm very sympathetic to, actually, that I talk over people, that I won't sit still for the answer. And I think that that's weirdly sort of correct. It's not that I'm not interested in hearing other voices. It's that I'm not interested in hearing the same voice on my program that I could have gotten on somebody else's. And I haven't solved that well. So I've learned that I need a new conversational technique where I can keep somebody from finding their comfortable place and yet not be the voice talking over that person.

• 2:38:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's funny. I can sense, like your conversation with Brett, I can sense you detect that the line he's going under, down is, you know how it's going to end and you know, you think it's a useless line. So you'll just stop it right there and you take them into the direction that you think it should go, but that requires interruption.

• 2:39:06Eric Weinstein?

  Well, and it does so far. I haven't found a better way. I'm looking for a better way. It's not, it's not like I don't hear the problem. I do hear the problem. I just, I haven't solved the problem. And, you know, on the, on the Brett episode, um, I was insufferable. It was very difficult to listen to. It was so overbearing, but on the other hand, I was right. You know, it's like-

• 2:39:30Lex Fridman?

  Funny, you keep saying that, but I didn't find it, maybe because I heard brothers, like I heard a big brother.

• 2:39:37Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, it was pretty bad.

• 2:39:39Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 2:39:39Eric Weinstein?

  I think so.

• 2:39:40Lex Fridman?

  I didn't think it was bad at all.

• 2:39:41Eric Weinstein?

  Well, a lot of people found it insufferable. And I think it also has to do with the fact that- This has become a frequent experience. I have several shows where somebody who I very much admire and think of as courageous, you know, I'm talking with them, maybe we're friends, and they sit down on the show and they immediately become this fake person. Like, two seconds in, they're, they're sort of saying, well, I don't want to be too critical or too harsh. I don't want to name any names. I wanted this, don't. He was like, okay, I'm going to put my listeners through three hours of you being sweetness and light.

• 2:40:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:17Eric Weinstein?

  Like, at least give me some reality and then we can decide to shelve the show and never let it hear, you know, the, the call of freedom in the, in the bigger world. But

• 2:40:27Lex Fridman?

  I've seen you break out of that a few times. I've seen you be successful with it. I forgot the guest, but she was dressed with, um, where at the end of the episode, you had an argument about Brett. I forgot.

• 2:40:42Eric Weinstein?

  Agnes Kaller.

• 2:40:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:44Eric Weinstein?

  Agnes Kaller, the philosopher at the University of Chicago.

• 2:40:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you've continuously broken out of her. You guys went, you know, you seem pretty genuine.

• 2:40:55Eric Weinstein?

  I like her. I'm completely ethically opposed to what she's ethically for.

• 2:41:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, she was great. And she wasn't like, you're both going hard.

• 2:41:05Eric Weinstein?

  She's a grown up.

• 2:41:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:06Eric Weinstein?

  And she doesn't like care about her. So she's

• 2:41:07Lex Fridman?

  That was awesome.

• 2:41:08Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:09Lex Fridman?

  But you're saying that some people are difficult to break out that way.

• 2:41:13Eric Weinstein?

  It's just that, you know, she was bringing the courage of her convictions. She was sort of defending the system. And I thought, wow, that's a pretty indefensible system that you're defending.

• 2:41:23Lex Fridman?

  That's great, though. She's doing that, isn't it?

• 2:41:25Eric Weinstein?

  I mean,

• 2:41:26Lex Fridman?

  It made for an awesome.

• 2:41:28Eric Weinstein?

  I think it's very informative for the world.

• 2:41:31Lex Fridman?

  Yes. You just hated.

• 2:41:33Eric Weinstein?

  I just can't stand the idea that somebody says, well, we don't care who gets paid or who gets the credit as long as we get the goodies. Because that seems like insane.

• 2:41:41Lex Fridman?

  Have you ever been afraid leading into a conversation?

• 2:41:48Eric Weinstein?

  Gary Kasparov.

• 2:41:50Lex Fridman?

  Really? By the way, I mean, I know I'm just a fan taking requests.

• 2:41:56Eric Weinstein?

  But I started, I started the beginning in Russian. And in fact, I used one word incorrectly. Is that terrible?

• 2:42:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was, it was pretty good. It's pretty good Russian. What was terrible is I think he complimented you, right? No, did he compliment you? He was like, me. Did he compliment you on your Russian?

• 2:42:12Eric Weinstein?

  Well, he said, almost perfect Russian.

• 2:42:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like he was full of shit. That was, that was not great Russian, but.

• 2:42:19Eric Weinstein?

  That was not great Russian.

• 2:42:20Lex Fridman?

  That was great. That was hard. That was, you tried hard, which is what matters.

• 2:42:24Eric Weinstein?

  That is so insulting.

• 2:42:26Lex Fridman?

  I hope so. But I do hope you continue. I felt like, I don't know how long it went. It might've been like a two hour conversation, but it felt, I, I hope it continues. Like, I feel like you have many more conversations with Gary. Yeah. I would love to hear, there's certain conversations I would just love to hear.

• 2:42:43Eric Weinstein?

  Well, just, you know, he's coming from a very, it's this issue about needing to overpower people in a very dangerous world. And so Gary has that need.

• 2:42:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he wasn't, he was interrupting you. It was an interesting dynamic. It was, it was an interesting dynamic.

• 2:43:00Eric Weinstein?

  Two Weinsteins going at it.

• 2:43:01Lex Fridman?

  Two, I mean, two powerhouse egos. Brilliant.

• 2:43:05Eric Weinstein?

  No, you don't say egos, minds.

• 2:43:07Lex Fridman?

  Minds.

• 2:43:07Eric Weinstein?

  Spirits.

• 2:43:08Lex Fridman?

  Mine. You don't have an ego. You're the most humble person I know.

• 2:43:11Eric Weinstein?

  Is that true?

• 2:43:12Lex Fridman?

  No, that's a complete lie. Do you think about your own mortality, death?

• 2:43:18Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 2:43:19Lex Fridman?

  Are you afraid?

• 2:43:20Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I released a theory during something that can kill older people. Sure.

• 2:43:27Lex Fridman?

  Oh, is there a?

• 2:43:28Eric Weinstein?

  Of course.

• 2:43:28Lex Fridman?

  A little bit of a parallel there?

• 2:43:29Eric Weinstein?

  Of course, of course. I don't want it to die with me.

• 2:43:34Lex Fridman?

  What do you hope your legacy is?

• 2:43:37Eric Weinstein?

  Oh. I hope my legacy is accurate.

• 2:43:46Eric Weinstein?

  I'd like to write on my accomplishments rather than how my community decided to ding me while I was alive. That would be great.

• 2:43:52Lex Fridman?

  What about if it was significantly exaggerated?

• 2:43:55Eric Weinstein?

  I don't want it.

• 2:43:57Lex Fridman?

  You want it to be accurate?

• 2:43:59Eric Weinstein?

  I've got some pretty terrific stuff and whether it works out or doesn't, that I would like it to reflect what I actually was.

• 2:44:10Eric Weinstein?

  I'll settle for accurate.

• 2:44:13Lex Fridman?

  What would you say, what is the greatest element of Eric Weinstein's accomplishment in life?

• 2:44:24Lex Fridman?

  In terms of being accurate, like what, what are you most proud of?

• 2:44:31Eric Weinstein?

  Trying.

• 2:44:36Eric Weinstein?

  The idea that we were stalled out in the hardest field at the most difficult juncture.

• 2:44:44Eric Weinstein?

  And then I didn't listen to that voice ever that said, stop, you're hurting yourself, you're hurting your family, you're hurting everybody, you're embarrassing yourself, you're screwing up, you can't do this, you're a failure, you're a fraud. Turn back, save yourself. Like that voice, I didn't ultimately listen to it and it was going for 35, 37 years.

• 2:45:15Eric Weinstein?

  Very hard.

• 2:45:19Lex Fridman?

  And I hope you never listen to that voice. That's why you're an inspiration.

• 2:45:24Eric Weinstein?

  Thank you. I appreciate that.

• 2:45:26Lex Fridman?

  Eric, you're the, I'm just infinitely honored that you would spend time with me. You've been a mentor to me, almost a friend. I can't imagine a better person to talk to in this world. So thank you so much for talking today.

• 2:45:42Eric Weinstein?

  I can't wait till we do it again. Lex, thanks for sticking with me and thanks for being the most singular guy in the podcasting space. In terms of all of my interviews, I would say that the last one I did with you, many people feel was my best and it was a non-conventional one. So whatever it is that you're bringing to the game, I think everyone's noticing and keep at it.

• 2:46:05Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.

• 2:46:07Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein, and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LEXSPodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at @LexFriedman. And now, let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Eric Weinstein's first appearance on this podcast. "Everything is great about war, except all the destruction." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.