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
the portal quick mention of each sponsor
followed by some thoughts related to the
episode
first is grammarly a service i use in my
writing
to check spelling grammar sentence
structure and readability
second is sun basket a meal delivery
service i use
to add healthy variety into my culinary
life
third is sem rush the most advanced seo
optimization tool i've ever come across
i don't like looking at numbers but
somebody should
it helps you make good decisions and
finally expressvpn
the vpn i've used for many years to
protect my privacy on the internet
please check out these sponsors in the
description to get a discount and
to support this podcast as a side note
let me say that wherever this life takes
me i'm drawn to the possibility of
having many more conversations
with eric through the years i think we
have just the
right kind of contrasting 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
if somehow you like this podcast please
subscribe on youtube
review it with five stars and apple
podcast follow on spotify
support on patreon or connect with me on
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 he's talking to contract
killers
and he says you know it's really weird
everybody pleads for their life
right before i kill them and they always
say this thing about i've got a
i've got two kids at home he says never
say that to a contract killer because we
have terrible relationships with our
parents
it doesn't endear us to you and that's
just like
oh wow so there's a minus sign in front
of that statement you're sitting there
saying you know i've got a
three-year-old it's like okay well i'm
going to take this
pos out of out of that kid's life maybe
he'll have a chance
you don't know how people are wired
and as much as i hate to say it there
are people whose wiring is so disturbing
and so different from yours that you
will never guess
why you can't reach them or how much
pleasure they may have gotten because
they may have gone over a point of no
return
nevertheless you are just a smart
guy who is using his intuition to make a
hypothesis
you do not know this for sure no and
i am you know whatever the hell i
am uh that has a different hypothesis
that even
in the darkest human beings that that
seem
to be only full of evil there's a good
person there that could be discovered
and that's one of the reasons i love
doing your show is is that you have
these beliefs
even as a russian
[Laughter]
the russian special as you know the
russian
there is a weirdness which is a total
cynicism and total idealism
yeah locked together right that's very
much part of the russian character
the reason i was i was kept bothering
you kept bothering to have this
conversation
is i'm really worried about the next
couple of months
no kidding and uh if there's anybody in
this world
that could help alleviate
my worry by um by at least
walking along with me through this worry
of
mine it's you do you think we're headed
towards
some kind of civil war some kind of
division that explodes beyond just stuff
on twitter but something that's
really destruct destructive to the
fabric
of our society well i believe we're in a
revolution
as you know i've called it the no name
revolution or n squared revolution i've
been talking about it for years
i don't think i think waiting for this
to be called a civil war is not smart
only history will cause such fine but i
think that the problem is is that you're
encountering things that you've never
seen
trying to fit them into things that you
already know right
and but history repeats itself
yes ish
you don't see lessons from history and i
do we see today
but i don't see it repeating itself you
know the the violence the famous quote
is that it rhymes
it rhymes i mean the thing i guess i'm
speaking to is violence and we're in
there
the abstraction of violence imagine
you were coding up violence as an
abstract class
okay thank you for speaking to the
audience
trying to lose these people come with me
go on i don't know i i i've dealt with
your audience
and your audience contains the smartest
people around yeah
i guarantee you if i say some stuff uh
first of all any wrong thing that i'll
say they're gonna detail so that'll be a
little bit of catnip to bring in the
smart people
but they'll also digest it for each
other it's one of the great lessons of
long-form podcasting if you don't if you
don't waste all your time explaining
things that's the job of the audience to
do amongst themselves
they're happy doing the work and those
who aren't they leave
isn't that great they'll leave the
people who don't want to struggle will
leave
you can get rid of them i think that the
point is
you you would want to say violence is
defined relative to a context so
let's call it meta violence so that we
don't get into the the problem
we already have a term for physical
violence right so we have meta violence
and physical violence i would say that
physical violence is subclassed from
meta violence meta violence is the
disruption of a system it's sort of
you know it's a you know if we for
example if a cell dies
you can die through apoptosis or
necrosis apoptosis is controlled
programmed cell death uh necrosis
is just like okay this didn't work that
was a violent disruption of the system
and this meta class is presumed in the
documentation
is it all negative no what are you
talking about
so this is part of the problem and the
madness of our
age right which is
if you if you open up a drawer in your
in your cabinet right in your kitchen
and you see knives spoons and forks do
you have a sense that the spoons are
good utensils and the knives are forks
or bad utensils because they're mean
i mean like if you start thinking in
these terms yeah
that knife is there to do violence
that's violence you want done
right when i cut a mango i'm doing
violence to the mango
the mango expects that i will do
violence to it because otherwise
i won't be able to get the the meat and
it won't
get its seed um spread somewhere else
so in part violence is absolutely part
of our story
so okay so there's this meta violence
class
yeah and what's so the metaviolence
class is already
you know it's a multiple inheritance
pattern whatever's going on right now
inherits from meta violence
no but there's there's certain
subclasses that
allow evil to emerge
so what what what i'm specifically
worried about
is that what's on your mind lex what's
really going on okay
i i worry that um amidst the chaos
of we have these protests or
the chaos that could be created by
the feeling that the election does not
represent
the the voice of the people like saying
that whoever gets
quote unquote wins the election
according to the
some kind of reporting of the numbers
that come out that's not
going to represent what people actually
who people actually want to be the
leader like something in that narrative
will create so much division that
people will resort to literal violence
like protests that really
that the united states loses its united
aspect
and because of that because of that
chaos and tension
evil evil people evil forces that my
definition of
evil is you know just cruel human beings
use that moment to attain power the kind
of power
that is ultimately goes against the
ideal
of the united states that could be
donald trump that could be
another human being it doesn't really
matter my
my worry is that love doesn't win out in
this
the unity doesn't win out in this and i
feel like
you and i have responsibility
no small yeah i know and so how do we
let love win in this moment
of we're gonna potentially
you're gonna have to become a fighter
you have to you have to throw some
serious punches if that's what you want
you have to be muhammad ali here because
the moment you start
criticizing anything yeah people you
have to be a masterful
communicator because that's why you're
here
look lex in part
your decency
is allowing you to do things that you
couldn't otherwise do i saw that you had
michael malus
on your podcast yeah now michael malus
is i think of somebody who at his best
is extremely shrewd and insightful yes
he's also got this trolling game which
he's quite open about and you talk to
him about it which i can't
stand and that's this is the idea oh
grandpa doesn't get the internet well
i'm grandpa i don't get the internet i
don't love the trolling
yeah there are trolls of the past
who were incredibly good i don't see
any of the modern trolls as being that
kind of genius level trolling the people
who deserve it
in the way that they deserve it you know
right now what i see is
that anything that stands up gets cut
down yeah you know it's like anything
earnest
you have to turn into cynicism and a
meme and it's this idea that the people
who believe that the world is chaos and
has no point are constantly trying to
let you know don't try to use the
internet for meaning for decency for
goodness
because we are going to find out that
that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy
and we will we will make you suffer so
i do think that there's a lot of
sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world
some of it mine
some of it yours but we all have it
and the trolls somewhat remove that but
it's not a judicious kind
constructive compassion a caring version
most of the time and a lot of those
trolls
and i i have this feeling about michael
malus i don't know whether it's right
that there's somebody who deeply cares
and loves beneath it
and that that's motivating some of the
trolling behavior and you and i don't
seem to be doing that i don't see you as
almost ever trolling yeah you and i are
get i
i'm very much against trolling i'm very
much against trolling it doesn't mean
that it's selective
you know i'm not even it's not even true
like
everything we say we say like i'm
forward i'm against it
this isn't my native language i speak
nuance i don't speak this internet shit
and i the more i have to communicate
through internet shit
right i almost never take a tweet
seriously if it contains the
the letters lmao lol rtfl
you know fol there's a interesting
effect where people say stuff and then
finish with lol
you put it beautifully that it indicates
to me that this is a person we've talked
about like why i wear this stupid suit
yeah it's like this is anti this is to
fight the lol at the end of sentences
is take it's like stand up for the words
you're saying
yeah don't finish stuff with lol
removing completely the responsibility
of the content of the sentence that
preceded it
yeah also choosing the outfit that
worked both for men in black and the
blues brothers
not a terrible choice okay but getting
back
look lex we're not in a position to do
this
you need to be seated in a different
chair
your chair is the wrong chair you're in
the wrong chair
it's been so long all right i want to
talk about you
and joe biden
joe biden was a 29 year old guy with
nothing particular going on
so far as i can tell okay
i know people as impressive at age 29 as
joe biden
you know 12 rows back three three deep
doesn't matter
huge number of people none of them my
age can get to where he got
like we're all morons
anytime somebody takes out like if you
found eddie van halen in a guitar shop
you'd be angry what is this guy doing
repairing guitars then somebody said
maybe he loves to repair guitars
yeah i mean what is your piano russian
piano tuna doing
what is my russian piano that was the
whole point of that story
which is what is it that happened
in that life that converted somebody and
i find this for example with
russian doctors who are you know
technicians in offices now
there's a huge amount of talent in the
world that's not
sitting in its proper seat yeah
and quite honestly i've gotten to the
point where my feeling is we've got to
take the seats
right maybe we don't sit in them maybe
the idea is that we take the seats and
we put some smart
gen z person in the seat and say look
no chanting i don't want to hear you say
no justice no peace
if there aren't verbs if it rhymes it's
wrong
like i used to have this thing rhyme
things that rhyme are more true
but like in general if something starts
at one two three four i don't wanna hear
what the rest of your sentence is
yeah but i i feel like
the responsibility that you carry that i
carry
this is where joe rogan generally
removes himself from being i'm just a
comedian this idea of i'm just a
comedian i'll do that
but at this moment in history
like history literally can pivot on the
wards
of a tattooed
ripped 50 year old you know comedian
and i think the same is true with you
okay well i'm
i'm interested and i care speaking of
lyrics
uh you know there are many here among us
who feel that life has been a joke
that's not us the hour is getting late
that's not us
in the song the the joker and the thief
are on opposite sides of jesus having
this conversation over jesus
you and i we've been through that that's
not our fate that's somebody else's fate
to
throw spit balls at the internet that's
not your fate you're an earnest guy
you're filled with love you're getting
the most amazing podcast guess you're
right over the internet this is the
point i'm trying to make that you're
saying
i'm i'm i'm just a grandpa i don't know
the internet no i'm telling you you're
going to get bigger and then you're
going to get cut down
you're going to keep ascending for a
while lex and then you're saying and
naturally there's i'm telling you i
watch the same process people get up to
a certain level
and one of the things that's going on in
my opinion with joe rogan
is is that when joe rogan starts to talk
about
his misgivings about joe biden you know
in a way that
you find at any bar in america about
cognitive decline in a 77 year old who's
about to be 78 i believe in november
we have never had anything remotely as
insane as a 78 year old person
slated to win the white house and you're
saying when that idea
that is is being communicated is there
something that's about the disc concept
do you talk about the system naturally
bad thing happens to joe or one of joe's
close associates
the ability to destroy people who become
inconvenient
has been documented this is what we have
done
in the past whether we are doing it now
we don't know because we are not doing
this church
church committee to in order to know
whether or not
you are currently destroying american
citizens as we did in the past as we
have documented as we found out
in 1976 the federal government destroyed
americans
who had political beliefs that
the government didn't want to continue
and
i don't know whether you are grasping
that one
interpretation of why jon stewart and
why joe rogan
why bill maher all these people to some
extent hide behind it's a joke
yeah it's because they're trying to find
a protected class
is there some place i can stand and
speak the truth
which does not result in my being
garbage collected
interesting i i guess you're right my
intuition is you can stand
as you gain more power you can stand
you yeah there's a photo for joe rogan
right now i mean i i've talked about it
for a few years now
people did not understand how big that
program was people didn't understand
long-form podcasting i was derided
by people who i think of as being very
shrewd um
for believing in these podcasts as a
major force
and most of the people who derided me
have said wow did i not get things
it's like if you started to propose um
you know you wanted to do the sopranos
in the era
of 30-minute sitcoms um
like you don't get it man the american
people they're not interested in these
long plot story lines
that's your weird thing nobody cares
dude everybody just wants short fast
memorable
and like okay so if you do that you
totally miss the opportunity and you
know the savvy people used to say
kid let me tell you nobody ever lost a
dime underestimating the
intelligence of the american people well
that was totally wrong because they
didn't calculate opportunity costs
i have been talking about the problem of
of joe for a long time
um the problem is is that when the
system wakes up they're going to want to
control it
and they're different they come up with
new different mechanisms of doing that
i guess one interesting one is cancel
culture
well look at the number of people around
joe who they've come after since they
realized that joe was really big
joey diaz brian callan
um crystalia
now i'm not saying that those are all
related but i do notice that
there are at least correlations between
when joe says something when something
bad happens in joe's universe
it's easier for me to believe that
that's happening
when it's happening around joe himself
yeah but i'm worried about my friend
yeah and i don't necessarily want to
push him towards being more if he
doesn't want it
because i don't think i don't want to i
don't want to conscript people he's got
a great life he's got a great situation
he's done a huge service
thank god do you know yeah like
how much do i owe joe just for what he's
done for you to say nothing of what he's
done for me
or for brett or for sam or any of these
people
and you know i'd like to think that we
all try to give back
but i'm worried about joe he's not
worried
one of the inspiring things about joe
yeah
is i mean he's in this war alone
and the way he fights the war is by just
enjoying life well that's his thing as
long as he stays close
to things that he loves and being you
know one of the things he's honest about
his drug use
he loves to hunt so he's just he does a
certain amount of
like semi-vice signaling up front
and then you just also know him this is
why every time they try to take him down
you use the n-word you know it's like
unfortunately everybody knows who joe is
and he yes he he doesn't
act as if he went to a fancy finishing
school
right that's not his energy the fact
that you've got some super smart guy who
always pretends to be a meathead
just like you know it's like hey i'm a
comedian like all these defenses and
disguises okay you've got this super
smart guy
who um he's admitted to most of the
things that
you know you can you can take him down
for and because everybody's been
effectively in his den
or his basement think about that studio
as his basement
people have hung out with joe so many
hours that you can't tell them something
about joe or they're going to say wow
i'm going to believe the new york times
and not
the hundreds of hours i've spent on the
joe rogan experience but the cool thing
is that
this is what inspires me is that the way
he's waging war against the system
is just by being a good person and and
talking enough hours in a week
where that message like bleeds
throughout the words
yeah in the gaps between and that that's
so inspiring to me that
the good people can win by just being
good and he's kind
and he's tough and he also he's no
pushover
no i i always worry a little bit when i
sit down in that chair
you still get scared that he'll call you
on some kind of bullshit that you
weren't even aware of
no it the first time i was on the show
the energy wasn't great between us
and it was in a sober october situation
so i think i hadn't understood that and
maybe our egos got a little bit off
um i don't know i mean i
i i was having fun but
maybe it was just too complicated life
forms getting to know each other the
first
one was probably
um yeah it made me a little nervous for
the future
but then you know joe and i become
friends although
sometimes we have miscommunications like
on yom kippur
i i texted him and i said joe you know i
i want to apologize
for uh ways i've let you down as a
friend that haven't been there for you
and
appreciate everything you've done for me
alisa like i get this text back
like what the fuck is your problem
you're great dude
i don't know what bad place you're in
but cheer up it's like joe
don't you have any jews in your life to
apologize for
what they've done he was just like dude
have you lost your mind what the hell's
gotten into you
yeah what do you think uh what do you
think about the spotify thing
what about it ask me a question he's now
as opposed to being just a comedian with
the podcast
he now is just a comedian with the
podcast who stepped like
in the middle of the center of cancer
culture
which is like it's i know spotify is in
sweden but they represent
silicon valley they represent the very
kind of
structures they contain and represent
the kind of structures that
threaten to destroy the elons of the
world
and he just like stepped like with his
alex jones and his uh
joey diaz just strolled right into the
middle of it
i think it's awesome i love it but do
you think he'll he's strong enough to
well i don't know i mean i don't even
know the right way to ask this but
is he strong enough to persevere it's a
bit interesting it's like when alliance
decides wow that honey badger looks
tasty i'm gonna swallow it whole
see what happens because i talked to him
offline
he really seems to be willing to give
away the hundred million
which gives him so much power oh
i don't it's a powerful thing to be able
to say
i don't yeah to the honey badger
he just strolls in but he's willing to
walk away from anything in this well
he's going to walk out the other side of
the
the lion i don't think he's going to go
out the way he came in yeah
well you know what it is it's tommy lee
jones entering the bug
this is like a giant alien he just walks
into it he just he gets swallowed by the
bug and he blasts out from the inside
yeah
i i have it as tommy lee jones yeah but
anyway
yeah is that my feeling is that spotify
doesn't understand what they're messing
with
i could be wrong but i'm not no you're
right i'm right
because joe doesn't need anything man i
mean this is the weird thing about it
it's like i'm sure that he loves all his
toys whatever blah blah blah he's a rich
guy
yes he's got fu money he had fu money a
long time ago
and you're not you know
the other thing about it's a bit weird
being friends with a dude like that
it just is because like you call him up
or he'll call you up and he's like i
said
what's going on in your life i don't
know kind of depressed
trying to get some math done what are
you up oh dude i can cheer you up i just
came off of a you know 29 thousand
person stadium
it's like oh cool how'd you do that oh i
don't know i just announced it on
instagram a few days ago and it filled
up
just like oh damn
yeah i mean that thing is so powerful
yeah
so there you go i mean you could be that
too
the instant takes an interest in
politics
and saving the world you might destroy
all that it's going
bye-bye i promise i just disagree with
you
i mean because you have to you have to
do it like you've said this many times
before
i'll bet you yeah i'll bet you uh a
bottle of stoli
that you can get uh if you you get joe
rogan to get highly politically active
and call out the system for all the
bullshit that it is in a very pointed
and determined fashion
uh and he doesn't get destroyed i'll
give you i'll give you the vodka the
vodka yeah
that sounds like a pretty damn good deal
so but this you've said this
i mean there's no living heroes my
friend
no living heroes i just no living heroes
it's it's just difficult you just have
to be good at it i mean if you just say
generic
political things no no you it you're
going to be taken down but the more
heroic
you are the more beautiful you are
the more you will be made to suffer if
they cannot get you on reputation if
jesus himself came down
i don't know if i ever read i probably
never read to you the hit piece i did on
jesus
you don't know about this no i did not
know i did hit pieces on all of the best
people in the world wow
so whoever it was who cured cancer you
know
discovered new particles or whatever it
is i did a hit piece against them to
prove that i can do it to anybody
around anything at any time except eddie
van halen as we were talking about well
eddie van gaal is now dead
but if if this was a uh a situation you
know hot for teacher
cancelled disrespectful absolutely
also you know packaging uh
female objectification for young men
clearly eddie van gaal is one of the
worst people alive
but was the skill
the incredible inspiration that is just
radiating from his music inspires so
many millions that they will fight those
canceled pieces they they will fight
though this is your thing
yeah you have this idea that there's a
war between good and evil and the good
has already been decided
designated the winner it's not true but
your belief in
that it's true until you make it no
i mean you gotta it's motivating both of
us
like i also believe that we're gonna win
because if i don't then i can't get out
of bed and
it's pretty heavy at the moment do you
think 2021
can uh could make us feel good
about the trajectory of society so like
where we emerge from this year
feeling good like there's a smile and
there are quests on his face and the
next time we talk
we'll be doing some kind of duet and
guitar and not having this worried
look on our faces no
okay but you've also promised you're
going to somehow end this in a positive
uh positive so okay so how do you how do
you turn the no around what's the u-turn
from the no
no until we get some actually decent
people
in the right chairs who are not
constantly thinking about their next
paycheck
i don't see a solution let me just say
what the
the prerequisites for a solution are and
to let you know why i don't think it's
coming
first of all both of these political
parties the leadership of them
is disgusting and has to go they're
tearing us apart
they lack the will to be americans they
don't understand the subtlety of the
project
they're simply the people who've figured
out how to inhabit the seats
and that is their great achievement
i believe that in order to solve this
you need people who can integrate who
are not partisan
at the level of the partisan warriors
that we're seeing
people who believe in dividing the pies
of the future rather than the present
pie
as our main task as americans because we
are built around growth i'm sorry to say
it
um you need
an ability to have subtle conversations
and you need the ability to exclude
and and you know at the moment everyone
knows inclusion is good
which it isn't it's like saying well
water is good
if i say water is good everybody will
agree with me it's not
people drown people need to
you know get dehydrated it can be
life-saving or life-ending
it it isn't good or bad inclusion is not
good or bad inclusion is just inclusion
exclusion is part of inclusion
we've taught people that they can reason
through the world
as um sub
you know cocker spaniels they just bark
things at each other
you know i'm for safety i'm for
inclusion i'm for growth
oh really do you guys use verbs
dependent clauses are there compound
complex sentences
where are we in this sea of nonsense
you have to be able to build a place
where you have
smart talented people who represent a
diverse
group of correct opinions you need to
get rid of almost all of the people who
have opinions that are
antithetical to what we're trying to
accomplish
you need to give them insulation which
we're terrified because we don't trust
anybody so everything has to be
transparent if you're going to the
bathroom i want those walls to be
plexiglas so i can see what you're doing
it's like that's too much transparency
we have too much and not enough at the
same time
and then you know in essence um you need
to
ensure that people aren't worried about
feeding their family every four seconds
for being real
none of that is happening and our
billionaires
our billionaires are pathetic what is
the point of billionaires if you're not
going to do
billionaire type cool stuff like saying
fu
and i'm going to throw you know 3
billion dollars at the project
of restoring the national conversation
i don't grasp this what is the point of
creating obscene wealth if we don't have
anyone smart enough
and caring enough to use it so i agree
with that
that last part for sure let me slightly
push back
on the idea that the leaders themselves
are broken
i feel like this goes to the
joe rogan uh joe biden and trump
having a debate on that program i feel
like
joe biden has a lot of really
interesting ideas
that he's almost forgot how to
communicate he's been fake for so long
within the system hillary was fake for
too long i'm sure she had real ideas at
the beginning that she still was
campaigning on decades later
but like if the system if the platforms
empowered you to search to be honest to
be real to search for those ideas within
yourself
like long-form conversations do then
we even the donald trump and joe biden
leaders we have now
would would take this country to a
better place
that that would unite people so like we
can keep the current
congress we just need to create better
platforms this might this is
going to the intuition that there's good
in donald trump
there's there is depth and competition
there is good intelligence there is and
the same with joe biden
does good and joe biden and it's just
we're not incentivizing
i mean there's several things i think
are broken one of them is twitter
the other is journalism just it's just
the platforms of us communicating with
each other
one of the reasons that i try to come up
with unifying explanations
is that you know if you look at the
number of wildfires in california
let's say that we've just seen if you
treat them all as spontaneous
uncorrelated uh instances it feels like
oh my god it's just
whack-a-mole every time i send a fire
truck here there's a fire over there
so you want to come up with something
like a central
theory which is why do i suddenly have a
problem when i hadn't had a problem
before so i look for these unifying
explanations and i found one the other
day that really speaks to me
um i mean people are very frustrated
because they've been trained to think
about this
incorrectly in my opinion but here's the
graph
that you need to look at on the x-axis
is uh time by year
and on the y-axis is something like
average age
of a human the title of the graph is any
desirable situation involving
institutions
so that could be ceo it could be tenured
professor
it could be who's getting grants
it could be the age at which people win
nobel prizes
university presidents all these things
go up
in other words for a long period of time
the average age
of the person in a desirable situation
has been increasing
something like 9 months for every 12.
those graphs have to go down at some
point the specter of
willingly put of having five people all
born in the 1940s as the final
uh entrance in the presidential context
that makes no sense think about how
bizarre
a thing that nobody's even really
talking about the last
five people were all ancient
by presidential standards not one not
two but
five we are talking about a contest
between
somebody who is the oldest of the baby
boomers
the very beginning of the baby boom
summer of 46th birthday
fighting somebody who is in the silent
generation
the silent generation guy in a town hall
in florida
gets this question from a gen z guy
saying you know
what what's going on with my future joe
biden has the um
audacity to say i'm a transitional
president
you guys the highly educated one when
has any generation in history needed a
transitional
78 year old person to take office it's
bizarre
it's preposterous that graph is the
graph we can't talk about
that graph is the graph of our
destruction
because it has the you can make a
one-line argument which is
sounds like ageism which isn't a very
good argument
no but what it does is is it it muddles
the conversation
and you always have to ask yourself the
question if this conversation becomes
muddled who wins as a result of the
muddling
well it's a battle but so we let's just
win it let's win the battle
you give are you running for sure
i'll run i was born in russia can't run
so uh
but we russians can hack elections so
we'll figure it out
uh this is me officially announcing my
run i was born in st
petersburg florida
yeah lex what is it that you really want
to ask i think
i want to put some responsibility on the
portal the portal
the portal that the portal gives
power to the people in that graph
like because you you put it quite
brilliantly that
the people that moved the world their
age has been going up
and not moved the world but put in the
position where they get the chance
to affect the world the
these new platforms i think twitter
falls in
in them give power to the younger people
it doesn't have to be about asia
necessarily but the younger thinking
people
so that's a promising thing and you
are like you're like gandalf you get to
you get to pick your frodos
or whatever i'm not very good with the
the analogy but the whole point is for
us gandalf i don't know that i make that
much sense
gandalf makes sense i don't know if
people
know how to fit me into this ecosystem
i think there's something in my
presentation that people find very
confusing oh figure it out i'm not i
disagree with you but you need to look
at the mirror and think like what
what is it is it um maybe you need a
mustache
i don't know but there's something about
figuring out um how to be a charismatic
communicator in this and that that's the
responsibility you said like
finishing sentences with the lol is
painful for your soul
yeah that's just how somebody lets me
know i don't have to take their opinion
seriously
yeah it's still the language the the way
that people are communicating and you're
swimming that way if you have a big
platform
i'm i have a growing platform it feels
like this is the place to give
i agree i agree but we're gonna get
swatted now i just don't think so
you're wrong why are you afraid of the
big like this is i've studied it
because i've studied let me ask you a
question lex
i believe that every society is supposed
to have a collection
of what i call break glass in case of
emergency people
yeah these are people who are
universally loved and trusted by your
society for example david attenborough
the great british naturalist and
presenter
uh recently came on instagram he's
worried about the planet
and i said you know look there are very
few of these people left
let's pay attention find out what he has
to say maybe maybe he's going to be an
ass maybe he's going to be in it maybe
he's going to say wrong things don't
know
tell me about your top 10 universal
american heroes
this is not a rhetorical question no
give me five but everybody looks to that
person and says yep
the best of us
well everybody's an interesting concept
i mean
elon musk is very divisive right but
i'm talking about overwhelmingly people
would would follow that person
if that person gave a rousing
intelligent
speech that said we we must act now
because we're in
in dire straits i think a lot of people
fall in that category for me
it would be uh in the in the tech world
in the engineering world elon musk
elon musk
the rock i'm thinking like who is the
most eloquent actor so like you think
celebrities so people with platforms
don't say celebrities
nobody well known i believe like
platform yeah so
this goes to joe rogan
first two did not really impress me as
being what i said but okay
elon several years ago would have can
you can you try to
joe rogan why do they fail why why does
why is
lots of people treat joe rogan as if
he's some sort of right-wing racist
because
they've never watched his program they
don't know who his friends i don't know
oh but when i thought you said everybody
i thought you meant
a large enough people where huge change
can happen
not actually literally everybody because
i mean people who've pulled up
like people who've pulled off something
where everybody's convinced that that
person just
deeply
i think i've told you the story before
but
the one time i've seen the power of a
figure
like this i mean very few times i've
been in a large crowd and i've seen
people just
moved where they would do almost
anything good bad and different because
they were primed um
one was a rolling stones concert the
other one was nelson mandela
coming to boston and man
you've never seen anything like this you
check out the photos from the banks of
the charles river
when nelson mandela came um
there are people that you need in your
dark hours and we can't agree on who
they are and as soon as they emerge we
tar them with shit we get out the shit
brunch
yeah i just disagree with you so i think
what do we disagree about it okay
i think it doesn't matter who it is i
think really good speeches are needed
and right i think i'm going to give them
i saw killer mike try to give a good
speech yeah he did
well in atlanta right yeah that was
something
very impressed yeah even keller mike
immediately gets into this
sell out like
uh yeah but he he he didn't take up the
responsibility
i would say he didn't of of
going bigger so he was speaking to the
community
and he was doing what he did on this
particular moment he's exceptional at it
and he was speaking to this particular
moment he didn't take it a step
far farther which is
like giving the same speech but bigger
than race
bigger than this particular moment but
more about
the the american project you know the
guy who landed the plane in the hudson
yes yeah there you go that's a good
example sorry that guy
until we screw him up
is the kind of thing that i'm talking
about yeah exactly okay i mean jocko
maybe
that's another jocko is pretty good
jaco is pretty good can't really tell is
he a democrat is a republican i don't
know
he's an american that's for damn sure
yeah and i think there's a lot of fun
and then you know no i think jocko there
aren't that's one of the reasons why
chocolate is so special
yeah your podcast the portal
is something in my little universe is
something
a lot of people really love and it moves
them
they draw a lot of meaning from it and
also especially in difficult times
and they it gives them a comfort of
through like this kind of uh it's not
just nuance it's there's like
even when you're talking about chaos
there's love underneath all of it
and i think people draw a lot of meaning
from it which is why
they are wondering why
you haven't been doing that many
podcasts or you haven't done it in
maybe a month and a half or two months
in this most difficult of times is there
is there a good reason
yeah there are lots of good reasons
so the first one is kind of weird which
is everybody assumes that everyone wants
to be famous
and if you say i don't want to be famous
it's like oh you're just saying that
because you want to be
every everyone to think you're famous
you're not that famous you know okay
i don't love being as well known
as i've become
there's lots of things that are fun
about it it's wonderful that you can go
to i can go to any city in the world
there are portal listeners there
uh all i need to do is put out a tweet
and 20 people show up for a drink
and they're amazing people and they're
almost i mean you can see my live
q and a's on my instagram page if you go
to eric r weinstein i just picked
somebody randomly and
i was really worried about it at first
and
you know maybe i should be worried about
it but in general people all over the
world are just so positive and so
you know and thoughtful and thoughtful
people
have a story because they're
self-selected right yeah
but i don't like the fame the thing we
just described comes with the fame
it's a beautiful thing you don't you're
worried that it's getting it's it's
ephemeral it'll
look lex it'll turn on you in a
heartbeat
yeah it'll turn on you in a heartbeat
and
the other problem is i don't i don't
like my audience being my audience
i want to get closer to them i want to
talk to them i want to find out what is
this doing in your life
my house fills up with art that people
send me
the lightest thing is an effects pedal
called something like
i don't know it's a bowtie overdrive
from a guy in mexico
right yeah you play lefty by the way and
then a tiny little
tangent did you play election i have a
stratocaster okay but it doesn't have a
strap and i don't know what to do with
it and i have a bad amp
so you should you should you should hook
me up with uh
we'll find it at home maybe okay you're
starting to sense that this is too much
no i want to be i want to be here i want
to do the work
very simply
i don't have an ability to fully explain
myself i don't want to claim that i
don't love
the fact that how much love do we get
from these programs like i
generically people are incredibly
generous
um you know people have begged me set up
a patreon account
and i haven't been able to do it i
should do it
i've said to everybody it's a business
it's the business it's a business
yeah but like they're so used to being
defrauded when somebody starts thinking
about monetary incentives
my goal was to say i'm going to keep
talking to you about you you wonder why
i started doing ads on my show
was because i wanted people to think
from the get-go
this is a business this is what i sound
like when i'm selling
but you know like you see i've lost
weight
a lot of that is due to athletic greens
athletic greens you know
um code uh
what's the i don't know what my promo
code is for athletic green well
probably athleticgreens.com portal but
doesn't portal
but you know fitbit who doesn't
advertise has also been
instrumental as well as a guy named
steven cates who
you know was a fan from the show found
me on the street and just said i'm a
trainer i want to help train you it's
got me on a
on a good pro a good path so you know
that's
one paid advertiser and two people i'm
calling out just because there are you
know two two outfits stephen cates and
fitbit
that have changed my life i wanted
people to say you know you don't have to
be afraid of advertising if i do it
in this way this is powering your show
but the whole issue of money is weird
because people have these crazy feelings
like oh wow
i knew he was a shill he's a grifter you
know okay
i didn't love that i didn't love the
issues so i didn't set up a patreon
the security issues for talking and
being me
are significant and
i don't have the kind of money to hire
around the clock
i mean i i desperately want to get to a
level of wealth where i don't have to
think about
money i don't think it's you know some
people want
money because they they need it for
status i think i can handle status
if i want it doing this i don't want the
status
necessarily and i don't want i i'd want
the status but i don't want the fame
that goes with it
i want the money i don't want to be seen
as this is about money because it's
about a substance
yeah and try you know all of those
things that's part of
i haven't solved these issues i i've
been feeling bad because people say
where's the portal
we're desperate these are difficult
times we have an election coming up and
it's just like
do you think for a moment that i want to
explain that i actually got really
uncomfortable being as well known as i
was and then what is it that i want
because i want to be
better known and less well-known at the
same time it doesn't there's nothing the
audience can do i don't want the
audience to be the audience that doesn't
make sense to people
i want it to be a business but i don't
think people need to fear a business if
the business is open about being a
business
that and then that's all to the side
what you're seeing now
in front of the election is an
incredibly
meta-violent period in our online
existence
and i believe that anybody who attempts
to say these two parties are completely
screwed
at the moment the leadership of these
parties is unsalvageable
unworkable everyone hears that from
inside the two-party system oh i get it
he's trying to subtract votes off of
biden oh i get it he's trying to scuttle
trump
oh i get it this is a play for his show
because he's trying to
plug in to discuss there's a bill hicks
routine
on marketing have you ever seen this
it's brilliant i recommend it to
everyone
where he comes out on stage and he says
are there any
people in marketing and sales in the
audience yeah it's like
okay great can you do us all a favor and
die
and like everybody laughs he's like no
i'm not laughing i'm seeing being
serious so he talks about how marketing
is horrible
so you're like where is this act going
then it gets to the point of it like oh
i know how you marketing people think
bill's going after that uh resentment
dollar that's good dollar
let's get that resentment anti-marketing
dollar yeah it's like no that's not what
i'm saying i really hate marketers
oh that's good it's the authenticity
dollar
you can't escape this kind of negative
marketing
thought and i guess that gets to the
issue that
i don't want to be destroyed in advance
of this election
i don't think it's a good use of my
relationship to my audience
to be broadcasting how completely
ridiculous donald trump
and joe biden are as candidates for the
president of the united states full stop
none of this makes any sense these
moderators of these pseudo debates
were in the wrong format with the wrong
people
no part of this makes a wit of sense
can i try to push back several claims
one is
i don't believe the systems as they
stand now can destroy
the eric weinstein voice the voice you
you're a child i'm sorry to say that
but well let me well it's also possible
it's entirely impossible okay that
you're the child
okay because a child would say you would
call other people a child yeah get in
the first blow
i think reveal the tell i
because the only power they have is to
attack you psychologically no
well i believe that the army of
people that love you yeah is much more
powerful
than uh mainstream media then
people that you might hear it say
ridiculous things that you just said
which is
try to reduce you like the marketing
yeah
thinking i just believe there's an army
maybe there's a better term of people
that
see you for who you are and the hungry
like i'm not disputing those things and
what i'm saying
i would venture to say as your therapist
that you're actually uh
the battle is all in your mind that
you have found these demons in the
system
and they're just a tiny minority and
it's all in your mind they cannot
actually
remove they're not strong enough to
remove the voice
of eric einstein to silence the voice i
love this
this is some of the best fiction writing
i've ever heard
let me tell you i have relatives who've
known me my entire life
yeah where one article in the new york
times they will believe that over me
my contention is that only that has no
power
except to affect your psychology you
know what you have to do is the rogan
thing which is loud hearing me
just laugh i am laughing i know but more
i'm tell no i'm telling you something
yes okay
the way this works is through ruin
ruin can come to anyone there is no one
who cannot be ruined
every single person is signed up
right now to be ruined by the system but
don't you understand
that you have more power than the system
the ruling
you can ruin the system your twitter
account
the podcast that's right i'm telling you
about the army
i agree that my twitter account my
pocket but what we've seen for example
you saw what happened to brett's
articles of unity project
yes okay what happened the you know from
on the twitter side
on the twitter side what happened
what happened well actually say the word
answer say the word it was uh blocked or
removed from twitter suspends
account suspended
yeah okay so i'm talking to the ceo
who i am crazy enough to still believe
in
good i do too i believe it somehow
there's a very strange thing going on
with jack dorsey
i cannot possibly reconcile the actions
but the person i've that that is a next
level mind in there
i'm not i don't know it well enough to
say that it's all next level i'm not
claiming he doesn't have any blind spots
every smart person i know has blind
spots i don't know what he's up against
blah blah blah
there's no way that the jack dorsey that
i've talked to
and the jack dorsey that interacted over
articles of unity can be the same person
he is constrained by that company in
some way that doesn't make sense to me
either that or he's the most implicitous
person on earth and i'm not believing it
i just don't buy it
okay yeah something horrible is
happening
i my claim is i i can remove you
functionally from the chess board in a
tiny number of moves no matter who you
are no matter how virtuous or how much
of a bastard you've been your entire
life
it doesn't take more than three or four
moves to basically neuter you as a force
yeah and i disagree that if that's
possible that means i'm not very good at
chess
like unity 2020 was removed from twitter
because it's not good enough
not within the system like the army
of people that feel the brilliance of
the idea was too small
okay but fear uncertainty and doubt is
the name of the game the
point of the realm psychology though
it's not real power
it just affects the mind okay i have a
reading assignment for you
because you're russian you'll really
enjoy this
as part of the great american tobacco
settlement the tobacco institute had to
disgorge
its archives of all of its strategies
all of its
skullduggery and put it on the web for
all time
so that we could all understand how the
tobacco companies got together
and destroyed people right you see
tobacco destroys people you can see you
know scientology destroys people
there are various vindictive
organizations that will not tolerate
um reality and opposition to them
let's take them down okay that's what
i'm trying to tell you is okay no
so so why aren't you doing the podcast
to return because that's
one of the weapons because of war
well first of all if you're at war and i
don't want to discuss strategy
on a podcast right
but that's you you're missing what did
montgomery say about rommel
but wasn't his line that i read your
book you beautiful bastard
it's like why are using the tactics that
you already explained
okay so one of the things i'm doing is
i'm not having a strategic conversation
with you and 100
yeah several hundred thousand of our
closest friends
i pulled back
because this is not the battle
that i know what i'm doing i i do not
feel passionately enough about defeating
donald trump to elect
joe biden even if that's the way i'm
going to ultimately
vote right
i don't believe in the biden democratic
party i don't believe in the trump
republican party
so yes it's an incredibly consequential
election but
to me it's like the the crips and the
bloods and the latin kings
fighting over the right to extort you
know
a business and the business trying to
figure out who it wants to
to do the extorting but don't you think
listen there's very few people that are
as good with the english language as you
do don't you think it's possible to draw
a line
that doesn't that betw in between that
finds
how we find our common humanity
that ensures a better 2021
without having to say like donald trump
is evil
or joe biden is incompetent or any of
that just
somehow driving a beautiful scene so
much pain
this election is chewing up the
integrity of
everyone who comments on it lex
maybe they're not good enough they're
not good enough no i
but that but okay the hope is do you
believe in me
yes you do yes listen to me very
carefully
my spider senses my intuition
that has allowed me to survive in the
space i've been mouthing off since the
80s
tells me this is a super dangerous time
for smart people to be spending the dry
powder
because the election doesn't make sense
it doesn't mean that i don't have a
sense that one outcome would be better
than the other probably but the variance
on that i'm not even positive that i'm
right
these two options are so completely
inappropriate to the world of 2020
what we need is so diametrically opposed
to more boomers
and more silent generation people trying
to sort out a highly technical
world being my mediated through social
media
we need more exclusion we need more
actual elites the people we've called
the elites are not the elite they need
to go
yeah we need excellence competence we
need people who can be trusted behind
closed doors and we need to close the
doors so we can't see what those people
are doing
here's the thing imagine that you had a
bunch of people who'd all
seen action in combat had all
volunteered to be part of the armed
services had all come
from backgrounds where they didn't need
to so you were convinced that these
people had put their lives
on their line for their country not for
a payday
imagine you had 10 of these people with
technical backgrounds
men women black white muslim jew doesn't
matter right
i would trust those people and i close
the door
i don't want to know what they talked
about i don't want
transparency into all of their
negotiations i want to know that they're
patriotic that they have they see
something in the world bigger than
themselves and their family fortunes
i want to know that they're courageous i
want to know that they've got
all of our well-being and i'm willing to
roll the dice and if they screw us over
i'd rather go down like that
okay so i disagree with you there
because there's a difference between
those
and jocko because
because you're not speaking to people
with credentials of no
talking about self-credentialed people
self-financing i view jaco as
self-credential but
the biggest the powerful thing about
jacob is he's not only self-credential
but he's
been real with people the the magical
thing about jocko
is in his book isn't his life story is
he's been
talking on a podcast for a long there's
something real that happens
okay so if you took everybody if you
took dan crenshaw
yeah and tulsi gabbard and you took
jocko willing
and maybe jessie ventura right
uh you can take i see where you're going
with this what you can take bernie
sanders yeah who's you know a lone voice
you take all of these people who've like
really just
risked like why do we trust why is
catherine hepburn the best that
hollywood ever produced
because she told hollywood to go fuck
itself
hard they gave her four academy awards
and she said love you sweeties i'm gonna
use them as the doorstops for the
bathrooms in my house
see that skill that's uh that's that's
just that's what you were talking about
yeah
be katherine hepburn audrey hepburn is
pretty amazing but katherine hepburn is
next level
right well you i mean that's what you're
trying to say to me yeah
okay i'm trying to figure it out lex
okay i don't have the answer yet
what i do know is that this election is
chewing people up
and i mean two separate things one that
parties don't have enough integrity
that if you comment either for or
against
there's a short sequence where you make
a comment that's nuanced
you get referenced to something right
like you know take this thing about you
know find people on both sides
that is non-resolved after n years
whether the context should be reported
or not
we are in some situation in which
democrats and republicans are primed to
fight each other
the way introducing two ants from two
different ant colonies always produces a
battle
yeah okay i don't want to be
in that fray because those people are
going to kill each other
mindlessly like robots and until the
election is concluded
like i do i think this is dire yes could
it be make or break absolutely i'm not
saying
that do i know which way this goes i can
make an excellent argument that we need
to
elect joe biden right now that we've got
a situation which can only be cured by
voting for joe biden
i can make another argument that we
could have a situation that can only
be cured by defeating joe biden right
now
and all of the things that the modern
democratic party represents
yeah i don't have
you know it's not the lady and the tiger
we're choosing between the tiger and the
tiger it's the sumatran tiger versus the
siberian tiger
right i'm trying to think well which
tiger can i do i have a better chance
against
um the key problem for us politically is
that we have to divorce the concept of
the center
in moderation from kleptocracy
every time we try to say something like
we need more moderate solutions we need
more pluralistic solutions
people will say wow you just want to
hand us right back into the swamp don't
you
the swamp people because the moderates
and the swamp people are the same people
all right so then we have these two
crazy wings we can't have crazy right
wing people
i don't want any tiki torch bs we can't
have crazy left wing
don't attack my courthouse really don't
attack my courthouse
and we can't have moderates it's like
okay how do we install our children and
rape pillage and get these speaking fees
when we're out of office and become
you know cozy with the things when we're
supposed to be regulating them and then
you know become their
lobbyists you know immediately when we
leave office
all of this stuff we need an entirely
different system and
i can't talk about that at the moment
when i talk
people say oh wow so you're going to sit
this one out because you're a pussy
because you're a coward
great to know eric we thought better if
you buy click yeah
i don't know what to do so but are you
thinking of what to do
yeah oh you you better believe it
look bret brett had this idea of unity
2020 and i told him it was a wrong idea
yeah i didn't tell him that unity 2024
was a wrong idea i didn't tell him that
unity 2028 is the wrong idea
and if i were to make the case that he
was right and i was wrong because he's
now shuddered the thing right
i would say that the case to be made
that he was correct was
is that by doing this in 2020 we found
out what we were up against it's good to
know that twitter can turn this off at
the drop of a hat
yeah great to know it's good to know as
we learned
that you cannot have
meetings of of of presidential
candidates in a primary
that are not approved of by the party
right like they've got this thing
figured out so we don't have any way
in and now unity 2024
makes sense because unity 2020 was tried
okay i don't know that we get to to 2024
under all circumstances in some we do
and some we don't
but there's there's a game theoretic
thing that i'm not sure you're
accounting for but you probably are but
let me just make an argument
is jack dorsey very likely listens to
your podcast
and what this is the power of these
words
something deep went wrong
but we can change it with the power of
words
something went wrong at twitter they
have so much division on their platform
that's what i'm trying to say they've
gotten
it's not wrong they just don't know
they're understaffed they have no
they have an insoluble problem difficult
to solve
they have an insoluble problem the
argument i disagree because
well all right i would like to create a
competitor no so then you know give it
to me
yeah wait create the competitor show me
you actually
understood this because my guess is is
that most of the things that you'll
think about
i mean i can tell you things i've talked
to jack about which i know would make
twitter much better
however i i think that this problem of
instantaneous communication across the
planet
and you subtract off all sorts of
context and mutual self-knowledge
the problem is us it's not the platforms
you're thinking about a technological
solution and i'm saying
the problem is is that we are ultimately
the product
and i just disagree with that and
there's a lot of let's probably could
save that for tomorrow i look forward
to uh spending summers in your villa uh
when you when you debut this product and
i would love to angel invest in it
by the way in terms of money i'll never
have a villa
yeah no i will always give away
everything i own
don't do that no sorry uh invest into
like things you like you mentioned
awesome things invest fine but
a little bit of evoncular advice
don't pledge to be the person who
disgorges themselves
of security money is freedom
that's what it is it's a big honking
pile of freedom
okay you can choose to use it as the
freedom to imprison you
if you don't you know so you can use it
as freedom to make yourself a prisoner
of your money
but generally speaking lex money is
freedom
and your voice is important at least
retain the amount of money
security you need to follow joe's advice
what is the point of fu money if you
don't say
fu the number of people who have fu
money who don't say fu
indicates the number of people who chose
the freedom of their wealth
to create a prison they built a prison
with the freedom they had
and they walked into it locked the door
i think
it's too difficult not to create the
reason i want to give away the money is
because i just know my own psychology
and you create prisons
our human mind just creates those
prisons the f.u money
is enough for
basic shelter and basic food that's
that's the
optimal if you don't have kids yet this
is a okay this is the problem
this is why i'm so this is me single lex
speaking great but future future lex
i'm talking to future licks single
single present lex
please don't listen yeah don't be an ass
you're going to need some money and
don't make these pledges to say
on a podcast i'm i'm say i want to save
you from yourself
you need money to do many of the
beautiful things that we're counting on
you to do
don't f it up
can i talk to you about roger penrose
sure you've talked to roger
on the portal but also in between the
lines and offline just
everything you've said about roger
penrose for people who don't know he
just recently a few days ago won the uh
2020 share the 2020 uh
nobel prize for physics but
it's clear to me that he had like a deep
personal
impact on you a connection with you uh
in terms of both your love of
mathematics just the way you see the
world
like the this is the eddie van halen
conversation this is clearly somebody
who's profound in your worldview
can you talk about roger can you talk
about what it means
that he won this highest of prizes just
in general let's celebrate the man
yeah okay so first of all there are two
other people who won this prize
i'm sorry i just didn't happen to know
who they were before they won
um roger is a
very it is not roger in particular
but the class from which roger comes
that is so
important so i would put roger in the
class
of feynman einstein dirac
yang um
you put whitten in there i know
i mean witten's a special case but
whidden is weirdly the reverse of the
roger penrose story right because
whitten is the first
physicist to win a mathematical fields
medal the highest honor in mathematics
penrose is in some sense a mathematician
who's now won the nobel prize
so it's a perfect sort of a couplet yeah
um roger's class
means everything to me that's the
highest achievement of the human
mind i'd probably throw bach in with
feynman and dirac in company right um
i think that he was so inventive
it was very frustrating to watch this
career it's a little bit frustrating to
watch
feynman's career feynman
was so good
and had he been born slightly different
at a slightly different time
i believe his claim on physics
would be far greater
i feel like penrose in some sense came
up a very difficult path
because you see einstein effectively
solved most of the most important
problems in general relativity right at
the beginning
as a result the children of einstein are
impoverished because there wasn't as
much to pick off of the trees
and sell at the market whereas bohr
didn't
and plonk didn't do nearly as good of a
job with quantum theory so there's lots
to do in quantum theory
i think that roger affected me
personally
by a diagram that i saw in a paper
of hermann gluck at the university of
pennsylvania
it was the first picture i'd ever seen
of the hop vibrations sketched
and that you know weirdly i brought that
to the rogan program
in order to sort of convey the wonder it
was recapitulating my own journey
i think i probably saw that at like age
16 or something it just flipped
my mind roger is incredibly visual
he's incredibly geometric he's
incredibly
suey generous he just does his own thing
he's got lots of bets none of them had
really
come through the way you would hope
and i think they stretched the rules to
be blunt about it
uh to give them the prize yeah i do you
you said this thing on twitter which is
beautiful
that every once in a while comes a human
being that
gives uh value to the prize versus the
prize giving value to the human
two different kinds of prizes the reason
that we care about the nobel prize
isn't because of alfred nobel it's
because it came along at the right time
to reward um
einstein derock schrodinger
feynman most of the most of the people
who should have won
one most of the awards
are not good in the sense that they
don't really follow
the prize is used to rewrite history
that's its problem
so it's you should have a love-hate
relationship with it because on the one
hand it does
focus the world on what really matters
and on the other hand it distorts what
really matters and both of those
functions
take place simultaneously in this case i
think that they violated their own rules
slightly
so it wasn't really clearly a case of a
prediction and a discovery in the
typical fashion
but they like we better give this award
to somebody of that highest caliber
to make sure that the prize is fully
funded with prestige going forward
that's that's sort of my weird
speculative guess as to what happened
and so roger's getting on in years and
the person should be alive
so they i think they meant the rules and
i think they couldn't have bent it for a
better person and i hope they will not
bend the rules
out of weakness but out of strength in
future
it would be great to get madame wu
and emmy nerder a posthumous prize along
with doug
prasher george sudarshan
uh and george zweig as well as ernst
stokelberg
nobel prizes there have been some
terrible omissions
on the first two being females who
revolutionized our view of the world
and i take a very dim view of people
pushing for prizes for people from
ethnic groups or genders or whatever
in order to make it plural and inclusive
if it's not following the work
and i feel very clear that in a few
cases we know there was a real problem
with the nobel committee because
we have stunning accomplishments you
know try to get through a day as a
physicist without
nerder's theorem and try to imagine the
universe without madame wu's discovery
that left and right don't appear to be
symmetric
i mean these are terrible emissions and
they're a huge blot
on science for not being more
inclusive when it matters yeah so just
like you said the nobel prize is
plagued by omissions as much as and
distortions and dilutions for example
derock and schrodinger were i believe
given the
prize in the same year there's no reason
that those two people needed to dilute
each other
the same thing with you know dyson was
an omission
tomonaga probably got included in part
because
we had an opportunity to show that
something had happened on both sides of
the pacific after the war
but i don't think we needed to dilute
weinberg
or feynman or schwinger it just makes me
it makes me somewhat sick all of these
people are such
important giants and it has to do with
the field i think
not wanting to create luminaries and
superstars who could have defended the
field from budget cuts
and worldly pressures i think it's
really important
that we have absolute superstars because
we produce superstars
we acknowledge them we don't dilute them
and that we bend the rules to make sure
that the prize stays funded with the
prestige
that comes from giving it to the roger
penrose's
albert einsteins and paul derocks of the
world
can we talk a little bit about evil
sure i haven't actually talked to you
about this topic
and it's been sitting on my mind
mostly because everybody at mit is quiet
about it
which is jeffrey epstein
i didn't get a chance to experience what
mit was like at the time when jeffrey
epstein was part of this
but it's i'd love to try to understand
how evil was allowed to flourish
in in the place that i love
whether you think
maybe let me ask the question this way
was it the man
evil or was the system evil
or is evil too strong a word
because what i see is the presence
of of this particular human being
in the eyes of many destroyed
the reputations of many really strong
scientists and also
weaken the ability
like weaken the institution of mit
by making everybody quiet
like almost making them unable to say
anything interesting or difficult
yeah and what what is that
and what am i supposed to uh
we don't know why is everyone quiet
about jeffrey we
don't agree no we don't know obviously i
want to scream about it too
right and i probably have said too much
about jeffrey epstein
look something horrible happened i don't
know what it is
but something horrible happened and
you know at the one thing that okay
let's just do this the first thing i
need to do is i need to get rid of this
woke
crap about power differentials
okay in general
can talk about hypergamy and power
differentials
are russell conjugates of the same
concept
just the way particular proportions and
symmetries
are mathematically provable to be
attractive
in females to males
male attractiveness is largely
determined by
male competence and ability to amass
power and success and all these sorts of
things
the relationship between consenting
adults
is quite frankly not something i want to
sort out
the relationship between the sexuality
of adults
and miners and particularly
you know there's the the the
17 18 issue
that's very different than 12 13.
um we're talking about really sick
depravity
with respect to what it appears that
jeffrey epstein was involved in
at some level i believe this story is
super complicated
in part because i think one thing
jeffrey epstein was doing
was providing money encouragement
and support to scientists another thing
he was doing i believe was giving tax
advice
to very rich people i believe another
thing he was doing
was hooking
very wealthy people up with young adult
females
another thing he was doing i think was
doing stuff
with children that will curl your toes
so between so there's an entire spectrum
of different stuff
and at the moment nobody can pull apart
or deconflate
anything because the woke thing comes
over it
and says you know i think it's
disgusting
that you know a 43 year old billionaire
would be partying with a 23 year old
right
yeah okay yeah i don't want to
adjudicate that i'm worried about 12 and
14 year olds that we're not talking
about but i mostly
i don't think mit was deep into
pedophilia
my guess is that that did not happen i
don't think that the scientists
were the targets of the really sick
depraved stuff
it's my guess my my guess is that what
you're looking at was a government
construct
it may have been our government it may
have been a joint government project
maybe
somebody else's government i don't know
i believe that in part
we don't really understand robert
maxwell sorry who's robert maxwell
galen gillian as well's father was very
active in scientific publishing
i don't know where peer review came from
i would love to run down the
relationship between peer review and
robert maxwell i would love to run down
the
missing fortune of robert maxwell and
the
mysterious fortune of jeffrey epstein
because i don't think jeffrey epstein
ever ran a hedge fund
i don't think he was a money advisor the
way people claimed
so there's two things i want to talk
about so one is
the shallow conversations of
woke identity politics that you're
referring to seems to be
removing everyone's ability no everyone
willing
one of the things to talk about like
what the hell is this person
and how is he allowed more most
importantly
to how do we prevent it in the future
and from the individual perspective the
question for me
it's the same question i asked about
1930s nazi germany i've been reading way
too much probably
or not enough about that period
currently is if i was
in germany at that time what is the
heroic action to take
when i think about mit with jeffrey
epstein what is the heroic action to
take we're not talking about virtue
signaling i wouldn't know what to do
i would like to know what you're up
against lex you're not hearing me
the problem here is what was jeffrey
epstein
well that question might be the heroic
action to take
that's what i'm trying to say i'm just
trying to get my first question you have
to map the silence with jeffrey epstein
what you're describing is a map of the
silence
at mit yeah well
is there a map of the silence in
washington state around jeffrey epstein
the bay area new york city the amount of
silence around jeffrey epstein should be
telling you everything
the number of dogs that don't bark is
like nothing we've ever seen
you're exactly correct but i want to
know what is it telling us
because what it's telling me is not some
kind of conspiracy
but more a disappointing
weakness not some kind of conspiracy or
might it's not some kind of conspiracy
but you've got to be kidding
me no you're so you're so afraid of
saying the word conspiracy that you
don't think it's a conspiracy
i personally i just think it's people
who i thought were my heroes just being
weak
no be of good cheer sir
a cheer be of good cheer of good cheer
yeah you think that there's a conspiracy
i think there is a conspiracy
a very impressive one that's the scale
of it
i tend to believe that large scale
can only be an emergent phenomena really
i find this so fascinating yeah because
i always see you as like a
logic logic and love drive your drive
your soul
you're very logical you're relentless
you got a lot of love in your heart
i believe that if you would review the
video where is it from dubai or abu
dhabi
of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest
you ever seen this thing yeah oh what
happened it's the assassination
in 2010 10 years ago of mahmoud
al-mabu something like that in dubai
where i believe 26
separate individuals on multiple teams
are shown converging
coming in from all over the world on
false passports
pretending to be tennis players or you
know business people or vacationers
and all of these teams have different
functions
and they murder this guy in his in his
hotel room
and the dubai i guess chief of police
security officer was so
angered that he put together this
amazing video that says
we can completely detail what you did we
caught you on closed circuit tv
we don't know exactly who you are
because your disguises and your false
passports
but yeah 26 people converged to kill one
no i don't believe you i don't believe
after cointelpro
an operation paperclip and
operation mockingbird
i don't know whether i should even bring
up rex 84
to not believe in conspiracies is an
idiocy
so you you have a sense that uh
evil can be as competent or more
competent first of all when evil wants
to operate at scale
it needs to make sure that people don't
try to figure out evil
when evil operates at scale yes from
first principles you have to realize
that evil
must not want it investigated that's
correct
the most efficient way
to keep yourself from being investigated
if you are a an evil institutional
player needs to do this repeatedly
is to invest in a world in which no one
can afford
to say the word conspiracy you will
notice that there is a special
radioactivity around the word conspiracy
we have provable conspiracies we have
admitted to conspiracies you have been
invited to conspiracies there is no
shortage conspiracies are everywhere
some of them are mundane some of them
are like price fixing cartels
you know or trade groups are generally
speaking conspiracies
so the first thing you have to realize
is that all of us
are under a in a memetic
complex where you can be taken off the
chess board by saying conspiracy
theorists
get done it's a one it's like a one-line
proof we don't have to listen to lex
he said he was a conspiracy theorist on
this show okay
that is partially distorting our
conversation if you want to ask me about
jeffrey epstein you have to agree with
me
that that is a logical description of
what you would have to have if you
wanted to commit conspiracies is that
you have to make sure that people are
dissuaded from investigating
yes okay but it's a very it's a
fascinatingly difficult
idea then because the world with
conspiracy theories in the world without
conspiracy theories
to the to the shallow glance looks the
same well
my point there is responsible conspiracy
theorizing where you look at the history
of
unearthed conspiracies and just like you
would with any other
topic just think about how different the
rules in your mind are
for conspiracy theorizing versus x
theorizing where x can be anything
right it's like if i say to you um i can
say the statement
that average weight is not the same
between widely separated populations
you'd say yeah i'd say average height is
not the same between widely separated
populations
you'd say yeah then i say in fact no
continuous variable
that has that shows variation should be
expected to be identical between widely
separated of course eric
like iq whoa whoa whoa hold on
right so we have a violent reaction to
specific topics
so the first thing i want to do is just
to notice
that conspiracy has that built into
everyone's mind
that's really important to state yeah
that's it's very interesting
at that and as a prerequisite as you're
saying that would be the first step if
you wanted to uh
pull off a conspiracy in a competent way
that's he would have to first convince
the world i just watched the film 1971
about my favorite conspiracy of all time
i highly recommend it
1971. well the film is entitled 1971
and it's about the citizens committee to
investigate the fbi
which was run by a student of murray
gelman
a physicist and broke into fbi offices
in pennsylvania
to steal files which allowed freedom of
information requests that discovered
a huge conspiracy it was a conspiracy
that unearthed
a conspiracy inside the federal
government a double conspiracy story
which launched multiple conspiracies i
think that the problem with modern
americans
is that they are so timid that they
don't even learn about the history of
conspiracies that we have
absolutely proven so with that done
jeff epstein in my opinion represented
somebody's cunt
construction i don't think it's scary to
think about
yeah well what part of the story isn't
scary
i in part did something which i i
imagine may get me destroyed
because i was more worried about being
destroyed by somebody else i had a
conversation with
around jeff epstein right so i'm just
trying to like
get let it be known that i don't know
anything more than i've already said
now your friends at mit yeah
their problem is is that jeff epstein
showed up as the only person
capable of continuing u.s scientific
tradition you see
the u.s scientific tradition is a little
bit like the russian
it's it's combative
okay and we're a free society and we act
like a free society we're a rich society
and we research like we're a rich
society that is historically and then
came the 1970s
and william prox meyer and the golden
fleece awards and the idea that we have
to
we're paying too much and these are
welfare queens and lab coats and blah
blah blah blah
we need more transparency more oversight
everything went to hell and the national
culture of u.s
science was lost the thing that produced
all this prosperity and security
and power was lost and then jeff epstein
shows up
and a tiny number of funders maybe fred
cavley
um maybe yuri milner
maybe who else would be in this category
peter thiel to an extent howard hughes
would be the largest of these things
which has different grant structures
than the nih
gave people a modicum of risk-taking
ability
okay when jeff epstein showed up
everybody wanted to take risk
in science and suddenly a charismatic
billionaire
says hey i can make that work for you
here's a hundred thousand dollars go go
research something crazy
well that money was supposed to be
provided
by the federal government under the
terms of the endless frontier compact
between the federal government and the
universities
and the federal government the taxpayers
welched
okay so that's one place to lay the
blame for jeffrey epstein as that the
the failure of the federal government to
honor
to honor its commitment yeah right
so the universities became psychopathic
it's not like everybody doesn't remember
what we're supposed to be doing to be
moral
but the point was there wasn't enough
money to be moral so it was time
to uh to eye each other as a source of
protein as i like to say
and in that process jeffrey epstein said
hey
come to my world we can do it like we
used to do
so in in part my point is is that almost
none of your colleagues at mit have that
kind of religious commitment to science
that they're willing to go down
with ship science
the galileo galilei thing became very
important to science because
occasionally you just have to say
look this isn't about me and you i there
isn't enough money in the world
to buy the kind of legacy i want to
leave to this planet
this is one of the great things about
science you know potentially it's worth
dying for
yeah i'm glad you said it
science is one of the things that is
best that's worth dying for
i mean i'm not eager to martyr myself
but i've certainly risked my health my
fortune
you know i i've destroyed myself
economically over science
and um
and my my my need to oppose these sons
of bitches in chaired
professorships who are destroying our
system along with everyone else
let me um bring in grandmaster who went
into this oogway ugly master ugly
i think he's a grand master oh that
would make him a chess playing turtle
so i've read some wikipedia uh-oh
shifu is a master there's apparently
only one grand master that's uh
anyway is the phrase grand master ever
uttered in the script i don't think so i
don't think so but there's a story
oh there's there's off off script canon
i'm gonna call glenn berger right now
and find out if any of this is true
all right you're not supposed to call
out my journalistic integrity
um but master oogway
master uh he says a couple things i'd
like to
bring up with you so one as part of a
longer quote
recommends that you should
find a battle worth fighting
we've talked about several battles just
now
what is the battle worth fighting for
for eric weinstein
in the next few months in the next year
there's only one
oh it's the moses it's the moses thing
it's time to go it's time to leave this
place is over to get off the planet
i yeah i i i freak people out when i say
that but
like look at your world you just got
introduced
to the problem of a virus wait wait till
it's fusion devices and you understand
what it means to have one interconnected
planet with no
uncorrelated experiments happening
anywhere else
you know so do you see the
foray your work in physics
and maybe like the echoes of it in uh
ship elon
everybody who has a possible plan
to avoid what is coming if we don't have
one
should work on the plan that he she
thinks best right so elon wants to do
rockets
people misinterpret me i meta eric says
i don't think that's a smart plan
regular eric says
all people who have hope should do
that thing yeah at least it's mars man
at least it's the moon and mars and
maybe titan and whatever and i don't
think it'll work and it doesn't make
sense and it looks silly
but that's exactly the kind of fight
where it's fighting but it's it's the
kind of it's for the same reason that i
went on brett's unity 2020 thing when i
didn't think it had a hope in hell and
people were you know are making fun of
it
we got to do things that make that make
us feel dumb and silly and childish
that possibly have a hope of working
okay so
everybody should do something my version
of this i'm the most hopeful about
because
i wouldn't have chosen to do if i
thought that daniel schmochtenberger's
wisdom project
was a better hope i'd do that
it's more down to earth in a certain way
i just think that it's more probable
look we got from powered flight with the
wright brothers and wind tunnels
to sending back images from the surface
of titan via huygens cassini
in less than a century okay what we can
do if we can change the laws of physics
is something we can't even conceive of
it may be that it buys us
nothing and at least we'll
we will know why we died on this planet
as a small aside i think this is
not the right time to take the full
journey but i feel like you'll guide me
like master uh did and i'm the kung fu
panda
at some they only have one conversation
we're on our like we didn't well we're
we're we're jews and they weren't so we
talk too much
but the guy doesn't have to be with
words uh you don't think poe is jewish
it's debatable we'll have to go back to
the really like yeah
okay
is there um that you would guide me
through
some more intuition about
the source code the source code of our
universe
can you comment on where since we last
spoke where your thinking has been
has roamed around geometric community
around that work
in physics in this fight i'm trying to
figure out
when to release it and how i mean i've
released the video
and the video quite honestly i think it
has a very bizarre reaction
i think one of the things that i've
learned from the video because the video
is coming up on half a million
views on youtube alone to say nothing of
the
um the audio but
yeah it produced a very strange reaction
one of the things i don't think that i
properly understood is that most
physicists
don't talk in this geometric language
i thought that more of the physics world
probably had converted over
into manifolds bundles differential
forms connections curvature tensors etc
and i i saw a lot of the comments would
say things like i have a phd in
theoretical physics and i'm not even
familiar with all of these concepts
and i think that was probably a
distortion
coming from living in cambridge
massachusetts for almost 20 years
so what's the solution to that well i
mean translated into
i can make this make as much sense as
anybody needs to my problem is
it's you know my calculation
is that as long as the boomers are still
in charge
the same people have these perverse
incentives on them
where they've invested in these programs
that didn't work so they're extremely
hostile and kind of difficult to deal
with
the fact that i'm not a physicist
has its own set of issues which is that
effectively it's like the hermit kingdom
they don't get any visitors
and they don't necessarily want somebody
you know rolling up and saying i know
how to do physics so i'm
i'm always very clear i'm not a
physicist
[Music]
that said if i wait too long i don't
know that theoretical physics is really
going to exist after the boomers because
everyone in you i think you had wolfram
on your program
i don't remember whether he said this to
you or brian keating but he said
something like everybody got discouraged
it was too hard we can't do that guys
we cannot do that there's something
about the renormalization revolution
that innervated the physics community
because it taught them
just because you can see in this energy
regime doesn't mean you can extrapolate
somewhere else unless you understand how
you know coupling constants run and
what kind of uv fixed points exist blah
blah blah
somehow that discouraged people from
guessing from believing everything
became an effective theory
the beauty of the effective theory
wasn't taken to be
really the beauty of the universe just
the beauty of an energy level so i think
that renormalization was one of the most
important revolutions that ever happened
in science and
also its interpretation by the physics
community was catastrophic
well the story i'm telling myself is
that in part i'm waiting for them to get
weaker but on the other hand i don't
know that we have any time left
and so are you also thinking about
ways of uh you know you know the
the podcast medium is revolutionary for
public for discourse for what i mean i
don't even know the right words for it
are you thinking of revolutionary ideas
for re-energizing the physics community
so basically for communicating
everything
look i have a fantasy okay
my fantasy is that all of these things
are the same problem and it goes back to
this thing that i read about
in in feynman's uh books
about tartaglia they asked him this
question like what's the greatest thing
that ever happened in math
he says tartaglia's solution to the
cubic
it's just like the weirdest answer so
you're like
okay i'll bite why is it ugly a solution
to the cubic and he said
because it was the first time a modern
person had done something profound that
the ancients had failed to do
i was like oh i got it it's the thing
that opens up new psychology that says
maybe things are possible again
send you orchard you orchard
new farmers new people who can find
fruit that they can pick
and once you have one person do that
very often you get many like one of the
things that we're talking about with
eddie van halen
the reason that he created a revolution
and somebody like roy buchanan did not
is that you could follow eddie van gaal
you couldn't pioneer it and maybe you
couldn't play as well and as cleanly and
as fast and as inventively
but you could follow once you understand
that there is a tapping principle
it was just the beginning of something
called percussive guitar
my belief is that once we start
innovating in the present
everything will come because everything
that around us is screwed up
on that let me with one last question
bring back
master oogway the probably the most
famous quote of his
right with the yesterday's history
tomorrow's a mystery but today is a gift
that is why it is called the present
it's very beautiful although i would
have gone with
quit don't quit noodles don't noodles
i feel i feel like people need to know
way too much context
for that to make sense how is that it's
your audience
just to hell with context yep they
they'll figure it out well let me ask
what are you grateful for today
what is your present we've talked about
a lot of dark things
but what do you brings you
joy to your heart that i can't believe
i'm
lucky enough to have this no nyla and
zeb
uh my wife pia
um the fact that we've got our health
all the
the little things saying grace
after meals you're coming over for
friday night shabbat dinner so we'll say
we'll we'll bench together and say grace
it's important
to just like this bottle of water in
front of me
i made a point um
of just thinking about how wonderful it
is that there's a quenching bottle that
happens to be placed in front of me
because somebody cared yeah you know so
that small thing made a difference to me
um
i still have strength for the fight so
far
i think that's something i'm grateful
for i can't believe that i'm not
more beaten down after all of this
nonsense
um
i have the most interesting set of
friends
i really do i mean i'm not that rich
by monetary standards but if there were
friend billionaires forbes would be all
over my ass
i just can't believe who i can talk to
you know at the drop of a hat
and i'm really grateful
i think this is the end of something
profound
and it's the beginning of whatever is
next
and whatever is next could be terminal
whatever's next could be amazing
whatever's next could be a return to the
horrors of the early 20th century that
doesn't manage to go totally
catastrophic but
you know takes hundreds of millions of
lives in the process
i'm grateful to having half of my life
in the rear view mirror
it maybe it took place in a bubble and
maybe it was unsustainable
but it was it was nice to be able to
move around the world without a mask
uh it was nice to be able to see a
little bit of the world even if it was
from a
a cot in a hostel in some country
um to fall in love absolutely
i mean it was a good life find the last
indian jewish girl left
who knew uh you're a lucky guy well let
me just say
actually there's something i wanted to
just say before you get to that yes
i forgot to say something falling in
love with an intellectual
collaborator is a special thing that not
everybody gets a chance
to do like i think when i met pia i felt
deeply in love with her
all her normal characteristics and i
she and i had an antagonistic
relationship around uh
geometry and economics
and then weirdly you know just like in a
buddy picture where in the first
half of the film they hate each other um
the two fields like we're fighting with
each other cats and dogs and finally
you know the sexual tension clearly was
so so thick you could cut it with a
knife
and we came up with geometric
marginalism which is this other theory
not geometric unity
which allowed me to inhabit space
with somebody who i already knew
intimately and had fallen
in love with and to see the quality and
beauty of their mind and to play into
dance it's sort of the intellectual
version of the tango
um one of the most romantic periods of
my life that doesn't fall into most
people's
experience there was a chance to see
something totally unexpected
haven't really had it since because she
doesn't want to revisit the material
but something i'm super grateful for
that's very particular and unique
but to flip the tables on you for
hundreds of thousands i think millions
of people
i can speak me and them are really
grateful
one that you exist and too
sorry for your podcast
and i do hope your voice in some form
continues
to to uh reverberate
i think in the at least in the 2021s and
and beyond even if it takes a brief
pause
we're pausing at the moment we've
recorded some
for future episodes and i'm recording
for you i really appreciate that i mean
it's earnestness uh
trades at a discount at the moment
because it's easy to make fun of it one
of the things i like best about you is
that you and i are both fairly earnest
we made we made joke and jeb but
honestly there's a project here in a
world to win as they say
um the thing that uh
i want my and your listeners to know is
that i'm not stepping away
from the podcast because
i don't appreciate that people really
want more it's not
you know this is hugely financially
costly to me
i want to make sure you guys are getting
the best that i can
do and destroying myself
right in front of an election i think
lex is incorrect i think that the forces
that are trying to make sure
that there aren't any planes in the sky
that aren't either colored red or
colored blue
is a big danger given how angry i am at
the system
and i don't want to be removed from the
chess board because if nobody's going to
talk about jeff epstein there need to be
people if nobody's going to talk about
various things that we've talked about
on these programs i want to make sure
that i'm there
do i think that this is potentially an
existential election yes do i
am i positive that i know that my way to
bed is the right way out no i'm not
i don't know people i just don't know
and where we are
right now seems so dumb and so
catastrophic in terms of how it is
chewing up smart people
that i decided it's really not about
cowardice because
i it's hard for me to restrain myself i
have so many reactions every day
this is really about trying to plan for
all of our futures to make sure that i'm
around
i had a huge concern that what happened
to brett's articles of unity was going
to happen to brett
what's going to happen to the youtube
channels i want to make sure that we
don't have all of our eggs in one basket
so if something goes wrong over there so
you know that's the whole idea of the
intellectual dark web which is at some
level
a loose confederation it can become a
strong confederation if somebody wants
to back it
and make it work it can dissolve so that
there really isn't anything
um the thing is to be hard to kill
because ultimately when the hit pieces
come
they don't come for what it is that
they're angry at you about they come for
when
where they can get you and so it's very
important that right in front of an
election
um yeah i think that the
the desire of the old system to defend
itself
uh through reputational destruction is
one of the most
pernicious aspects of the new america
and we have to fight
the ability to destroy reputations as a
means of
institutions keeping individuals with
podcasts and the ability to reach
millions like through substance
out of their domain i don't surrender
this domain to them
they have plenty of weaponry with which
to fight us
and i believe that they could remove you
or me in an instant by the end of today
if they wanted
us off the chessboard we would be off
the chess board i know that's not your
perspective
my goal is to stay here as long as
possible to make sure that you have
enough
of a counterbalancing set of ideas and
to
let and help other podcasters start
and my hope is is that that works but
you know long heroism short martyrdom is
a good uh
motto for anyone and i try to remember
the short martyrdom part of that
first of all beautifully put second of
all way to end the conversation and the
disagreement
which is how you hook them for the next
conversation to be continued
when lex says eric
it's a huge honor thank you once again
lex really appreciate every time we get
together thanks buddy
thanks for listening to this
conversation with eric weinstein and
thank you to our sponsors
grammarly a service i use in my writing
to check
spelling grammar sentence structure and
readability
sunbasket a meal delivery service i use
to add healthy variety into my
culinary life sem rush
the most advanced seo optimization tool
i've ever come across
i don't like looking at numbers but
someone should it helps you make good
decisions
and finally expressvpn the vpn i've used
for many years to protect my privacy on
the internet
please check out these sponsors in the
description to get a discount and
to support this podcast if you enjoy
this thing subscribe on youtube
review it with 5 stars on apple podcast
follow on spotify
support on patreon or connect with me on
twitter at lex friedman
and now let me leave you with some words
from leonard cohen
in a song titled hallelujah
well maybe there's a god above but all
i've ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew
you
and it's not a cry that you're here at
night it's not somebody who's seen the
light
it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you