Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
eric weinstein the third time we've
spoken on this podcast
he is the wise turtle master oogway to
my kung fu panda
one of my favorite people to talk to in
this world a complicated and fascinating
mind
that i'm grateful to have the chance to
accompany in exploring this world
through conversation
on this podcast and on his the latter
called
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having many more conversations
with eric through the years i think we
have just the
right kind of contrasting world views
and a deep respect and appreciation of
each other's life stories
that creates for this magical experience
in the realm of conversation that feels
like we're
always looking for something that we
never quite find
but are always better for having tried
i'm not sure how or why the universe is
connected eric and me
but it did and i would be a fool not to
trust
its judgment and enjoy the journey
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twitter at lex friedman
and now here's my conversation with eric
weinstein who's the greatest musician of
all time
would you say we were just off camera
talking about eddie van halen he
unfortunately passed away
who's the greatest musician of all time
yeah
jonathan richmond who's that
it's a weird question so i'm going to
give you a weird answer it's not because
thank you okay
jonathan richard the reason i'm picking
on him is that he had a quote
uh he was the front man of a group
called the modern lovers
and his quote was something like we have
to be prepared
to play music when our instruments are
broken
the electricity's out and it's raining
something like that
and i thought that that quote was very
interesting because what it said was
you have to be able to strip this thing
down farther and farther back to get to
something that is intrinsically musical
so we were having
a conversation just now about virtuosity
and we're talking about eddie van halen
and his recent passing and
that affected me emotionally i don't
know whether it affected you i was never
a van halen
the group fan but i i revered
eddie van halen's capacity for
innovation just
i saw him like uh you know rodney mullen
the skateboarder i had dreamed of having
the two of them on
the same podcast just to talk about what
it's like to totally discontinuously
innovate
and he posted a video of spanish fly i
think and saying like
i didn't know the guitar could make
those kinds of sounds like what is this
voodoo movie
is it well this is the thing right the
arpeggios that he did on a single string
are so fast and the attacks
uh from the hammer-ons when they go
at light speed as he did uh particularly
and the reason i chose that was is that
i wanted to strip
out the electronics because part of the
claim would be is that he's a rock
musician and a lot of the innovations
had to do with things peculiar
to sort of the electrified setup you
know his his use of the whammy bar for
example or the frankenstrat that he
built
from different pieces right
all of those aspects
in my opinion are just dwarfed by his
innovation and his musicianship
and that's why i chose spanish fly
because everyone of course will go to
something like
eruption or running with the devil which
is the first things that they
heard that let them know that there was
a new force erupting out of southern
california that was eddie van halen
right i mean i just i i'm in love with
i'm in love with the story of it
you're often so poetic about music
like it clearly touches your soul on
some kind of on many levels
what is that is it deeper than just
rocking out with the uh
in your convertible corvette
69 i imagine eric weinstein is driving
down the
california highways blasting some kind
of music
is it just like being able to be
carefree for moments of time
or is there something more fundamental
that connects to like
the theory of everything in physics and
life and all that
how often do you have the chance for
example to hear mathematics performed as
you do in bach
right like something with that kind of
precision and elegance that can't really
be grasped
where you know uh to go back to leonard
cohen's uh
famous line the baffled king composing
right such a good song such a good song
but it's also like
individual verses of that song are
insanely important
um the the baffled king
is how we often make music we don't
really understand
what did we just do that broke that
person's heart sitting on the couch
right and so it's a very strange thing
that you should be able to have
think of it like you're a computer
you've got this weird open music port
you know port 37.8 you know like
it's not even it's not even supposed to
be there and suddenly somebody starts
playing guitar and they're making you
feel things
or you know like in particular
particular instruments like the violin
it's so difficult it's so unforgiving
and when it
gives up its secrets it just you know it
it wraps its fingers around your heart
and won't let go
sometimes i talk about head heart and
loins when something can grab your head
heart and your loins at the same moment
and integrate them there are very few
opportunities
to live like that and if you think about
eddie van halen uh
you know as far as your head the the
musical innovations and the fact that he
was
drawing directly from the classical
canon um
you know really speaks to the idea that
maybe rock
is what um somebody like jimi hendrix
saw it as being you know an infinitely
extensible medium
uh in terms of heart um i always
notice the smile on his face it's
painful to look at an eddie van gaal and
solo
now like sometimes you'll see the
cigarette dripping off the side of his
mouth and you're like
that's gonna fucking kill you and i'm
not even worried about it for you i'm
worried about it for me
you're gonna rob i don't even need to
hear you play another note i just like
knowing that you're in the world that
there is somebody that everyone looks to
that no but
i've never heard a guitarist say yeah i
don't know
i think it was okay like i've never just
never heard it you can hate him
but you still think he was a genius
there are very few people like that in
the
in the world and then loins those leaps
that guy was incredibly good-looking and
you know skin-tight pants
super athleticism he completely owned
the sexual the male sexuality of the
stage
both being the completely dominant you
know sort of
mythical alpha male i hate that
expression but there you are
but also this kind of little boy with
this mischievous smirk
and you know the sense that it all came
together
how could you not eat that up you could
just imagine the millions
of like young teenage boys who are just
like playing air guitar in their
in their room just that yeah basically
dreaming of being that kind of god the
the the most perfect example of what a
human being can be
yeah it's fascinating to think it is and
and then you know
as in many of the cases with these bands
you get these multiple talents in the
same outfit
and i think that the original
configuration with david lee roy i mean
david lee roth is such a hot mess at all
times
i would love you to talk to david
like if there that
that dance would be just gorgeous i
don't know
he's can you handle it can you ride that
probably not yeah
probably not because i think he's very
i i get the feeling that he's very smart
and very uh dysregulated and i don't
know that i could
like like bring him down to earth for a
moment well i can also get pretty
disregulated
yeah yeah and so i don't know i don't
know whether it could be magic it could
be a shit show i don't know what you
thought of
his appearance on rogan that was an
interesting one
i loved it but joe and that and joe does
this sometimes
sometimes he just sits back and listens
and he just lets
like the music play which works really
well
i think you have a chance to kind of
jump into the chaos i care too and then
you'll just start
and the places you will go you may not
even talk about
music for like hours it might just go to
this because he i think lives in japan
like there's a weird
he's a he's been in like an emt after he
was a rock star he chose to be kind of
like
i don't know you know it it like there's
depth to that man that uh that hasn't
been explored by him
either so i that'll be an exciting
conversation can we go back to
larry cohen yeah can we just
i the things i feel when i listen to
hallelujah by leonard cohen or
anything by him really but that one what
do you want to get into it
let's go what what does it that song
mean to you
is it love oh boy well first of all it's
it's it's mystery
like it starts off about mystery so what
are you what are you doing
you're doing this alternation between
the
two chords so three notes at the same
time one is called
the the tonic or you have the the
major and the relative minor and he's
alternating between them
there's only one note of difference
between those two chords one of them
would be
feeling sad one of them would be more
joyous typically described
and so by altering one note it's the
minimal amount to take you back and
forth between joy and happiness
as that's encoded in us so he starts off
with it i heard there was a scene
david played the please lord but you
don't really care for music do you
um that's really interesting because
it's he's using this technique called
bathos
right so the alternation between the
sublime
and kind of the guttural or ridiculous
or the mundane right
so he's like uh there's a bitterness to
it too
is it just play well the way i hear it
again you know great song allows for
different interpretations you happen to
be asking me so i'm going to impart some
stuff that probably isn't in the song
but why it speaks to me and that's what
makes it great
um the way i hear it is he doesn't
believe the audience you don't really
care for music do you then what are you
doing listening to this you stupid
idiots
you know of course you of course you
care for music you're too cool to care
so i see through you and screw you
that's like the kind that's that's the
energy i get
then he does this weird thing it goes
like this is where he should put the
description
of where he is in the chord progression
which is the tonic right
it goes like this and then he hits the
fourth and the fifth
which are the two other major elements
the subdominant and the dominant
in functional harmony so he's describing
the chord progression
in real time in the lyrics there's two
ways this can come about in other
songs like we had this example of
um every time we say goodbye do you know
the song
every time we say goodbye no i think it
was a cole porter maybe
or gershwin maybe porter i don't know i
cry a little
there is no love song finer but how
strange the change
from major to minor right like it's
beautiful
then then there's times when it's
duplicitous so for example
you'll have i guess my favorite examples
of this are johnny cash's ring of fire
i fell into a burning ring of fire then
what does he do with the
lyrics in the tune
i went down down down it goes up
yeah right and so the idea is like oh
okay that was a head fake yeah
right and another one of these um you
know is nina simone's
feeling good oh okay so what do you get
a
bird's flying high
you know how i feel and sun
up in the sky high you know how i feel
that woman's voice she doesn't give a
damn
yet she's and i'm feeling but then
what's the
dude yeah it's like heavy stripping
music it's
it's you're not in a good place you're
probably in some
strip club with the last of your money
you're drinking
lousy beer some bad situation yeah and
she's feeling good
no it's funerial it's oppressive right
i never thought of that song that way
wow
well you think of it as joyous yeah no
no if you think about it
contrast it with ray charles for example
you know do you know do you know lonely
avenue
well my room has got two windows
but the sun never comes through it's
really depressed
it's the same sort of vibe as nina
but she's claiming that she's in great
shape so she's like a good case of the
unreliable narrator
leonard cohen to me is talking about the
unreliable audience that's too cool to
be with the performer on stage
the things that go with the music like
the cole porter stuff they go against
like the johnny cash
i think these are the games that
musicians play that the rest of us
only sort of notice subliminally okay
fourth the fifth and then he when he he
should say something about the relative
minor or the
he's giving you the secret the baffled
king in other words he doesn't know why
it works
did paco bell know why pachelbel's canon
would work
yeah it was a discovery that's the whole
thing like some music
is discovered and some music is invented
and he's talking about a musical
discovery he's talking about the
pythagorean
power of the wave equation and then
superimposed like there's two
genius intellectual concepts behind
music one of which is the wave equation
usually we solve it for a
one-dimensional medium because we're
talking about strings or air columns
occasionally
you're talking about things like hand
pans or steel drums or metallophones or
gamalons whatever
and those have a wave equation too
that's much
more chaotic the other equation is this
crazy thing
that 2 to the 19 12 is almost exactly
equal to 3 which is what gave us even
temperament
and so the tension between those two
things is in fact
one of these most beautiful stories
inside of that system
that formula of the baffled king is a
discovery it's not
he's not really composing it the reason
he's baffled
it's imagine that you took like a little
brush
and you started brushing off uh you know
a pyramid under the sands
you you might think that you created the
pyramid by your brushing
but in fact if somebody else did it
that's why you're baffled
right that's beautifully played you're
right and as as
creating one of the greatest songs of
all time and as he's doing it he's
baffled
and he's in his mouth he leonard is
within the song and he leonard is
baffled is my
my contention but he knows enough to
know that he's baffled
right and so the idea is that he is
composing he has the audacity
to compose as david
he's echoing david at a minimum and then
in a later song which i really wish we
would discuss that's
totally dystopic and you will not like
it at all uh
is the future which contains this line
that i
i think i used in my episode with roger
penrose on the portal
uh note the subtle plug the portal the
portal
i'm the little jew that wrote the bible
so there is this way in which leonard
cohen i think is constantly coming to
the idea of being
a biblical-like scribe and i think this
is one of the great things that you know
you see dylan doing this with all along
the watchtower you saw warren zivan who
we should talk much more about
doing this with a song called i was in
the house when the house burned down do
you know this thing
no this is embarrassing sweetheart
that's a great day
warren zivan is one of the most
important songwriters of our time
and he's been largely forgotten
uh by this generation but you know bob
dylan
uh would sing one of his songs in
tribute i've heard bob dylan you know
very small number of songwriters really
move him woody got three
gordon lightfoot and uh warren zevon
by the way bob dylan if you're out there
appear on either one of our podcasts
we need to get your voice into a new
medium for a new group
definitely this is a time this is a time
for bob dylan my friend
honestly you've been doing an amazing
job in this space one of the reasons i'm
super excited to do this podcast again
is that i've learned some things about
what i don't do well
and i also have sort of struggled with
the question should i do those things
better because what if it's
you know i always use the same example
of the fitted sheet when you're trying
to put a queen-size fitted sheet on a
king-sized mattress he's like okay i got
that corner squared away and then you
get another corner that pops off and
then you go back around
i wonder whether i can improve my style
in the ways in which
uh you know i think it's just a
recognition of a difference you do a
better job of getting to the soul
of a really top intellectual guest
and making them accessible and
presenting them as themselves
for a huge number of people and i'd give
my tooth to be able to do that
do you ever think about this like
because i
think about what is the greatest
conversation i'll ever have
you know like in in a sense the portal
not to reduce it to anything but there
will be the greatest conversation
you may have already had it but it's
very possible if if
if enough people like me can keep
twisting your arm to keep doing the
portal please
that is there'll be an amazing
conversation one of the questions
that i ask myself is like who is the
person
that i'm especially equipped for some
reason i'm convinced on putin
there's something in my head that says i
i i can do this man
better than anyone else in this world i
got this thought in my head about it i
don't know why
and i'm convinced but i think the
universe works in that way like if it
tells you it's kind of happens the way i
would say it is is that almost everybody
who becomes a supreme court justice
believes at a very early age they're
going to become a supreme court justice
many people believe at an early age that
they can do it don't get there
but of those who get there almost all of
them had this sort of
well i call it pathological
self-confidence
and i do think you have pathological
self-confidence and you also have
humility and
most people would hear those as a
contradiction i think that
you would not be able to get away with
what you do
if you didn't have the humility and so i
think
you know the great danger is that your
equation becomes unbalanced
that you either lose the humility or you
lose the the
humility overwhelms the ego and the
drive
because right now you've got a mexican
standoff in your mind and
the rest of us are just benefiting
that's beautifully put my mexican
standoffs aren't as stable as yours
it's all reservoir dogs all the time
yeah but
um actually the person who that
describes is peter thiel
peter thiel thinks more dif people
always say like what does peter think
about x y and z p and q it's like
well do you want communist peter do you
want hyper peter
in there oh my god right on everything
that's why he's successful is that he's
got all these minds fighting each other
and so when people say peter is this
repeater is that i just laugh
because it like nobody who knows him
would describe him as having
thoughts at the level that people are
claiming and i do think that you know
in my case
um you know there's also pathological
epistemic humility
like just i know i know how little
i know how little i can do in one life i
know how many things i've screwed up
i know how many things i've got wrong
and on
the other hand i know that if if not you
know it's like hillel's questions you
know if i'm not for myself who will be
for me
and if i'm only for myself what am i if
not now when
you know at some level there's a
question about
if i don't decide that someone is
capable and
that somebody is me and i
if i apply that to everyone else on the
planet then nobody's going to do
anything
and so i do think that one of the things
that people like you and i get
is who are you to say that right
f that man just
sign me up for some dunning-kruger
yeah but it's multiple minds like you
said like this morning
i was feeling so good and confident
about i couldn't think no wrong
and i remember last night clearly
thinking that i'm the dumbest human
who's ever lived yeah and nothing i've
ever said is worth anything
what the fuck am i doing with my life
why am i
scared i was terrified of this
conversation
who the hell is my conversation because
i'm an idiot and because
you know lex
but no no but this morning
[Laughter]
i was the baddest motherfucker who's
ever walked this earth so it was
i was very conscious i think it was the
coffee i'm not sure maybe some sleep
this sounds very russian and it involves
multiple beverages some of them being
alcoholic others containing caffeine
there's in fact i can't share the story
behind it but there is a bottle of vodka
in the fridge
okay so i mean i should have hate you
for coffee because this is a morning
there's a morning show here so i put out
a call that
we get a chance to have this
conversation and people ask these
wonderful questions
a few people asked about depression
and suicide it's a
this this is a russian program so we'll
have to go there
and i think about leonard cohen and one
of the things that always
kind of um broke my heart
and kind of suffocated the hope i have
for just
uh i don't know for
love in a person's life is to hear how
much the
how much depression was a part of
leonard cohen's life and how much he
suffered
see i guess one way i'm not sure where
we can go with this question but
do you think about the places that the
mind can go
like these dark places yeah is there
something
like where the only escape out is
suicide for example that's the darkest
version of it
that i really think suicide is a big
place
in suicidal ideation and self-harm and
we don't talk a lot about it um
it's it's a similar problem to trying to
talk about trans
these are umbrella categories and if the
commonality is
that somebody harms themselves but we
don't know whether that's coming because
of a
problem in brain chemistry because of an
event in their life
um whether evolutionary programming for
suicide is
weirdly normal whether or not it might
have a religious motivation
there's there's too many different forms
of self-harm and something like the 10th
largest killer
thereabouts
and i think that you know you can look
at it from different angles
i i'm old enough to have you know had
pete seeger come to my college when i
was at university
and to watch his good humor
in the face of all adversity um
i think of odetta i used to go to odetta
concerts any i don't know if you
you know who she is okay this is going
to be one of the better days of your
life check out odetta
when we're done with the interview um
she was a civil rights
figure but also just had a profound
voice
and great musicianship
these people were in the struggle right
and they
they saw lots of bad things happen and
they kept their humor about them
and you know the thing is that
you can take on the velcro merits you
know the pain
of the of the planet or you can
try to do something else which is to be
a happy warrior even if
the odds are terrible and the and the
cost of failure
is catastrophic so even when surrounded
by darkness but the thing is with
leonard cohen
is he created such beautiful music
and yet it's like anthony bourdain the
same
and yet they go to this dark place
and it could be it's easy to say it's
just biochemistry
no there's a linkage between this highly
generative creative
side and in some cases
dark depression in other cases not so
you can't say that it's tied
the genius and madness are always you
know co-traveling or the beauty and pain
are one and the same what you can say is
that there's a cluster
of people that tell you that for that
cluster there is a relationship between
the darkness and the beauty
and i do think that in part it's
squaring circles that can't be squared
you know that well we're just talking
before about
the inability to serve two perfect
systems the perfect system of the wave
equation and the perfect system of even
temperament
they're both perfect they're not
compatible
and once you realize that there is
perfection and an inability to make
contact with perfection
i think you know you recognize that
um there is no solution to this world
yeah that's weird with the poets and
musicians
do you want to say this is a particular
thing that you do but then there's
spanish fly by van halen
and then you realize oh well what do you
get out of spanish fly by david
i i think it's very singular because of
its the fact that it's purely acoustic
for some reason i always i couldn't
imagine
eddie van halen separates from the band
in front of thousands of people
just screaming and rocking out with
lights everywhere
and spanish fly made me think like you
made me imagine him sitting alone on a
couch in a room i think that's who he
was i really do
i mean i i it's believe me i get it it
was a rock star it's a rock guy got it
got it got it got it
i'm almost positive that you can't get
to where he got to without being a
complete introvert
yeah like it made me imagine that
there's like some half naked supermodel
walking around hoping that uh they can
you know
do their thing together and and he's
completely disinterested he'd be able to
be with the guitar right yeah because
like honestly at some level
in one case you know maybe you're maybe
you're conquesting maybe you're pursuing
love and romance
and the other case you're talking about
a relationship to the
to the order the creator the almighty
whatever it is you want to call that
substrate that is reality
and you know do i believe that eddie van
halen
and jimi hendrix and paganini and
heifetz jacked into the
you know the true essence of the world
yeah they did i don't think it's as good
as differential geometry i'm sorry i do
think
it's amazing for other reasons and thank
god
because it's very difficult to
communicate differential geometry at
scale
but the thing about eruption for example
what level do you want to come into
eruption
do you want just the sheer majesty and
pageantry do you want the theatrics
like you could put him on on wires and
you know
set his pants on fire or whatever and
you know it'd be it'd be totally in
keeping with it on the other hand you
want to talk something completely
precise
that you know shows off the virtuosity
of what's possible with the stratocaster
everything works multi-axis but there's
a precision to it
which and which is very different than
hendrix
there's a messiness to hendrix that to
me somebody who has ocd
has always been how does that affect you
i mean
let's have the jimi hendrix conversation
i don't know that we can do anything to
it that hasn't already been done to it
maybe that's not true maybe the idea is
that every generation has to have its
hendrix
conversation and this is a long time
it's johnny hendricks experience
yeah it's so funny yeah i hear he stole
it from joe rogan
yeah there's so many
details one it hurt my
soul on so many levels that you can put
a thumb over the guitar
to to play a note to hold the note
and it doesn't because i want it to be
the russian virtuoso that sits with his
classical guitar and a perfect form
plays really fast with the fingers and
and then you don't want you want the
thumb to be perfectly relaxed and
supportive
that's the russian conservatory student
conservatory yeah
then there's like the russian wild man
which one is that
well haven't they're different russian
archetypes
right so the completely idiosyncratic
russian is very different in a weird way
from the uh you know i can do this
backwards in any key in any sli
in my sleep in in any time signature
that you you know just just snap your
fingers
we've discussed my uh piano tuner
in previous episodes no no that was
offline conversation you told me the
story
but i should tell you this you should
you should re-tell the story there it
was
in darkest manhattan yeah with the
world's shittiest
uh it wasn't even an upright was a spin
it piano
a friend had given it to me the piano
fell out of tune
and i would have to tune it and
the only tuner i knew was this russian
guy and i hated dealing with him
there's something about his attitude
just really rubbed me the wrong way
so anyway my wife says tune that thing
so we get the
piano tuner to come and he's tuning this
and he's like are you sure are you sure
you want to tune this this
piece of shit you know okay fine so he's
like okay it's your money
the phone rings and i have the the phone
ringer set
on a landline to paganini caprice 24.
and immediately as the phone rings he
figures out
what key the phone ringer is and which
is not the key that like
list composed the variations on on
uh caprice 24. and he starts going into
theme and variations on caprice 24
at some level i've never heard before
just jaw dropping it
and like the phone stops ringing and we
have this awkward silence i said
i didn't know you were such a great
piano player and then he says one of
these things and in
you know in russian accented english
hurts in a way you can't imagine
no you are the piano player i am merely
the piano tuner
i was just like oh man through the heart
you know it's kind of reminiscent i'd
love to hear actually your opinion this
is reminiscent of the goodwill hunting
story what do you think about that that
movie that movie it's
about it's mit yeah i guess when i think
of that film
i think about matt damon as a young guy
risking everything giving up harvard
i think you know probably the most
accomplished group of people in the
world are people who choose to give up
harvard voluntarily
it's beautiful right that's true bigger
than harvard you know ives was one of
these people
um bill gates of course uh
and then oddly uh you know zuckerberg
what zuckerberg
but then steve jobs gave up a read and
read is like the weirdest craziest
college in the world people should pay
much more attention to read and i'm
sorry it's going through a hard time at
the moment but what it was before the
current craziness is really an
interesting story
irregardless as we say in the 617 area
code um
i think that a lot about a lot of my
reaction is to the the real story of
matt damon
uh having this vision and being the
young guy to pull it off
and you know i also think about robin
williams trying to explore
heart through this lens of acting
and you know as you and i you've hung
out with comedians
they know that they are a screwed up
bunch of people
they do they'll they're proud about it
they really are
the idea that robin williams who i saw
many years ago when i was in la
um in the comedy clubs around here
you know he was a straight-up crazy
dysregulated genius
in tremendous pain
and his desire to do it earnestly
through acting
rather than constantly by just sniping
you know or or being a clown or or
showing us how
fast his mind worked relative to ours um
i i was really moved by that i thought
that he he brought some authenticity
and took a huge risk for a comedian to
be that real
and again like you said it doesn't
always have to be but in that case the
madness and the genius were
neighbors that one couldn't have been
any other way
yeah no because his mind you the thing
about seeing him in a comedy club
was that he would react to random
stimulus in the environment
you know it could be a heckler sometimes
he almost got the feeling that he wanted
a heckler because it was
it gave him something to play against
right he was just he was infinitely
instantly inventive
but i actually to me the best robin
williams
is as he got closer and closer to the
end of his life
because there was a sadness and he's
almost
fighting the sadness with this
improvisational like the weapons he has
is this wit and humor and this dancing
that he does with language
but and then sometimes when you just
fall silent
you can see the sadness and and
i don't know there's something so
beautiful about that it's like this bird
with a broken wing that's like trying to
fly
you know and it's getting older and
older and
i mean those he would have made a one
hell of a podcast guess i'll tell you
i'll tell you that that's a sad
um yeah i have some sadness that i
really do think that part of
what we call podcasting is actually just
getting to know a soul
right over and over again like yeah
maybe the idea is that this is talking
about
depression and sadness and
heavy feelings is not an american
specialty
seeing that in context with the beauty
of life is a russian specialty
like it is very much special
it sounds like a diner menu what yeah
what the
a big scoop of ice cream with tons of
depression
i i do think that we're in a really
terrifying and depressing
time and i think that part of it is
we don't know if something huge is about
to get started
and we don't even know what this is i
mean we just
sit here in this weird world that is
falling into some new state
and we're not even super curious it's
like what the hell just happened
everybody's got an answer and i'm
positive that all of those answers are
wrong
let's let's try to at least sneak up on
the good answer
so the central core of the answer is
that the us
seemed to be the greatest thing in the
world
in large measure because we hadn't
noticed
that we were getting a benefit from
having no plan
not having to make a plan for low growth
as long as we had growth we were in
great shape
let's imagine that there was a that
you could run an experiment you have a
billion copies of earth and you start
the initial conditions slightly
different
on some giant number of planets a lot of
the things
that were discovered from the 1800s
through the end of the 20th century are
discovered in a period of
time because a lot of that just has to
do with once you crack the puzzle of
getting better instruments you can see
more
and the more you can see the more you
can make use of what you can see and it
turns out there was lots of stuff to do
with like you know germs or
electron orbitals or you know
spectrum electromagnetic spectrum and so
we got to do all of those things
and the us roughly corresponded for a
good chunk of its history with this
bonanza
and so of course we look like an amazing
genius country we have no plan
imagine that you you could sell a car
you don't have to put in seat belts you
don't have to put in airbags
you don't have to put in rear view
mirrors or sensors or
a rear view mirror you could save a lot
of money on a car by not putting in all
of the stuff
to keep things from going wrong
and i think that's what we had we had a
machine
that as long as growth was insanely good
we plowed it back
the riches and spoils and then treasure
back into the system and made more
genius stuff and we carried along a good
chunk of humanity hundreds of millions
of people
we did not have a plan for what happens
when the growth goes below
the stall speed of our society
how confident should we be that the
growth has slowed in
in a way that uh is permanent rather
than
a kind of slap in the face where is that
the right concept
right concept is i i try to use the same
words over and over again in case people
see mold because then
the perseveration actually gets
somewhere so i use this analogy of the
orchard
because everyone talks about low-hanging
fruit they know the concept of
low-hanging fruit
but they don't think in terms of
orchards
so they say things like you think we've
picked all the low-hanging fruit but i
believe in the infinite inventiveness of
the human mind
yeah it's like okay that doesn't even
work as an analogy
what if the idea is we only picked all
the low-hanging fruit here and then
we're having this stupid argument about
low-hanging fruit and we're not going
and looking for new orchards
we're not planting new orchards we're
not looking for forests we're we're just
sitting here arguing about low-hanging
fruit so my claim is there's probably a
lot more low-hanging fruit and it's not
here
it's in other orchards it's in other
orchards one of those turned out to be
the digital orchard
the digital orchard has not been a
stagnant
as lots of these other like the chemical
uh
orchard you know i have faith
that there is a small percentage of the
population
but not zero that's looking for those
other orchards
like i'm excited about one of those
orchards which is
i believe there will be robots in
everybody's homes and that will unlock
some totally new thing
totally new set of technologies ideas
the way we live life
the productivity all the everything
it'll change everything so i'm excited
about that orchard so i'm si
you know i'm roaming that orchard and
wondering how the hell
you kind of bring back like the ant that
finds a new
source of food yeah i'm trying to find
an apple i can bring back to the
the great so you're in an you're in in
an
explorer idiom and you have faith that
there's enough
of those i don't think there are very
many of us i mean i'm one of them too
yeah
how many does it take it takes one hand
it takes one end what are you talking
about
how many uh elons does it take to screw
in a light bulb
okay let's imagine that we went
imagine some ant goes and finds a new
source of food
yeah right and then it comes back to the
colony
and it says hey i think i found a new
source of food and the
initial reaction is you're not you're
not authorized to find new food
what why would you try to go find new
food we're going to remove you from
twitter
yeah and by the way i think the fact
that you think you're allowed to go find
you shows how privileged you are as an
aunt
get out of the colony kill him kill him
well
that's probably not a great model for
finding new orchards
and i think that what we find is that
where there's a system that allows
somebody to ascend without a lot of
gatekeeping
you can have that but you know i saw
this happen in hedge funds hedge funds
for a while
uh hoovered up a lot of talent because
they were places that had funding
and had freedom and in general
really smart people want to be free and
they don't want to think a lot about
how they're going to you know feed
themselves they want to get lost in
their minds
so you can either give them productive
places to play dangerous places to play
you know they're either going to break
into computers or find vaccines for you
or build bombs or build companies
and we're not providing for the people
who have to disrupt and have to innovate
and trying to channel that effort we're
so focused
on this other thing which is like
fairness and safety
and fairness and safety by the way are
really important i don't want to
denigrate them
but the singular focus on fairness and
safety without
in the same breath being focused on
growth
and discovery and creation is going to
doom us because what we're talking about
is we're always talking about divvying
up the pie that
is as opposed to the pie that will be
imagine that you spent all your time
trying to divvy up the 13th century pie
and you destroyed your ability to get to
the 20th century
you'd be an idiot but one place i think
i disagree with you
is uh i don't think you need that many
people to empower the geniuses the
innovators the
people who refuse to spend most of their
days in meetings about fairness
this is good uh-huh let's have a
disagreement i think
podcasting whatever you call that medium
it's just one
little example of a tool that you can
give
power to like you and your podcast can
have
the next elon musk and make him a star
now i see where you're going
okay there has been a series of places
for people to play
and be free and we've lost them
successively
what's a good place you remember because
i disagree with you there too
i think they're still there you can
still play you interviewed
noam chomsky yes okay
noam chomsky comes from an era where you
can play
where you could play at mit at mit and
you can't play this is where i disagree
with you
we've already had this but go check the
clips channel
for the lexi friedman podcast i i think
i wasn't brave enough at that time
and i'm not really brave enough now come
on because that's
the vodka uh it's a feeling and because
people are going to tear me apart oh
what are you and and you speak from
emotions and facts
the feeling the podcast is this it's
yours yes okay
tell the people who are currently
editing your brain because i saw that
move right now yeah
that they should go find another podcast
right
let's get rid of some of your audience
right now
yeah please go find another podcast if
you're editing my brain nevertheless
all the self-doubt they're sitting in
that brain so i can't stand to watch
this but all right
okay what is the self-doubt loop that
you're in the thing is
when i walk the halls of mit
yeah there's bureaucracy there's
administrators that never have done
anything interesting in their entire
lives
there's meetings there's all these
crowds the usual crap
but there's in the eyes of individuals
yeah there's this glow of excitement has
nothing to do with career i understand
this
and and that's just it's still a
playground there's little little pockets
of playgrounds from which genius can
emerge still
and they're unaffected by diversity
meetings or fairness meetings or
or blah blah blah i love to hear this
yeah but you don't think so i don't
believe it
because i've watched the change lex i've
watched people and we're all editing
ourselves all the time
i remember my old mind i liked it better
all of this relentless focus on critical
race theory
and you know critical theory
post-modernism
fairness social justice it's making many
of us into
worse people you think that's that do
you think the mad demons are
of you know the character is paying
attention to any of that you think that
has enough
have you seen what happened to matt
damon himself matt damon has tried to
say various things at various times that
seem to be relatively innocuous
he can't can't speak okay well let's
let's not
mix up matt damon is just an actor well
no no
he was just a harvard student who came
up with his own genius screenshot acted
and made it happen
no yeah no but we're somewhere else you
don't think you can build the rocket
company
no no i think that there are things that
you can
still do but we're losing them we lose
them
we keep losing them i would say the
biggest problem
here let me just say like what i think
the solution would be is
to fire anybody who is doesn't
like who's not like faculty especially
young faculty should have way more power
and administration should have much less
power because right now
the administration which used some of
the who
used to be faculty but they've lost the
fire the spark that
gave them they've lost the memories of
the playground
and so the people that admire and love
the playground like you could see it in
their behavior should have way more
power
and so we should create a systems that
give them power
you're very idealistic yeah and you're
very you've got a huge heart
it's a weird time because i don't want
to dissuade you
from believing beautiful things um
because i see how potent you are you you
do all these things jiu jitsu guitar
podcasting programming computers
um etc etc
i don't think you're right i think we're
in a really deeply screwed up place
where even the tiny number of let me
give you an alternate version of this
dystopia
i do think that there are people who are
capable and there's still places to play
and cause things to happen that progress
the story forward
but if you look at the fire that some of
the people are in
who fit that profile like how much crap
has elon musk taken
quite considerable right
and not much at admiration from the
craig venter jim watson
these are very difficult people
steve jobs is a very difficult guy you
know
yeah it is a bit heartbreaking to me i
mean everybody
is different generations i just my mind
is a little focused on elon musk because
he's
the modern person well you know him i
mean he's a person to you
i it hurts my heart to see how few
faculty and uh people with nobel prizes
and so on
uh admire eon like how little prop
he gets he gets a lot of fans from like
people who buy his products and you know
young minds yeah just excited but like
why don't we as institute why doesn't
mit
say that we wanna we we
somebody amongst us will be the next
elon musk and we want to encourage them
it's like say that say that in a meeting
say that
like that's success no kidding for us as
mit
and they instead there's this jealousy
it's like
well here's the did you hear what he
almost tweeted did you
did you see like how responsible is what
he's doing how
the the like just saying all these
things that are just
dripping with jealousy and
basically i want what he's got that's
the thing right
and then if yeah here's the weird thing
rivalry
has a different signature
you see when you know that you're never
going to make it
yeah that's the position you take
what is it in kung fu panda which you've
watched now
yes yes what does tai long say
when he's looking for the dragon warrior
and the furious five come
to defeat him on the bridge one of them
gives a
poe's name accidentally and tai long
hears it
po so that is his name finally a worthy
opponent
our battle will be legendary right he's
excited
why is that well you learn about this in
boxing sometimes you'll see a division
or an mma which is lousy with talent
just you can't swing a cat without
hitting an amazing amazing athlete
sometimes you'll have a division which
at that particular moment has one star
and no real competition in that weight
class or something
that person is in bad shape because you
can't build a legend
without the other
when you think of muhammad ali what are
the names that you immediately think of
now you have to fraser you have to think
of the other
ways listen right yeah
so those those opponents
are in part what made muhammad ali
muhammad ali
and that's you know that that's why the
the the mayweather
um mcgregor revelation that
okay this guy's got his opponent's
picture in his house
how weird is that well because without
the opponent you may not be able to get
there now
i am not a huge fan of
the wrong kinds of rivalries you have
examples in mind
well there are rivalries where people
take each other's credit
and screw each other over and then there
are other rivalries like
the rna tie club where these guys were
so
in love with what they were doing that
they couldn't wait to share everything
and
like nobel prizes were so abundant that
you know
most people got nobel prizes just for
being a member of the rna tie club and
doing cool stuff
and yeah that's that's the golden
that's the golden kind of sweet spot
um most of these people can't do what
elon's doing because they can't break
rules they can't take the pressure
i'll tell you what really concerns me
about your perspective
i think that there are a lot of genius
ideas inside of people who don't
have the stomach for conflict and
derision
and i think a lot of those people are
female and i think that
until we come up with a world in which
we can swat down the trolls
where we can actually cause the trolls
not to ruin everything and i don't
necessarily mean by shutting them up i
don't necessarily mean by
being brutal to them but somehow
separating off people who are working in
people who are trolling
i think that we're losing a huge amount
of human genius in part
because women in particular
are not necessarily going to push an
idea
if it results in 10 years of being
derided
very few men are willing to do that
either
but there are some of us who are so dumb
that we will pigheadedly
stick to an idea for 10 years even if
the world collapses
i don't think that there are as many
women who are going to make that
calculation even if they know the idea
is correct and
one of the things that i believe
technology can help us fight the trolls
of all definitions of troll like i
believe that a better twitter can be
built
interesting i do not i don't believe
that a twitter successor can be built
that solves
most of the problems i think you can
always improve what we have
but i don't think that converges in
something that really works because i
think ultimately the problem isn't
twitter the problem is us
for example i've recently made a very
disturbing
realization which is
academics and trolls have very many
similar behaviors
absolutely it's largely a trolling
community
i tend to believe that the trolls
are not it's like the peter thiel many
mind
idea yeah which in all of the trolls
there's the possibility of goodness and
all you have to do
not all you have to do what you have to
do is create technology that
incentivizes
them to uh to embrace
to to discover to embrace to practice
the the better angels of their nature
and
i believe that like the people actually
want to do that the trolls
is a short-term dopamine rush
of uh childish toxicity that all of us
want to overcome
i believe that like deep within we want
to overcome that
i i try to keep myself from believing
what you believe
because you'll be disappointed if it's
not because it's dangerous because
a lot of these people are implacable
foes and there aren't many of them but
when you meet somebody's like
yeah i just like screwing people up i'm
here for the pain
i i just believe even in them there's a
good there's a wonderful book that i'm
going to recommend to you
where i hope this comes from maybe i've
got the source wrong but
in any event it's a great book called
the maximum city
about bombay and i believe
the the conceit is that the author
leaves bombay as a kid and comes back as
an adult and he realizes
he has to rediscover the city because he
can't live in the city he left
so he gets in contact with all of the
weird areas of the city and one of them
is the underworld
he hangs out with the police but in the
underworld