WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:03.320 The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein. 00:03.320 --> 00:08.640 He's a mathematician, economist, physicist, and the managing director of Teal Capital. 00:08.640 --> 00:14.280 He coined the term, and you can say, is the founder of the intellectual dark web, 00:14.280 --> 00:19.680 which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals that include Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, 00:19.680 --> 00:24.760 Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others. 00:24.760 --> 00:30.160 This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast at MIT and beyond. 00:30.160 --> 00:35.680 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter 00:35.680 --> 00:39.280 at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D. 00:39.280 --> 00:44.440 And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. 00:44.440 --> 00:46.240 Are you nervous about this? 00:46.240 --> 00:47.120 Scared shitless. 00:47.120 --> 00:47.760 Okay. 00:47.760 --> 00:50.440 You must be crazy. 00:50.440 --> 00:54.440 You mentioned Kung Fu Panda as one of your favorite movies. 00:54.440 --> 00:57.920 It has the usual profound master student dynamic going on. 00:57.920 --> 01:04.800 So who has been a teacher that significantly influenced the direction of your thinking and life's work? 01:04.800 --> 01:08.520 So if you're the Kung Fu Panda, who was your Shifu? 01:08.520 --> 01:12.040 Oh, that's interesting because I didn't see Shifu as being the teacher. 01:12.040 --> 01:13.600 Who was the teacher? 01:13.600 --> 01:16.400 Uwe, master Uwe, the turtle. 01:16.400 --> 01:17.400 Oh, the turtle. 01:17.400 --> 01:18.040 Right. 01:18.040 --> 01:20.680 They only meet twice in the entire film. 01:20.680 --> 01:24.960 And the first conversation sort of doesn't count. 01:24.960 --> 01:33.120 So the magic of the film, in fact, its point is that the teaching that really matters is 01:33.120 --> 01:38.400 transferred during a single conversation. 01:38.400 --> 01:39.960 And it's very brief. 01:39.960 --> 01:42.600 And so who played that role in my life? 01:42.600 --> 01:52.800 I would say either my grandfather, Harry Rubin, and his wife, Sophie Rubin, my grandmother, 01:52.800 --> 01:54.800 or Tom Larrer. 01:54.800 --> 01:55.800 Tom Larrer? 01:55.800 --> 01:56.800 Yeah. 01:56.800 --> 01:58.200 In which way? 01:58.200 --> 02:05.360 If you give a child Tom Larrer records, what you do is you destroy their ability to be 02:05.360 --> 02:08.680 taken over by later malware. 02:08.680 --> 02:17.480 And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene that it destroys the ability to 02:17.480 --> 02:19.400 lead a normal life for many people. 02:19.400 --> 02:27.080 So if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted from any kind of neurotypical presentation, 02:27.080 --> 02:31.120 I'll often ask them, are you a Tom Larrer fan? 02:31.120 --> 02:34.040 And the odds that they will respond are quite high. 02:34.040 --> 02:38.320 Now, Tom Larrer is poisoning pigeons in the park, Tom Larrer? 02:38.320 --> 02:39.320 That's very interesting. 02:39.320 --> 02:44.160 There's a small number of Tom Larrer songs that broke into the general population. 02:44.160 --> 02:49.200 Poisoning pigeons in the park, the element song, and perhaps the Vatican rag. 02:49.200 --> 02:52.560 So when you meet somebody who knows those songs but doesn't know... 02:52.560 --> 02:54.920 Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you? 02:54.920 --> 02:55.920 Harshly. 02:55.920 --> 02:57.120 No, but you're a Russian. 02:57.120 --> 03:02.000 So undoubtedly you know Nikolay Ivanovich Lubachevsky, that song. 03:02.000 --> 03:06.400 So that was a song about plagiarism that was in fact plagiarized, which most people don't 03:06.400 --> 03:13.360 know from Danny Kaye, where Danny Kaye did a song called Stanislavsky of the Musky Arts. 03:13.360 --> 03:19.160 And so Tom Larrer did this brilliant job of plagiarizing a song about and making it about 03:19.160 --> 03:24.920 plagiarism and then making it about this mathematician who worked in non Euclidean geometry. 03:24.920 --> 03:27.600 That was like giving heroin to a child. 03:27.600 --> 03:33.680 It was extremely addictive and eventually led me to a lot of different places, one of 03:33.680 --> 03:36.640 which may have been a PhD in mathematics. 03:36.640 --> 03:41.840 And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics, I believe, at Harvard, something like that. 03:41.840 --> 03:45.240 I just had dinner with him, in fact. 03:45.240 --> 03:52.800 When my son turned 13, we didn't tell him, but his bar mitzvah present was dinner with 03:52.800 --> 03:54.720 his hero Tom Larrer. 03:54.720 --> 04:01.000 And Tom Larrer was 88 years old, sharp as a tack, irreverent and funny as hell. 04:01.000 --> 04:05.880 And just, you know, there are very few people in this world that you have to meet while 04:05.880 --> 04:07.040 they're still here. 04:07.040 --> 04:09.440 And that was definitely one for our family. 04:09.440 --> 04:16.680 So that wit is a reflection of intelligence in some kind of deep way, like where that 04:16.680 --> 04:20.280 would be a good test of intelligence, whether you're a Tom Larrer fan. 04:20.280 --> 04:27.560 So what do you think that is about wit, about that kind of humor, ability to see the absurdity 04:27.560 --> 04:28.560 in existence? 04:28.560 --> 04:33.560 Do you think that's connected to intelligence, or are we just two Jews on a mic that appreciate 04:33.560 --> 04:34.560 that kind of humor? 04:34.560 --> 04:37.560 No, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence. 04:37.560 --> 04:40.160 So you can see it. 04:40.160 --> 04:45.160 There's a place where Tom Larrer decides that he's going to lampoon Gilbert of Gilbert 04:45.160 --> 04:49.560 and Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever, meaningless wordplay. 04:49.560 --> 04:55.560 And he has, forget the, well, let's see, he's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan 04:55.560 --> 04:56.560 wrote it. 04:56.560 --> 05:00.560 That I missed her depress her young sister, name is to this Mr. Depester, she tried pestering 05:00.560 --> 05:04.360 sisters of festering blister, you best to resist or say, I, the sister persisted, the 05:04.360 --> 05:05.360 Mr. resisted. 05:05.360 --> 05:07.880 I kissed her all loyalty slip when he said, when she said I could have her, her sisters 05:07.880 --> 05:10.800 could ever must surely have turned in its crypt. 05:10.800 --> 05:11.960 That's so dense. 05:11.960 --> 05:18.680 It's so insane that that's clearly intelligence, because it's hard to construct something like 05:18.680 --> 05:19.680 that. 05:19.680 --> 05:26.440 If I look at my favorite Tom Larrer, Tom Larrer lyric, you know, there's a perfectly absurd 05:26.440 --> 05:30.280 one, which is once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again. 05:30.280 --> 05:34.720 We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then, right? 05:34.720 --> 05:36.920 That is a different kind of intelligence. 05:36.920 --> 05:41.760 You know, you're taking something that is so horrific, and you're, you're sort of making 05:41.760 --> 05:47.760 it palatable and funny and demonstrating also just your humanity. 05:47.760 --> 05:53.520 I mean, I think the thing that came through as, as Tom Larrer wrote all of these terrible, 05:53.520 --> 05:59.320 horrible lines was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was who was channeling 05:59.320 --> 06:02.920 pain through humor and through grace. 06:02.920 --> 06:07.760 I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia, that same kind of humor emerged from the generation 06:07.760 --> 06:09.240 of World War II. 06:09.240 --> 06:14.640 It seemed like that humor is required to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering of that 06:14.640 --> 06:16.640 war created. 06:16.640 --> 06:19.680 You do need the environment to create the broad Slavic soul. 06:19.680 --> 06:28.320 I don't think that many Americans really appreciate Russian humor. 06:28.320 --> 06:34.080 How you had to joke during the time of, let's say, Article 58 under Stalin, you had to be 06:34.080 --> 06:40.120 very, very careful, you know, that the concept of a Russian satirical magazine like Crocodile 06:40.120 --> 06:41.440 doesn't make sense. 06:41.440 --> 06:48.640 So you have this cross cultural problem that there are certain areas of human experience 06:48.640 --> 06:51.360 that it would be better to know nothing about. 06:51.360 --> 06:56.720 And quite unfortunately, Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them, which makes the, 06:56.720 --> 07:02.960 you know, the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky so potent, the, you know, the prose of Pushkin, 07:02.960 --> 07:08.960 whatever it is, you have to appreciate the depth of the Eastern European experience. 07:08.960 --> 07:14.120 And I would think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time of the 07:14.120 --> 07:24.240 Civil War or maybe, you know, under slavery in Jim Crow or even the harsh tyranny of the 07:24.240 --> 07:29.200 coal and steel employers during the labor wars. 07:29.200 --> 07:34.720 But in general, I would say it's hard for us to understand and imagine the collective 07:34.720 --> 07:40.680 culture unless we have the system of selective pressures that, for example, Russians were 07:40.680 --> 07:41.680 subjected to. 07:41.680 --> 07:42.680 Yeah. 07:42.680 --> 07:50.240 So if there is one good thing that comes out of war, it's literature, art, and humor, 07:50.240 --> 07:51.240 music. 07:51.240 --> 07:52.240 Oh, I don't think so. 07:52.240 --> 07:57.200 I think almost everything is good about war except for death and destruction. 07:57.200 --> 07:59.200 Right. 07:59.200 --> 08:02.640 Without the death, it would bring the romance of it. 08:02.640 --> 08:03.640 The whole thing is nice. 08:03.640 --> 08:07.840 This is why we're always caught up in war and we have this very ambiguous relationship 08:07.840 --> 08:15.800 to it is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful and at an unacceptable price 08:15.800 --> 08:17.800 and the price has never been higher. 08:17.800 --> 08:22.840 So just jump into AI a little bit. 08:22.840 --> 08:28.680 You, in one of the conversations you had or one of the videos, you described that one 08:28.680 --> 08:34.440 of the things AI systems can't do and biological systems can self replicate in the physical 08:34.440 --> 08:35.440 world. 08:35.440 --> 08:37.360 Oh, no, no, no. 08:37.360 --> 08:38.880 In the physical world. 08:38.880 --> 08:43.520 Well, yes, the physical robots can self replicate. 08:43.520 --> 08:49.560 But this is a very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we've been able to 08:49.560 --> 08:57.400 create that's really complex that has an analog of our reproductive system is software. 08:57.400 --> 09:04.040 But nevertheless, software replicates itself if we're speaking strictly for the replication 09:04.040 --> 09:05.840 in this kind of digital space. 09:05.840 --> 09:08.680 So let me just to begin, let me ask you a question. 09:08.680 --> 09:15.080 Do you see a protective barrier or a gap between the physical world and the digital world? 09:15.080 --> 09:16.560 Let's not call it digital. 09:16.560 --> 09:20.880 Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world. 09:20.880 --> 09:21.880 Why logical? 09:21.880 --> 09:28.080 Well, because even though we had, let's say, Einstein's brain preserved, it was meaningless 09:28.080 --> 09:33.720 to us as a physical object because we couldn't do anything with what was stored in it at 09:33.720 --> 09:35.640 a logical level. 09:35.640 --> 09:41.320 And so the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically 09:41.320 --> 09:45.400 are not necessarily, we don't always benefit from synonymizing. 09:45.400 --> 09:51.040 I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis to the logical world, but that it does 09:51.040 --> 09:58.240 warrant identification with a separate layer that need not invoke logic gates and zeros 09:58.240 --> 09:59.680 and ones. 09:59.680 --> 10:05.480 And so connecting those two worlds, the logical world and the physical world, or maybe just 10:05.480 --> 10:09.880 connecting to the logical world inside our brain, Einstein's brain, you mentioned the 10:09.880 --> 10:14.720 idea of out intelligence. 10:14.720 --> 10:15.720 Artificial out intelligence. 10:15.720 --> 10:16.720 Artificial out intelligence. 10:16.720 --> 10:17.720 Yes. 10:17.720 --> 10:25.640 The essay that John Brockman ever invited me to write that he refused to publish in Edge. 10:25.640 --> 10:26.640 Why? 10:26.640 --> 10:30.680 Well, maybe it wasn't, it wasn't well written, but I don't know. 10:30.680 --> 10:36.840 The idea is quite compelling, it's quite unique and new, and for these from my view of a stance 10:36.840 --> 10:39.000 point, maybe you can explain it. 10:39.000 --> 10:40.000 Sure. 10:40.000 --> 10:45.360 What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial 10:45.360 --> 10:53.640 general intelligence when in fact, artificial life is terrifying in and of itself and it's 10:53.640 --> 10:54.640 already here. 10:54.640 --> 11:00.280 So in order to have a system of selective pressures, you need three distinct elements. 11:00.280 --> 11:04.400 You need variation within a population. 11:04.400 --> 11:08.600 You need heritability and you need differential success. 11:08.600 --> 11:15.960 So what's really unique, and I've made this point, I think, elsewhere, about software 11:15.960 --> 11:19.400 is that if you think about what humans know how to build, that's impressive. 11:19.400 --> 11:24.960 So I always take a car and I say, does it have an analog of each of the physical physiological 11:24.960 --> 11:25.960 systems? 11:25.960 --> 11:26.960 Does it have a skeletal structure? 11:26.960 --> 11:27.960 That's its frame. 11:27.960 --> 11:30.120 Does it have a neurological structure? 11:30.120 --> 11:35.760 It has an onboard computer, it has a digestive system. 11:35.760 --> 11:38.520 And one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system. 11:38.520 --> 11:46.640 But if you can call spawn on a process, effectively, you do have a reproductive system. 11:46.640 --> 11:52.280 And that means that you can create something with variation, heritability, and differential 11:52.280 --> 11:53.280 success. 11:53.280 --> 12:01.440 Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was where do we see inanimate, nonintelligent 12:01.440 --> 12:05.720 life, outwitting intelligent life? 12:05.720 --> 12:11.520 And I have two favorite systems and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted. 12:11.520 --> 12:18.040 One of which is the ophry's orchid subspecies or subclade, I don't know what to call it. 12:18.040 --> 12:19.040 Is it a type of flower? 12:19.040 --> 12:23.960 Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to 12:23.960 --> 12:30.720 dupe the males into engaging, it was called pseudo copulation with the fake female, which 12:30.720 --> 12:34.040 is usually represented by the lowest petal. 12:34.040 --> 12:37.360 And there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating 12:37.360 --> 12:38.360 opportunity. 12:38.360 --> 12:42.960 But the flower doesn't have to give up energy in the form of nectar as a lure because it's 12:42.960 --> 12:45.320 tricking the males. 12:45.320 --> 12:53.800 The other system is a particular species of muscle, lampacillus in the clear streams of 12:53.800 --> 13:02.080 Missouri, and it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young. 13:02.080 --> 13:07.040 And when the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that 13:07.040 --> 13:14.120 the bass like to eat, the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the bass 13:14.120 --> 13:19.600 and also lose the bass to redistribute them as they eventually release. 13:19.600 --> 13:30.480 Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent dupe being fooled by a lower life form. 13:30.480 --> 13:34.760 And what is sculpting these convincing lures? 13:34.760 --> 13:41.560 It's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies. 13:41.560 --> 13:49.480 So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, those weaker mimics fall off. 13:49.480 --> 13:52.760 They have terminal lines and only the better ones survive. 13:52.760 --> 14:00.840 So it's an arms race between the target species that is being parasitized, getting smarter 14:00.840 --> 14:09.000 and this other less intelligent or non intelligent object getting as if smarter. 14:09.000 --> 14:17.240 And so what you see is that artificial general intelligence is not needed to parasitize us. 14:17.240 --> 14:22.120 It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves. 14:22.120 --> 14:27.400 So you could have a program, let's say, you know, one of these Nigerian scams that writes 14:27.400 --> 14:36.240 letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin to figure out which aspects of the program should 14:36.240 --> 14:38.920 be kept, which should be varied and thrown away. 14:38.920 --> 14:43.320 And you don't need it to be in any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario 14:43.320 --> 14:46.720 of being parasitized by something that has no idea what it's doing. 14:46.720 --> 14:49.400 So you phrased a few concepts really eloquently. 14:49.400 --> 14:53.080 So let me try to, as a few directions, this goes. 14:53.080 --> 14:58.640 So one, first of all, in the way we write software today, it's not common that we allow 14:58.640 --> 15:05.200 it to self modify, but we do have that ability now, we have the ability, it's just not common. 15:05.200 --> 15:06.200 It's not just common. 15:06.200 --> 15:13.080 So, so your, your thought is that that is a serious worry. 15:13.080 --> 15:18.480 If there becomes a self modifying code is available now. 15:18.480 --> 15:21.160 So there's different types of self modification, right? 15:21.160 --> 15:29.840 There's personalization, you know, your email app, your Gmail is self modifying to you after 15:29.840 --> 15:32.400 you log in or whatever you can think of it that way. 15:32.400 --> 15:39.560 But ultimately central all the information is centralized, but you're thinking of ideas 15:39.560 --> 15:45.440 where you're completely self, this is a unique entity operating under selective pressures 15:45.440 --> 15:46.440 and it changes. 15:46.440 --> 15:52.480 Well, you just, if you think about the fact that our immune systems don't know what's 15:52.480 --> 15:57.160 coming at them next, but they have a small set of spanning components. 15:57.160 --> 16:05.360 And if it's, if it's a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape or binding region 16:05.360 --> 16:12.680 can be approximated with, with the Lego that is present, then you can have confidence that 16:12.680 --> 16:20.240 you don't need to know what's coming at you because the combinatorics are sufficient to 16:20.240 --> 16:22.560 reach any configuration needed. 16:22.560 --> 16:25.280 So that's a beautiful thing. 16:25.280 --> 16:30.680 Well, terrifying thing to worry about because it's so within our reach. 16:30.680 --> 16:34.120 Whatever I suggest these things, I do always have a concern as to whether or not I will 16:34.120 --> 16:37.040 bring them into being by talking about them. 16:37.040 --> 16:39.680 So there's this thing from open AI. 16:39.680 --> 16:47.840 So next week to talk to the founder of open AI, this idea that their text generation, 16:47.840 --> 16:53.560 the new, the new stuff they have for generating text is they didn't want to bring it. 16:53.560 --> 16:58.960 They didn't want to release it because they're worried about the, I'm delighted to hear that, 16:58.960 --> 17:00.640 but they're going to end up releasing. 17:00.640 --> 17:01.640 Yes. 17:01.640 --> 17:02.640 So that's the thing. 17:02.640 --> 17:09.160 The thing about it, well, at least from my end, I'm more a proponent of technology preventing 17:09.160 --> 17:16.520 tech, so further innovation preventing the detrimental effects of innovation. 17:16.520 --> 17:22.320 Well, we're, we're sort of tumbling down a hill at accelerating speed. 17:22.320 --> 17:25.560 So whether or not we're proponents or it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. 17:25.560 --> 17:31.120 It may not matter, but I, well, I do feel that there are people who've held things back 17:31.120 --> 17:35.360 and you know, died poorer than they might have otherwise been. 17:35.360 --> 17:37.400 We don't even know their names. 17:37.400 --> 17:43.720 I don't think that we should discount the idea that having the smartest people showing 17:43.720 --> 17:50.720 off how smart they are by what they've developed may be a terminal process. 17:50.720 --> 17:57.240 I'm very mindful in particular of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller of all people wrote 17:57.240 --> 18:02.080 to Leo Zillard, whereas Zillard was trying to figure out how to control the use of atomic 18:02.080 --> 18:08.040 weaponry at the end of World War II and Teller rather strangely, because many of us view him 18:08.040 --> 18:15.200 as a monster, showed some very advanced moral thinking talking about the slim chance we 18:15.200 --> 18:19.480 have for survival and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable. 18:19.480 --> 18:24.920 I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut what it is we are playing with when we 18:24.920 --> 18:29.760 are working on technical problems, and I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it a movie 18:29.760 --> 18:37.640 called The Bridge on the River Kwai about, I believe, captured British POWs who just 18:37.640 --> 18:43.200 in a desire to do a bridge well, end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors. 18:43.200 --> 18:51.120 Well, now you're making me question the unrestricted open discussion of ideas in AI. 18:51.120 --> 18:52.120 I'm not saying. 18:52.120 --> 18:53.120 I know the answer. 18:53.120 --> 18:57.800 I'm saying that I could make a decent case for either our need to talk about this and 18:57.800 --> 19:02.640 to become technologically focused on containing it or our need to stop talking about this 19:02.640 --> 19:08.640 and try to hope that the relatively small number of highly adept individuals who are 19:08.640 --> 19:12.800 looking at these problems is small enough that we should, in fact, be talking about 19:12.800 --> 19:13.800 how to contain them. 19:13.800 --> 19:20.400 Well, the way ideas, the way innovation happens, what new ideas develop Newton with calculus, 19:20.400 --> 19:27.920 whether if he was silent, the idea would emerge elsewhere, in the case of Newton, of course, 19:27.920 --> 19:35.000 but in the case of AI, how small is the set of individuals out of which such ideas would 19:35.000 --> 19:36.000 arise? 19:36.000 --> 19:41.840 Well, the idea is that the researchers we know and those that we don't know who may 19:41.840 --> 19:47.080 live in countries that don't wish us to know what level they're currently at are very disciplined 19:47.080 --> 19:50.520 in keeping these things to themselves. 19:50.520 --> 19:57.160 Of course, I will point out that there is a religious school in Kerala that developed 19:57.160 --> 20:06.120 something very close to the calculus, certainly in terms of infinite series in, I guess, religious 20:06.120 --> 20:10.440 prayer and rhyme and prose. 20:10.440 --> 20:16.360 So it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back, and I don't really believe 20:16.360 --> 20:17.600 that we have an ability to hold it back. 20:17.600 --> 20:23.040 I do think that we could change the proportion of the time we spend worrying about the effects 20:23.040 --> 20:26.200 of what if we are successful, rather than simply trying to succeed and hope that we'll 20:26.200 --> 20:28.080 be able to contain things later. 20:28.080 --> 20:29.280 Beautifully put. 20:29.280 --> 20:35.600 So on the idea of intelligence, what form, treading cautiously as we've agreed as we 20:35.600 --> 20:38.080 tumbled down the hill, what form? 20:38.080 --> 20:40.080 Can't stop ourselves, can't we? 20:40.080 --> 20:41.080 We cannot. 20:41.080 --> 20:43.520 What form do you see it taking? 20:43.520 --> 20:52.040 So one example, Facebook, Google, do want to, I don't know a better word, you want to 20:52.040 --> 20:59.560 influence users to behave a certain way, and so that's one kind of example of our intelligence 20:59.560 --> 21:05.920 is systems perhaps modifying the behavior of these intelligent human beings in order 21:05.920 --> 21:08.720 to sell more product of different kinds. 21:08.720 --> 21:13.080 Do you see other examples of this actually emerging in? 21:13.080 --> 21:19.280 Just take any parasitic system, make sure that there's some way in which there's differential 21:19.280 --> 21:27.640 success, heritability, and variation, and those are the magic ingredients, and if you 21:27.640 --> 21:32.040 really wanted to build a nightmare machine, make sure that the system that expresses the 21:32.040 --> 21:40.120 variability has a spanning set so that it can learn to arbitrary levels by making it 21:40.120 --> 21:41.920 sufficiently expressive. 21:41.920 --> 21:43.240 That's your nightmare. 21:43.240 --> 21:48.040 So it's your nightmare, but it could also be, it's a really powerful mechanism by which 21:48.040 --> 21:52.360 to create, well, powerful systems. 21:52.360 --> 21:59.120 So are you more worried about the negative direction that might go versus the positive? 21:59.120 --> 22:05.120 So you said parasitic, but that doesn't necessarily need to be what the system converges towards. 22:05.120 --> 22:07.120 It could be, what is it? 22:07.120 --> 22:13.680 Well, parasitism, the dividing line between parasitism and symbiosis is not so clear. 22:13.680 --> 22:15.040 That's what they tell me about marriage. 22:15.040 --> 22:17.560 I'm still single, so I don't know. 22:17.560 --> 22:28.200 Well, yeah, we can go into that too, but no, I think we have to appreciate, are you infected 22:28.200 --> 22:30.440 by your own mitochondria? 22:30.440 --> 22:32.440 Right. 22:32.440 --> 22:34.440 Right? 22:34.440 --> 22:35.440 Yeah. 22:35.440 --> 22:42.560 So in marriage, you fear the loss of independence, but even though the American therapeutic community 22:42.560 --> 22:47.400 may be very concerned about codependence, what's to say that codependence isn't what's 22:47.400 --> 22:53.040 necessary to have a stable relationship in which to raise children who are maximally case 22:53.040 --> 22:57.560 selected and require incredible amounts of care because you have to wait 13 years before 22:57.560 --> 23:01.800 there's any reproductive payout, and most of us don't want our 13 year olds having kids. 23:01.800 --> 23:08.920 That's a very tricky situation to analyze, and I would say that creditors and parasites 23:08.920 --> 23:14.000 drive much of our evolution, and I don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them. 23:14.000 --> 23:19.160 Well, ultimately, I mean, nobody knows the meaning of life or what even happiness is, 23:19.160 --> 23:25.640 but there is some metrics that they didn't tell you, that's why all the poetry and books 23:25.640 --> 23:31.760 are about, you know, there's some metrics under which you can kind of measure how good 23:31.760 --> 23:35.040 it is that these AI systems are roaming about. 23:35.040 --> 23:44.800 So you're more nervous about software than you are optimistic about ideas of self replicating 23:44.800 --> 23:45.800 large stuff. 23:45.800 --> 23:50.440 I don't think we've really felt where we are. 23:50.440 --> 23:57.960 You know, occasionally we get a wake up, 9.11 was so anomalous compared to everything else 23:57.960 --> 24:03.760 we've experienced on American soil that it came to us as a complete shock that that was 24:03.760 --> 24:05.080 even a possibility. 24:05.080 --> 24:11.640 What it really was, was a highly creative and determined R&D team deep in the bowels 24:11.640 --> 24:18.200 of Afghanistan, showing us that we had certain exploits that we were open to that nobody 24:18.200 --> 24:19.440 had chosen to express. 24:19.440 --> 24:23.680 I can think of several of these things that I don't talk about publicly that just seem 24:23.680 --> 24:32.120 to have to do with how relatively unimaginative those who wish to cause havoc and destruction 24:32.120 --> 24:34.280 have been up until now. 24:34.280 --> 24:44.280 The great mystery of our time of this particular little era is how remarkably stable we've been 24:44.280 --> 24:51.880 since 1945 when we demonstrated the ability to use nuclear weapons in anger. 24:51.880 --> 24:58.400 We don't know why things like that haven't happened since then. 24:58.400 --> 25:04.120 We've had several close call, we've had mistakes, we've had brinksmanship. 25:04.120 --> 25:10.800 What's now happened is that we've settled into a sense that, oh, it'll always be nothing. 25:10.800 --> 25:19.880 It's been so long since something was at that level of danger that we've got a wrong 25:19.880 --> 25:21.080 idea in our head. 25:21.080 --> 25:25.480 That's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro show, I talked about the need to resume above 25:25.480 --> 25:30.440 ground testing of nuclear devices because we have people whose developmental experience 25:30.440 --> 25:37.600 suggests that when, let's say, Donald Trump and North Korea engage on Twitter, oh, it's 25:37.600 --> 25:38.600 nothing. 25:38.600 --> 25:39.600 It's just posturing. 25:39.600 --> 25:41.800 Everybody's just in it for money. 25:41.800 --> 25:48.400 There's a sense that people are in a video game mode, which has been the right call since 25:48.400 --> 25:49.480 1945. 25:49.480 --> 25:51.320 We've been mostly in video game mode. 25:51.320 --> 25:52.320 It's amazing. 25:52.320 --> 25:57.120 So you're worried about a generation which has not seen any existential... 25:57.120 --> 25:58.320 We've lived under it. 25:58.320 --> 26:00.240 You see, you're younger. 26:00.240 --> 26:05.840 I don't know if, again, you came from Moscow. 26:05.840 --> 26:13.560 There was a TV show called The Day After that had a huge effect on a generation growing 26:13.560 --> 26:21.040 up in the US, and it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange. 26:21.040 --> 26:27.480 We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively where we've thought about this, 26:27.480 --> 26:32.800 and I think it's one of the most irresponsible things that the elders among us have done, 26:32.800 --> 26:42.120 which is to provide this beautiful garden in which the thorns are cut off of the rose 26:42.120 --> 26:47.840 bushes and all of the edges are rounded and sanded. 26:47.840 --> 26:52.000 And so people have developed this totally unreal idea, which is everything is going 26:52.000 --> 26:54.240 to be just fine. 26:54.240 --> 27:01.760 And do I think that my leading concern is AGI or my leading concern is thermonuclear exchange 27:01.760 --> 27:04.040 or gene drives or any one of these things? 27:04.040 --> 27:11.800 I don't know, but I know that our time here in this very long experiment here is finite 27:11.800 --> 27:17.040 because the toys that we've built are so impressive and the wisdom to accompany them 27:17.040 --> 27:19.320 has not materialized. 27:19.320 --> 27:25.280 And I think we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945. 27:25.280 --> 27:29.960 We had a lot of dangerous skilled players on the world stage who nevertheless, no matter 27:29.960 --> 27:37.360 how bad they were, managed to not embroil us in something that we couldn't come back 27:37.360 --> 27:38.360 from. 27:38.360 --> 27:39.360 The Cold War. 27:39.360 --> 27:40.360 Yeah. 27:40.360 --> 27:47.600 And the distance from the Cold War, I'm very mindful of, there was a Russian tradition 27:47.600 --> 27:56.240 actually of on your wedding day going to visit a memorial to those who gave their lives. 27:56.240 --> 27:58.040 Can you imagine this? 27:58.040 --> 28:03.800 Were you on the happiest day of your life, you go and you pay homage to the people who 28:03.800 --> 28:08.960 fought and died in the Battle of Stalingrad? 28:08.960 --> 28:13.400 I'm not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say, but there were a couple of things that 28:13.400 --> 28:18.840 the Russians did that were really positive in the Soviet era. 28:18.840 --> 28:25.040 And I think trying to let people know how serious life actually is, is the Russian model 28:25.040 --> 28:28.640 of seriousness is better than the American model. 28:28.640 --> 28:35.280 And maybe like you mentioned, there was a small echo of that after 911, but we wouldn't 28:35.280 --> 28:36.280 let it form. 28:36.280 --> 28:40.840 We talk about 911, but it's 912 that really moved the needle. 28:40.840 --> 28:48.200 When we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak, we witnessed something super serious 28:48.200 --> 28:59.240 and we didn't want to run to our computers and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings. 28:59.240 --> 29:03.920 And it was profound because we woke up briefly there. 29:03.920 --> 29:08.960 I talk about the gated institutional narrative that sort of programs our lives. 29:08.960 --> 29:15.240 I've seen it break three times in my life, one of which was the election of Donald Trump. 29:15.240 --> 29:21.280 Another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers, when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns 29:21.280 --> 29:27.360 wasn't that important knew that Lehman Brothers met AIG was next. 29:27.360 --> 29:29.440 And the other one was 911. 29:29.440 --> 29:35.240 And so if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times that the global narrative was 29:35.240 --> 29:43.480 really interrupted, that tells you how much we've been on top of developing events. 29:43.480 --> 29:47.600 We had the Murrow Felt Federal Building explosion, but it didn't cause the narrative to break. 29:47.600 --> 29:49.560 It wasn't profound enough. 29:49.560 --> 29:58.840 Around 912, we started to wake up out of our slumber and the powers that be did not want 29:58.840 --> 30:01.200 to coming together. 30:01.200 --> 30:04.040 The admonition was go shopping. 30:04.040 --> 30:07.840 The powers would be, what is that force as opposed to blaming individuals? 30:07.840 --> 30:08.920 We don't know. 30:08.920 --> 30:09.920 So whatever that... 30:09.920 --> 30:14.160 Whatever that force is, there's a component of it that's emergent and there's a component 30:14.160 --> 30:15.760 of it that's deliberate. 30:15.760 --> 30:18.840 So give yourself a portfolio with two components. 30:18.840 --> 30:23.920 Some amount of it is emergent, but some amount of it is also an understanding that if people 30:23.920 --> 30:27.880 come together, they become an incredible force. 30:27.880 --> 30:34.000 And what you're seeing right now, I think, is there are forces that are trying to come 30:34.000 --> 30:40.760 together and there are forces that are trying to push things apart, and one of them is the 30:40.760 --> 30:48.360 globalist narrative versus the national narrative, where to the globalist perspective, the nations 30:48.360 --> 30:53.840 are bad things, in essence, that they're temporary, they're nationalistic, they're jingoistic. 30:53.840 --> 30:58.680 It's all negative to people in the national, more in the nationality, and they're saying, 30:58.680 --> 31:03.120 look, this is where I pay my taxes, this is where I do my army service, this is where 31:03.120 --> 31:06.160 I have a vote, this is where I have a passport. 31:06.160 --> 31:10.240 Who the hell are you to tell me that because you've moved into someplace that you can make 31:10.240 --> 31:15.560 money globally, that you've chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special and 31:15.560 --> 31:16.560 elevated duty? 31:16.560 --> 31:23.200 And I think that these competing narratives have been pushing towards the global perspective 31:23.200 --> 31:27.920 from the elite, and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised people are saying, hey, 31:27.920 --> 31:33.680 I actually live in a place and I have laws and I speak a language, I have a culture, 31:33.680 --> 31:40.320 and who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some faraway land, that my obligations 31:40.320 --> 31:43.280 to my fellow countrymen are so much diminished? 31:43.280 --> 31:47.960 So these tensions between nations and so on, ultimately, you see being proud of your country 31:47.960 --> 31:53.960 and so on, which creates potentially the kind of things that led to wars and so on, they 31:53.960 --> 31:58.960 ultimately, it is human nature and it is good for us, for wake up calls of different kinds. 31:58.960 --> 32:01.280 Well, I think that these are tensions. 32:01.280 --> 32:06.640 And my point isn't, I mean, nationalism run amok is a nightmare. 32:06.640 --> 32:09.960 And internationalism run amok is a nightmare. 32:09.960 --> 32:17.440 And the problem is we're trying to push these pendulums to some place where they're somewhat 32:17.440 --> 32:25.960 balanced, where we have a higher duty of care to those who share our laws and our citizenship, 32:25.960 --> 32:30.920 but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system. 32:30.920 --> 32:37.640 I would think this is elementary, but the problem that we're facing concerns the ability 32:37.640 --> 32:45.520 for some to profit by abandoning their obligations to others within their system. 32:45.520 --> 32:48.600 And that's what we've had for decades. 32:48.600 --> 32:50.200 You mentioned nuclear weapons. 32:50.200 --> 32:55.880 I was hoping to get answers from you, since one of the many things you've done is economics 32:55.880 --> 33:00.520 and maybe you can understand human behavior and why the heck we haven't blown each other 33:00.520 --> 33:01.520 up yet. 33:01.520 --> 33:02.520 But okay. 33:02.520 --> 33:03.520 So we'll get back to you. 33:03.520 --> 33:04.520 I don't know the answer. 33:04.520 --> 33:05.520 Yeah. 33:05.520 --> 33:07.640 It's a fast, it's really important to say that we really don't know. 33:07.640 --> 33:09.520 A mild uptick in wisdom. 33:09.520 --> 33:10.840 A mild uptick in wisdom. 33:10.840 --> 33:17.320 Well, Steven Pinko, who I've talked with, has a lot of really good ideas about why, 33:17.320 --> 33:18.320 but nobody really knows. 33:18.320 --> 33:20.320 I don't trust his optimism. 33:20.320 --> 33:24.960 Listen, I'm Russian, so I never trust a guy who's that optimistic. 33:24.960 --> 33:25.960 No, no, no. 33:25.960 --> 33:31.280 It's just that you're talking about a guy who's looking at a system in which more and 33:31.280 --> 33:37.760 more of the kinetic energy, like war, has been turned into potential energy, like unused 33:37.760 --> 33:38.760 nuclear weapons. 33:38.760 --> 33:39.760 Wow, beautifully put. 33:39.760 --> 33:42.880 You know, now I'm looking at that system and I'm saying, okay, well, if you don't have 33:42.880 --> 33:46.000 a potential energy term, then everything's just getting better and better. 33:46.000 --> 33:47.000 Yeah. 33:47.000 --> 33:48.000 Wow. 33:48.000 --> 33:49.320 That's beautifully put. 33:49.320 --> 33:50.320 Only physicists could. 33:50.320 --> 33:51.320 Okay. 33:51.320 --> 33:53.800 I'm not a physicist. 33:53.800 --> 33:55.200 Is that a dirty word? 33:55.200 --> 33:56.200 No. 33:56.200 --> 33:57.200 No, I wish I were a physicist. 33:57.200 --> 33:58.200 Me too. 33:58.200 --> 33:59.200 My dad's a physicist. 33:59.200 --> 34:02.880 I'm trying to live up that probably for the rest of my life. 34:02.880 --> 34:04.520 He's probably going to listen to this too. 34:04.520 --> 34:05.520 He did. 34:05.520 --> 34:06.520 Yeah. 34:06.520 --> 34:14.120 So, your friend, Sam Harris, worries a lot about the existential threat of AI, not in 34:14.120 --> 34:16.640 the way that you've described, but in the more. 34:16.640 --> 34:18.040 Well, he hangs out with Elon. 34:18.040 --> 34:20.400 I don't know Elon. 34:20.400 --> 34:30.720 So are you worried about that kind of, you know, about the, about either robotic systems 34:30.720 --> 34:36.320 or traditionally defined AI systems, essentially becoming super intelligent, much more intelligent 34:36.320 --> 34:38.680 than human beings and, uh, getting. 34:38.680 --> 34:40.600 Well, they already are. 34:40.600 --> 34:42.840 And they're not. 34:42.840 --> 34:45.840 When seen as a collective, you mean? 34:45.840 --> 34:53.120 Well, I mean, I can mean all sorts of things, but certainly many of the things that we thought 34:53.120 --> 34:57.360 were peculiar to general intelligence or do not require general intelligence. 34:57.360 --> 35:03.120 So that's been one of the big awakenings that you can write a pretty convincing sports 35:03.120 --> 35:10.720 story from stats alone, uh, without needing to have watched the game. 35:10.720 --> 35:14.000 So you know, is it possible to write lively prose about politics? 35:14.000 --> 35:15.000 Yeah. 35:15.000 --> 35:16.280 No, not yet. 35:16.280 --> 35:20.640 So we, we're sort of all over the map. 35:20.640 --> 35:24.000 One of the, one of the things about chess that I yield, there's a question I once asked 35:24.000 --> 35:29.240 on Quora that didn't get a lot of response, which was, what is the greatest brilliancy 35:29.240 --> 35:32.840 ever produced by a computer in a chess game, which was different than the question of what 35:32.840 --> 35:35.520 is the greatest game ever played? 35:35.520 --> 35:39.200 So if you think about brilliancies is what really animates many of us to think of chess 35:39.200 --> 35:42.240 as an art form. 35:42.240 --> 35:47.400 Those are those moves and combinations that just show such flair, panache and, and, and 35:47.400 --> 35:48.400 soul. 35:48.400 --> 35:50.480 Um, computers weren't really great at that. 35:50.480 --> 35:52.720 They were great positional monsters. 35:52.720 --> 35:57.120 And, you know, recently we, we've started seeing brilliancies. 35:57.120 --> 35:58.120 And so. 35:58.120 --> 36:03.000 The masters have identified with, with alpha zero, that things were quite brilliant. 36:03.000 --> 36:04.000 Yeah. 36:04.000 --> 36:07.680 So that's, that's, you know, that's an example of something we don't think that that's AGI, 36:07.680 --> 36:13.120 but in a very restricted set, a set of rules like chess, you're starting to see poetry 36:13.120 --> 36:16.040 of a high order. 36:16.040 --> 36:21.240 And, and so I'm not, I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI. 36:21.240 --> 36:29.160 AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives in the same way that I don't think a worm 36:29.160 --> 36:33.360 should be, you know, the C. elegans shouldn't be treated as non conscious because it only 36:33.360 --> 36:34.360 has 300 neurons. 36:34.360 --> 36:39.080 It maybe just has a very low level of consciousness because we don't understand what these things 36:39.080 --> 36:40.840 mean as they scale up. 36:40.840 --> 36:43.760 So am I worried about this general phenomena? 36:43.760 --> 36:44.760 Sure. 36:44.760 --> 36:48.240 But I think that one of the things that's happening is that a lot of us are fretting 36:48.240 --> 36:53.600 about this in part because of human needs. 36:53.600 --> 36:56.240 We've always been worried about the Gollum, right? 36:56.240 --> 37:01.560 Well, the Gollum is the artificially created life, you know, it's like Frankenstein. 37:01.560 --> 37:02.560 Yeah. 37:02.560 --> 37:03.560 Sure. 37:03.560 --> 37:08.800 It's a Jewish version and Frankenberg, Frankenstein. 37:08.800 --> 37:09.800 Yeah. 37:09.800 --> 37:10.800 That makes sense. 37:10.800 --> 37:11.800 Sorry. 37:11.800 --> 37:17.160 So the, but we've always been worried about creating something like this and it's getting 37:17.160 --> 37:18.720 closer and closer. 37:18.720 --> 37:25.920 And there are ways in which we have to realize that the whole thing is kind of, the whole 37:25.920 --> 37:31.560 thing that we've experienced are the context of our lives is almost certainly coming to 37:31.560 --> 37:32.560 an end. 37:32.560 --> 37:39.040 And I don't mean to suggest that we won't survive, I don't know. 37:39.040 --> 37:43.680 And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow, it could be 300, 500 years. 37:43.680 --> 37:49.600 But there's no plan that I'm aware of if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit 37:49.600 --> 37:58.280 that are sensible within current technological dreams, the earth, the moon and Mars. 37:58.280 --> 38:04.860 And we have a very competitive civilization that is still forced into violence to sort 38:04.860 --> 38:06.920 out disputes that cannot be arbitrated. 38:06.920 --> 38:12.960 It is not clear to me that we have a long term future until we get to the next stage, 38:12.960 --> 38:18.160 which is to figure out whether or not the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken. 38:18.160 --> 38:21.600 And that requires our source code. 38:21.600 --> 38:25.720 Our source code, the stuff in our brains to figure out what do you mean by our source 38:25.720 --> 38:26.720 code? 38:26.720 --> 38:30.880 The source code of the context, whatever it is that produces the quarks, the electrons, 38:30.880 --> 38:31.880 the neutrinos. 38:31.880 --> 38:33.360 Oh, our source code. 38:33.360 --> 38:34.360 I got it. 38:34.360 --> 38:38.240 So this is the best stuff that's written in a higher level language. 38:38.240 --> 38:39.240 Yeah. 38:39.240 --> 38:40.240 Yeah. 38:40.240 --> 38:41.240 That's right. 38:41.240 --> 38:42.240 You're talking about the low level bits or lower. 38:42.240 --> 38:46.600 That's what is currently keeping us here. 38:46.600 --> 38:52.800 We can't even imagine, you know, we have harebrained schemes for staying within the 38:52.800 --> 38:55.520 Einsteinian speed limit. 38:55.520 --> 38:59.040 You know, maybe if we could just drug ourselves and go into a suspended state or we could 38:59.040 --> 39:02.920 have multiple generations, I think all that stuff is pretty silly. 39:02.920 --> 39:07.720 But I think it's also pretty silly to imagine that our wisdom is going to increase to the 39:07.720 --> 39:10.880 point that we can have the toys we have. 39:10.880 --> 39:14.120 And we're not going to use them for 500 years. 39:14.120 --> 39:18.720 Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough when I realized you're just one letter away 39:18.720 --> 39:19.720 from the guy. 39:19.720 --> 39:22.880 Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein. 39:22.880 --> 39:25.880 It's, well, you get to pick. 39:25.880 --> 39:26.880 Okay. 39:26.880 --> 39:32.680 So unified theory, you know, you've worked, you enjoy the beauty of geometry. 39:32.680 --> 39:34.440 I don't actually know if you enjoy it. 39:34.440 --> 39:36.000 You certainly are quite good at it. 39:36.000 --> 39:37.000 I tremble before it. 39:37.000 --> 39:39.000 Tremble before it. 39:39.000 --> 39:42.200 If you're religious, that is one of the, I don't have to be religious. 39:42.200 --> 39:43.200 It's just so beautiful. 39:43.200 --> 39:44.200 You will tremble anyway. 39:44.200 --> 39:50.960 I mean, I just read Einstein's biography and one of the ways, one of the things you've 39:50.960 --> 39:59.160 done is try to explore a unified theory, talking about a 14 dimensional observers that has 39:59.160 --> 40:02.800 the 4D space time continuum embedded in it. 40:02.800 --> 40:09.600 I'm just curious how you think philosophically at a high level about something more than 40:09.600 --> 40:12.000 four dimensions. 40:12.000 --> 40:19.160 How do you try to, what does it make you feel talking in the mathematical world about dimensions 40:19.160 --> 40:23.480 that are greater than the ones we can perceive? 40:23.480 --> 40:26.640 Is there something that you take away that's more than just the math? 40:26.640 --> 40:30.880 Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me. 40:30.880 --> 40:41.240 Okay, now on the front of that tongue, there was a sweet receptor and next to that were 40:41.240 --> 40:46.600 salt receptors on two different sides, a little bit farther back, there were sour receptors 40:46.600 --> 40:49.400 and you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue where your bitter receptor was. 40:49.400 --> 40:51.280 Show the good side always. 40:51.280 --> 40:58.080 Okay, but that was four dimensions of taste receptors, but you also had pain receptors 40:58.080 --> 41:01.200 on that tongue and probably heat receptors on that tongue. 41:01.200 --> 41:05.360 So let's assume that you had one of each, that would be six dimensions. 41:05.360 --> 41:12.880 So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza and it's got some hot pepper on 41:12.880 --> 41:17.720 it, maybe some jalapeno, you're having a six dimensional experience, dude. 41:17.720 --> 41:24.400 Do you think we overemphasize the value of time as one of the dimensions or space? 41:24.400 --> 41:28.160 Well, we certainly overemphasize the value of time because we like things to start and 41:28.160 --> 41:30.720 end or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to. 41:30.720 --> 41:36.840 Well, what if you flipped one of the spatial dimensions into being a temporal dimension 41:36.840 --> 41:42.160 and you and I were to meet in New York City and say, well, where and when should we meet? 41:42.160 --> 41:50.680 Say, how about I'll meet you on 36th and Lexington at two in the afternoon and 11 o clock in 41:50.680 --> 41:53.280 the morning. 41:53.280 --> 41:55.520 That would be very confusing. 41:55.520 --> 41:59.320 Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time, you mean? 41:59.320 --> 42:03.560 We happen to be in a delicious situation in which we have three dimensions of space and 42:03.560 --> 42:07.920 one of time and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade 42:07.920 --> 42:11.800 off a little space for a little time, but we still only have one dimension that is picked 42:11.800 --> 42:13.440 out relative to the other three. 42:13.440 --> 42:15.640 It's very much glad to snipe the pips. 42:15.640 --> 42:17.960 So which one developed for who? 42:17.960 --> 42:22.800 Do we develop for these dimensions or did the dimensions or were they always there and 42:22.800 --> 42:23.800 it doesn't? 42:23.800 --> 42:27.200 Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place where there are four temporal dimensions or 42:27.200 --> 42:31.960 two and two of space and time or three of time and one of space and then would time not 42:31.960 --> 42:33.920 be playing the role of space? 42:33.920 --> 42:37.960 Why do you imagine that the sector that you're in is all that there is? 42:37.960 --> 42:40.800 I certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise. 42:40.800 --> 42:46.160 I mean, I haven't done ayahuasca or any of those drugs that I hope to one day, but instead 42:46.160 --> 42:49.640 of doing ayahuasca, you could just head over to building two. 42:49.640 --> 42:50.640 That's where the mathematicians are? 42:50.640 --> 42:52.200 Yeah, that's where they hang. 42:52.200 --> 42:53.200 Just to look at some geometry. 42:53.200 --> 42:55.640 Well, just ask about pseudo Romanian geometry. 42:55.640 --> 42:58.640 That's what you're interested in. 42:58.640 --> 43:01.640 Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru. 43:01.640 --> 43:03.140 And then some extra money for that trip. 43:03.140 --> 43:06.600 Yeah, but you won't be able to do any calculations if that's how you choose to go about it. 43:06.600 --> 43:09.960 Well, a different kind of calculation. 43:09.960 --> 43:14.000 One of my favorite people, Edward Frankel, Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math, 43:14.000 --> 43:20.280 great title for a book, said that you were quite a remarkable intellect to come up with 43:20.280 --> 43:25.360 such beautiful original ideas in terms of the unified theory and so on, but you were 43:25.360 --> 43:28.240 working outside academia. 43:28.240 --> 43:34.360 So one question in developing ideas that truly original, truly interesting, what's the difference 43:34.360 --> 43:40.120 between inside academia and outside academia when it comes to developing such ideas? 43:40.120 --> 43:43.240 Oh, it's a terrible choice, terrible choice. 43:43.240 --> 43:55.200 So if you do it inside of academics, you are forced to constantly show great loyalty to 43:55.200 --> 44:03.000 the consensus and you distinguish yourself with small, almost microscopic heresies to 44:03.000 --> 44:10.520 make your reputation in general, and you have very competent people and brilliant people 44:10.520 --> 44:17.720 who are working together, who are, who form very deep social networks and have a very 44:17.720 --> 44:25.520 high level of behavior, at least within mathematics and at least technically within physics, theoretical 44:25.520 --> 44:27.880 physics. 44:27.880 --> 44:35.240 When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people, madmen. 44:35.240 --> 44:41.200 And these are people who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position and almost always 44:41.200 --> 44:44.320 lose their way. 44:44.320 --> 44:52.320 And the key question is, will progress likely come from someone who is miraculously managed 44:52.320 --> 44:59.160 to stay within the system and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy that is sort of 44:59.160 --> 45:07.840 unthinkable, in which case that will be fascinating, or is it more likely that somebody will maintain 45:07.840 --> 45:15.760 a level of discipline from outside of academics and be able to make use of the freedom that 45:15.760 --> 45:21.800 comes from not having to constantly affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field? 45:21.800 --> 45:28.440 So you've characterized in ways that academia in this particular sense is declining. 45:28.440 --> 45:34.880 You posted the plot, the older population of the faculty is getting larger, the younger 45:34.880 --> 45:37.240 is getting smaller and so on. 45:37.240 --> 45:40.720 So what's, which direction of the two are you more hopeful about? 45:40.720 --> 45:43.360 Well the baby boomers can't hang on forever. 45:43.360 --> 45:46.440 Was it first of all in general, true, and second of all in academia? 45:46.440 --> 45:53.000 But that's really what, what this time is about, is we didn't, we're used to like financial 45:53.000 --> 45:57.160 bubbles that last a few years in length and then pop. 45:57.160 --> 46:02.000 The baby boomer bubble is this really long lived thing. 46:02.000 --> 46:07.960 And all of the ideology, all of the behavior patterns, the norms, you know, for example, 46:07.960 --> 46:11.640 string theory is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomenon. 46:11.640 --> 46:16.640 It was something that baby boomers were able to do because it required a very high level 46:16.640 --> 46:20.600 of mathematical ability. 46:20.600 --> 46:24.360 You don't think of string theory as an original idea? 46:24.360 --> 46:29.920 Oh, I mean it was original to Veneziano, probably is older than the baby boomers. 46:29.920 --> 46:32.800 And there are people who are younger than the baby boomers who are still doing string 46:32.800 --> 46:33.800 theory. 46:33.800 --> 46:37.920 And I'm not saying that nothing discovered within the large string theoretic complex 46:37.920 --> 46:38.920 is wrong. 46:38.920 --> 46:43.720 Quite the contrary, a lot of brilliant mathematics and a lot of the structure of physics was 46:43.720 --> 46:46.960 elucidated by string theorists. 46:46.960 --> 46:51.560 What do I think of the deliverable nature of this product that will not chip called 46:51.560 --> 46:52.560 string theory? 46:52.560 --> 46:57.560 I think that it is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and 46:57.560 --> 47:03.240 geometrically talented baby boomer physics physicists so that they can say that they're 47:03.240 --> 47:10.480 working on something within the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity. 47:10.480 --> 47:14.640 Now there are other schemes, you know, there's like asymptotic safety. 47:14.640 --> 47:17.080 There are other things that you could imagine doing. 47:17.080 --> 47:26.800 I don't think much of any of the major programs, but to have inflicted this level of loyalty 47:26.800 --> 47:27.800 through a shibboleth. 47:27.800 --> 47:29.520 Well, surely you don't question X. 47:29.520 --> 47:33.760 Well, I question almost everything in the string program and that's why I got out of 47:33.760 --> 47:35.600 physics when you called me a physicist. 47:35.600 --> 47:39.920 It was a great honor, but the reason I didn't become a physicist wasn't that I fell in 47:39.920 --> 47:40.920 love with mathematics. 47:40.920 --> 47:49.080 As I said, wow, in 1984, 1983, I saw the field going mad and I saw that mathematics, which 47:49.080 --> 47:53.000 has all sorts of problems, was not going insane. 47:53.000 --> 47:57.520 And so instead of studying things within physics, I thought it was much safer to study the same 47:57.520 --> 47:59.200 objects within mathematics. 47:59.200 --> 48:01.240 There's a huge price to pay for that. 48:01.240 --> 48:06.960 You lose physical intuition, but the point is that it wasn't a North Korean reeducation 48:06.960 --> 48:07.960 camp either. 48:07.960 --> 48:16.400 Are you hopeful about cracking open Einstein unified theory in a way that has really, really 48:16.400 --> 48:21.800 understanding whether this uniting everything together with quantum theory and so on? 48:21.800 --> 48:28.320 I mean, I'm trying to play this role myself to do it to the extent of handing it over 48:28.320 --> 48:35.280 to the more responsible, more professional, more competent community. 48:35.280 --> 48:39.920 So I think that they're wrong about a great number of their belief structures. 48:39.920 --> 48:45.280 But I do believe, I mean, I have a really profound love, hate relationship with this 48:45.280 --> 48:46.280 group of people. 48:46.280 --> 48:47.800 On the physics side. 48:47.800 --> 48:48.800 Oh, yeah. 48:48.800 --> 48:52.240 Because the mathematicians actually seem to be much more open minded and… 48:52.240 --> 48:58.040 Well, they are, and they're open minded about anything that looks like great math, right? 48:58.040 --> 49:01.800 They'll study something that isn't very important physics, but if it's beautiful mathematics, 49:01.800 --> 49:06.200 then they'll have great intuition about these things. 49:06.200 --> 49:10.880 As good as the mathematicians are, and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level 49:10.880 --> 49:19.280 give them the edge, the theoretical physics community is bar none the most profound intellectual 49:19.280 --> 49:22.040 community that we have ever created. 49:22.040 --> 49:26.120 It is the number one, there's nobody in second place as far as I'm concerned. 49:26.120 --> 49:30.520 In their spare time, in the spare time, they invented molecular biology. 49:30.520 --> 49:33.160 What was the origin of molecular biology? 49:33.160 --> 49:34.160 You're saying physics? 49:34.160 --> 49:35.160 Well, something like Francis Crick. 49:35.160 --> 49:39.200 I mean, a lot of the early molecular biologists were physicists. 49:39.200 --> 49:40.200 Yeah. 49:40.200 --> 49:42.760 I mean, you know, Schrodinger wrote, what is life? 49:42.760 --> 49:44.400 That was highly inspirational. 49:44.400 --> 49:53.320 I mean, you have to appreciate that there is no community like the basic research community 49:53.320 --> 49:55.000 in theoretical physics. 49:55.000 --> 49:59.360 And it's not something, I'm highly critical of these guys. 49:59.360 --> 50:08.440 I think that they would just wasted the decades of time with a near religious devotion to 50:08.440 --> 50:13.320 their misconception of where the problems were in physics. 50:13.320 --> 50:20.040 But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse ever witnessed within academics. 50:20.040 --> 50:22.320 You see it as a collapse or just a lull? 50:22.320 --> 50:26.000 Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality. 50:26.000 --> 50:29.320 We can't afford to pay these people. 50:29.320 --> 50:33.440 We can't afford to give them an accelerator just to play with in case they find something 50:33.440 --> 50:35.280 at the next energy level. 50:35.280 --> 50:38.400 These people created our economy. 50:38.400 --> 50:41.880 They gave us the Rad Lab and radar. 50:41.880 --> 50:45.600 They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II. 50:45.600 --> 50:51.680 They created the semiconductor and the transistor to power our economy through Moore's law. 50:51.680 --> 50:56.680 As a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the worldwide web. 50:56.680 --> 51:02.440 And we have the insolence to say, why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars? 51:02.440 --> 51:03.440 No. 51:03.440 --> 51:08.840 The question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars? 51:08.840 --> 51:12.800 These guys signed the world's worst licensing agreement. 51:12.800 --> 51:20.280 And if they simply charged for every time you used a transistor or a URL or enjoyed the 51:20.280 --> 51:25.680 piece that they have provided during this period of time through the terrible weapons 51:25.680 --> 51:31.000 that they developed or your communications devices, all of the things that power our 51:31.000 --> 51:35.240 economy, I really think came out of physics, even to the extent the chemistry came out 51:35.240 --> 51:38.040 of physics and molecular biology came out of physics. 51:38.040 --> 51:42.760 So first of all, you have to know that I'm very critical of this community. 51:42.760 --> 51:45.160 Second of all, it is our most important community. 51:45.160 --> 51:46.160 We have neglected it. 51:46.160 --> 51:47.640 We've abused it. 51:47.640 --> 51:49.780 We don't take it seriously. 51:49.780 --> 51:54.920 We don't even care to get them to rehab after a couple of generations of failure. 51:54.920 --> 52:01.920 I think the youngest person to have really contributed to the standard model of theoretical 52:01.920 --> 52:08.040 level was born in 1951, Frank Wilczek. 52:08.040 --> 52:15.840 And almost nothing has happened in theoretical physics after 1973, 1974, that sent somebody 52:15.840 --> 52:21.720 to Stockholm for theoretical development that predicted experiment. 52:21.720 --> 52:24.840 So we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves. 52:24.840 --> 52:31.320 Now with that said, these guys have behaved abysmally, in my opinion, because they haven't 52:31.320 --> 52:35.520 owned up to where they actually are, what problems they're really facing, how definite 52:35.520 --> 52:37.360 they can actually be. 52:37.360 --> 52:40.960 They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries which are desperately needed in 52:40.960 --> 52:45.880 other fields like gauge theory, which at least the mathematicians can share, which is an 52:45.880 --> 52:50.520 upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz, and they haven't shared the importance 52:50.520 --> 52:55.520 of renormalization theory, even though this should be standard operating procedure for 52:55.520 --> 53:00.920 people across the sciences dealing with different layers and different levels of phenomena. 53:00.920 --> 53:06.200 And by shared, you mean communicated in such a way that it disseminates throughout the 53:06.200 --> 53:07.200 different sciences as well. 53:07.200 --> 53:11.920 These guys are sitting, both theoretical physicists and mathematicians, are sitting on top of 53:11.920 --> 53:15.160 a giant stockpile of intellectual gold. 53:15.160 --> 53:19.720 They have so many things that have not been manifested anywhere. 53:19.720 --> 53:25.240 I was just on Twitter, I think I mentioned the Habermann switch pitch that shows the 53:25.240 --> 53:29.840 self duality of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism. 53:29.840 --> 53:36.720 This is like a triviality, and it makes an amazing toy that's built to market, hopefully 53:36.720 --> 53:38.680 a fortune for Chuck Habermann. 53:38.680 --> 53:44.720 Well, you have no idea how much great stuff that these priests have in their monastery. 53:44.720 --> 53:47.800 So it's truly a love and hate relationship for you. 53:47.800 --> 53:49.840 Well, it sounds like it's more on the love side. 53:49.840 --> 53:54.720 This building that we're in right here is the building in which I really put together 53:54.720 --> 54:00.120 the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, 54:00.120 --> 54:04.360 through the government university industry research roundtable, to destroy the bargaining 54:04.360 --> 54:11.040 power of American academics using foreign labor on microfeet in the base. 54:11.040 --> 54:13.240 Oh, yeah, that was done here in this building. 54:13.240 --> 54:14.240 Isn't that weird? 54:14.240 --> 54:18.120 I'm truly speaking with a revolutionary and a radical... 54:18.120 --> 54:20.200 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. 54:20.200 --> 54:25.200 At an intellectual level, I am absolutely garden variety. 54:25.200 --> 54:27.640 I'm just straight down the middle. 54:27.640 --> 54:34.800 The system that we are in, this university is functionally insane. 54:34.800 --> 54:36.840 Harvard is functionally insane. 54:36.840 --> 54:42.240 And we don't understand that when we get these things wrong, the financial crisis made 54:42.240 --> 54:43.640 this very clear. 54:43.640 --> 54:51.200 There was a long period where every grownup, everybody with a tie who spoke in baritone 54:51.200 --> 54:58.080 tones with the right degree at the end of their name, was talking about how we banished 54:58.080 --> 54:59.080 volatility. 54:59.080 --> 55:01.080 We were in the Great Moderation. 55:01.080 --> 55:04.160 Okay, they were all crazy. 55:04.160 --> 55:05.160 And who was right? 55:05.160 --> 55:08.520 It was like Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Rubini. 55:08.520 --> 55:14.040 Now what happens is that they claimed that the market went crazy, but the market didn't 55:14.040 --> 55:15.040 go crazy. 55:15.040 --> 55:16.240 The market had been crazy. 55:16.240 --> 55:18.600 And what happened is that it suddenly went sane. 55:18.600 --> 55:21.680 Well, that's where we are with academics. 55:21.680 --> 55:23.960 Academics right now is mad as a hatter. 55:23.960 --> 55:25.520 And it's absolutely evident. 55:25.520 --> 55:27.040 I can show you graph after graph. 55:27.040 --> 55:28.520 I can show you the internal discussions. 55:28.520 --> 55:31.000 I can show you the conspiracies. 55:31.000 --> 55:36.040 Harvard's dealing with one right now over its admissions policies for people of color 55:36.040 --> 55:38.360 who happen to come from Asia. 55:38.360 --> 55:41.400 All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going. 55:41.400 --> 55:46.440 What we're talking about, just while we're on the topic of revolutionaries, is we're 55:46.440 --> 55:50.120 talking about the danger of an outbreak of sanity. 55:50.120 --> 55:55.320 Yeah, you're the guy pointing out the elephant in the room here. 55:55.320 --> 55:57.160 The elephant has no clothes. 55:57.160 --> 55:59.560 Is that how that goes? 55:59.560 --> 56:07.680 I was going to talk a little bit to Joe Rogan about this at the time. 56:07.680 --> 56:13.400 I think you have some, just listening to you, you could probably speak really eloquently 56:13.400 --> 56:16.560 to academia on the difference between the different fields. 56:16.560 --> 56:21.680 So you think there's a difference between science, engineering, and then the humanities 56:21.680 --> 56:25.800 in academia in terms of tolerance that they're willing to tolerate? 56:25.800 --> 56:33.000 So from my perspective, I thought computer science and maybe engineering is more tolerant 56:33.000 --> 56:36.560 to radical ideas, but that's perhaps innocent of me. 56:36.560 --> 56:40.960 Because I always, all the battles going on now are a little bit more on the humanities 56:40.960 --> 56:43.240 side than gender studies and so on. 56:43.240 --> 56:48.520 Have you seen the American Mathematical Society's publication of an essay called Get Out the 56:48.520 --> 56:49.520 Way? 56:49.520 --> 56:50.520 I have not. 56:50.520 --> 56:57.960 What's the idea is that white men who hold positions within universities and mathematics 56:57.960 --> 57:04.000 should vacate their positions so that young black women can take over something like this? 57:04.000 --> 57:07.240 That's in terms of diversity, which I also want to ask you about, but in terms of diversity 57:07.240 --> 57:15.000 of strictly ideas, do you think, because you're basically saying physics as a community has 57:15.000 --> 57:20.480 become a little bit intolerant to some degree to new radical ideas? 57:20.480 --> 57:21.480 Or at least you said that. 57:21.480 --> 57:27.120 Well, it's changed a little bit recently, which is that even string theory is now admitting, 57:27.120 --> 57:32.960 okay, we don't, this doesn't look very promising in the short term. 57:32.960 --> 57:39.760 So the question is what compiles if you want to take the computer science metaphor? 57:39.760 --> 57:42.040 What will get you into a journal? 57:42.040 --> 57:47.080 Will you spend your life trying to push some paper into a journal or will it be accepted 57:47.080 --> 57:48.080 easily? 57:48.080 --> 57:54.560 What do we know about the characteristics of the submitter and what gets taken up and 57:54.560 --> 57:56.680 what does not? 57:56.680 --> 58:01.680 All of these fields are experiencing pressure because no field is performing so brilliantly 58:01.680 --> 58:11.320 well that it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking in the ways in which 58:11.320 --> 58:12.920 we've become accustomed. 58:12.920 --> 58:19.360 But don't you think even in theoretical physics, a lot of times, even with theories like string 58:19.360 --> 58:24.200 theory, you can speak to this, it does eventually lead to what are the ways that this theory 58:24.200 --> 58:25.200 would be testable? 58:25.200 --> 58:32.160 Ultimately, although look, there's this thing about Popper and the scientific method that's 58:32.160 --> 58:36.360 a cancer and a disease in the minds of very smart people. 58:36.360 --> 58:39.840 That's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out. 58:39.840 --> 58:42.560 It's how it gets checked. 58:42.560 --> 58:45.680 And there is a dialogue between theory and experiment. 58:45.680 --> 58:57.240 But everybody should read Paul Dirac's 1963 scientific American article where it's very 58:57.240 --> 58:58.240 interesting. 58:58.240 --> 59:03.160 He talks about it as if it was about the Schrodinger equation and Schrodinger's failure to advance 59:03.160 --> 59:06.320 his own work because of his failure to account for some phenomenon. 59:06.320 --> 59:10.400 The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off, it won't agree with experiment, 59:10.400 --> 59:13.600 but it doesn't mean that the theory is actually wrong. 59:13.600 --> 59:18.720 But Dirac could as easily have been talking about his own equation in which he predicted 59:18.720 --> 59:22.440 that the electrons should have an antiparticle. 59:22.440 --> 59:26.840 And since the only positively charged particle that was known at the time was the proton, 59:26.840 --> 59:30.760 Heisenberg pointed out, well, shouldn't your antiparticle, the proton have the same mass 59:30.760 --> 59:31.760 as the electron? 59:31.760 --> 59:33.640 And doesn't that invalidate your theory? 59:33.640 --> 59:39.400 So I think that Dirac was actually being potentially quite sneaky and talking about the fact that 59:39.400 --> 59:43.960 he had been pushed off of his own theory to some extent by Heisenberg. 59:43.960 --> 59:51.520 But look, we've fetishized the scientific method and popper and falsification because 59:51.520 --> 59:55.580 it protects us from crazy ideas entering the field. 59:55.580 --> 1:00:00.120 So it's a question of balancing type one and type two error, and we're pretty maxed 1:00:00.120 --> 1:00:01.560 out in one direction. 1:00:01.560 --> 1:00:08.280 The opposite of that, let me say what comforts me, biology or engineering, at the end of 1:00:08.280 --> 1:00:10.760 the day, does the thing work? 1:00:10.760 --> 1:00:11.760 Yeah. 1:00:11.760 --> 1:00:14.760 You can test the crazies away. 1:00:14.760 --> 1:00:19.520 The crazy, well, see, now you're saying, but some ideas are truly crazy and some are actually 1:00:19.520 --> 1:00:20.520 correct. 1:00:20.520 --> 1:00:24.000 So, well, there's pre correct, currently crazy. 1:00:24.000 --> 1:00:25.000 Yeah. 1:00:25.000 --> 1:00:26.000 Right. 1:00:26.000 --> 1:00:31.520 And so you don't want to get rid of everybody who's pre correct and currently crazy. 1:00:31.520 --> 1:00:37.480 The problem is, is that we don't have standards in general for trying to determine who has 1:00:37.480 --> 1:00:43.840 to be put to the sword in terms of their career and who has to be protected as some sort of 1:00:43.840 --> 1:00:47.920 giant time suck pain in the ass, who may change everything. 1:00:47.920 --> 1:00:51.200 Do you think that's possible, creating a mechanism of those select? 1:00:51.200 --> 1:00:55.200 Well, you're not going to like the answer, but here it comes. 1:00:55.200 --> 1:00:59.400 It has to do with very human elements. 1:00:59.400 --> 1:01:02.560 We're trying to do this at the level of like rules and fairness. 1:01:02.560 --> 1:01:10.160 That's not going to work because the only thing that really understands this, you know, 1:01:10.160 --> 1:01:16.120 read the, read the double helix, it's a book, oh, you have to read this book. 1:01:16.120 --> 1:01:22.280 Not only did Jim Watson half discover this three dimensional structure DNA, he's also 1:01:22.280 --> 1:01:28.640 one hell of a writer before he became an ass that, no, he, he's tried to destroy his 1:01:28.640 --> 1:01:29.640 own reputation. 1:01:29.640 --> 1:01:33.080 I knew about the ass, I didn't know about the good writer. 1:01:33.080 --> 1:01:36.200 Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living. 1:01:36.200 --> 1:01:44.840 And as I've said before, Jim Watson is too important a legacy to be left to Jim Watson. 1:01:44.840 --> 1:01:49.480 That book tells you more about what actually moves the dial, right? 1:01:49.480 --> 1:01:53.680 There's another story about him, which I don't, don't agree with, which is that he stole everything 1:01:53.680 --> 1:01:54.680 from Rosalind Franklin. 1:01:54.680 --> 1:01:59.560 I mean, the problems that he had with Rosalind Franklin are real, but we should actually 1:01:59.560 --> 1:02:05.320 honor that tension in our history by delving into it rather than having a simple solution. 1:02:05.320 --> 1:02:10.160 Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick being a pain in the ass that everybody secretly 1:02:10.160 --> 1:02:12.840 knew was super brilliant. 1:02:12.840 --> 1:02:19.240 And there's an encounter between Chargaff who came up with the, the equimolar relations 1:02:19.240 --> 1:02:25.120 between the nucleotides who should have gotten the structure of DNA and Watson and Crick. 1:02:25.120 --> 1:02:30.880 And you know, he talks about missing a shiver in the heartbeat of biology and stuff is so 1:02:30.880 --> 1:02:36.440 gorgeous and just makes you tremble even thinking about it. 1:02:36.440 --> 1:02:45.160 Look, we know very often who is to be feared and we need to fund the people that we fear. 1:02:45.160 --> 1:02:49.720 The people who are wasting our time need to be excluded from the conversation. 1:02:49.720 --> 1:02:55.000 You see, and you know, maybe we'll make some errors in both directions. 1:02:55.000 --> 1:02:58.200 But we have known our own people. 1:02:58.200 --> 1:03:02.480 We know the pains in the asses that might work out and we know the people who are really 1:03:02.480 --> 1:03:06.760 just blowhards who really have very little to contribute most of the time. 1:03:06.760 --> 1:03:10.160 It's not 100%, but you're not going to get there with rules. 1:03:10.160 --> 1:03:11.160 Right. 1:03:11.160 --> 1:03:12.720 It's using some kind of instinct. 1:03:12.720 --> 1:03:18.840 I mean, to be honest, I'm going to make you roll your eyes for a second, but in the first 1:03:18.840 --> 1:03:24.000 time I heard that there is a large community of people who believe the earth is flat actually 1:03:24.000 --> 1:03:28.520 made me pause and ask myself the question, why would there be such a community? 1:03:28.520 --> 1:03:30.280 Is it possible the earth is flat? 1:03:30.280 --> 1:03:33.160 So I had to like, wait a minute. 1:03:33.160 --> 1:03:37.640 I mean, then you go through a thinking process that I think is really healthy. 1:03:37.640 --> 1:03:39.600 It ultimately ends up being a geometry thing. 1:03:39.600 --> 1:03:45.240 I think it's an interesting thought experiment at the very least. 1:03:45.240 --> 1:03:46.560 I do a different version of it. 1:03:46.560 --> 1:03:48.440 I say, why is this community stable? 1:03:48.440 --> 1:03:49.440 Yeah. 1:03:49.440 --> 1:03:52.120 That's a good way to analyze it. 1:03:52.120 --> 1:03:56.040 Something that whatever we've done has not erased the community. 1:03:56.040 --> 1:04:00.680 So you know, they're taking a long shot bet that won't pan out, you know, maybe we just 1:04:00.680 --> 1:04:04.600 haven't thought enough about the rationality of the square root of two and somebody brilliant 1:04:04.600 --> 1:04:05.600 will figure it out. 1:04:05.600 --> 1:04:11.520 Maybe we will eventually land one day on the surface of Jupiter and explore it, right? 1:04:11.520 --> 1:04:14.240 These are crazy things that will never happen. 1:04:14.240 --> 1:04:17.600 So much of social media operates by AI algorithms. 1:04:17.600 --> 1:04:22.000 We talked about this a little bit, uh, recommending the content you see. 1:04:22.000 --> 1:04:28.200 So on this idea of radical thought, how much should AI show you things you disagree with 1:04:28.200 --> 1:04:34.440 on Twitter and so on in a Twitter word verse in the, in this question. 1:04:34.440 --> 1:04:35.440 Yeah. 1:04:35.440 --> 1:04:36.440 Yeah. 1:04:36.440 --> 1:04:37.440 Cause you don't know the answer. 1:04:37.440 --> 1:04:38.440 No. 1:04:38.440 --> 1:04:39.440 No, no, no. 1:04:39.440 --> 1:04:45.960 Look, we've been, they pushed out this cognitive Lego to us that will just lead to madness. 1:04:45.960 --> 1:04:49.440 It's good to be challenged with things that you disagree with. 1:04:49.440 --> 1:04:53.920 The answer is no, it's good to be challenged with interesting things with which you currently 1:04:53.920 --> 1:04:56.640 disagree, but that might be true. 1:04:56.640 --> 1:05:00.400 So I don't really care about whether or not I disagree with something or don't disagree. 1:05:00.400 --> 1:05:05.480 I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing is being pushed out. 1:05:05.480 --> 1:05:07.120 Is it because it's likely to be true? 1:05:07.120 --> 1:05:09.880 Is it because, is there some reason? 1:05:09.880 --> 1:05:14.400 Because I can write, I can write a computer generator, uh, to come up with an infinite 1:05:14.400 --> 1:05:17.720 number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at. 1:05:17.720 --> 1:05:22.920 So please, before you push things at me that are disagreeable, tell me why. 1:05:22.920 --> 1:05:26.200 There is an aspect in which that question is quite dumb, especially because it's being 1:05:26.200 --> 1:05:34.120 used to, uh, almost, uh, uh, very generically by these different networks to say, well, 1:05:34.120 --> 1:05:35.600 we're trying to work this out. 1:05:35.600 --> 1:05:43.720 But you know, basically, uh, how much do you see the value of seeing things you don't like? 1:05:43.720 --> 1:05:47.640 That you disagree with, because it's very difficult to know exactly what you articulated, 1:05:47.640 --> 1:05:53.440 which is, uh, the stuff that's important for you to consider that you disagree with. 1:05:53.440 --> 1:05:55.040 That's really hard to figure out. 1:05:55.040 --> 1:05:57.240 The bottom line is the stuff you don't like. 1:05:57.240 --> 1:06:03.040 If you're a, uh, uh, Hillary Clinton supporter, you may not want to, it might not make you 1:06:03.040 --> 1:06:05.960 feel good to see anything about Donald Trump. 1:06:05.960 --> 1:06:08.400 That's the only thing algorithms can really optimize for currently. 1:06:08.400 --> 1:06:09.400 They really can't. 1:06:09.400 --> 1:06:10.640 No, they can do better. 1:06:10.640 --> 1:06:12.440 This is, we're, we're, we're, we think so. 1:06:12.440 --> 1:06:21.640 No, we're engaged in some moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people who 1:06:21.640 --> 1:06:27.560 are capable of building Google, Facebook, Twitter are having us in these incredibly 1:06:27.560 --> 1:06:28.920 low level discussions. 1:06:28.920 --> 1:06:31.200 Do they not know any smart people? 1:06:31.200 --> 1:06:36.120 Do they not have the phone numbers of people who can elevate these discussions? 1:06:36.120 --> 1:06:41.200 They do, but this, they're optimizing for a different thing and they're pushing those 1:06:41.200 --> 1:06:42.400 people out of those rooms. 1:06:42.400 --> 1:06:48.480 They're, they're optimizing for things we can't see and yes, profit is there. 1:06:48.480 --> 1:06:54.640 Nobody, nobody's questioning that, but they're also optimizing for things like political 1:06:54.640 --> 1:06:57.640 control or the fact that they're doing business in Pakistan. 1:06:57.640 --> 1:07:01.120 And so they don't want to talk about all the things that they're going to be bending 1:07:01.120 --> 1:07:03.360 to in Pakistan. 1:07:03.360 --> 1:07:06.880 So we're, we're involved in a fake discussion. 1:07:06.880 --> 1:07:07.960 You think so. 1:07:07.960 --> 1:07:11.360 You think these conversations at that depth, they're happening inside Google. 1:07:11.360 --> 1:07:15.840 You don't think they have some basic metrics under our user engagements. 1:07:15.840 --> 1:07:18.320 You're having a fake conversation with us guys. 1:07:18.320 --> 1:07:19.880 We know you're having a fake conversation. 1:07:19.880 --> 1:07:23.720 I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation. 1:07:23.720 --> 1:07:29.000 You know how to cool, you know, these units, you know, high availability like nobody's 1:07:29.000 --> 1:07:30.000 business. 1:07:30.000 --> 1:07:32.720 My Gmail never goes down almost. 1:07:32.720 --> 1:07:38.400 See, you think just because they can do incredible work on the software side with infrastructure, 1:07:38.400 --> 1:07:46.440 they can also deal with some of these difficult questions about human behavior, human understanding. 1:07:46.440 --> 1:07:47.440 You're not. 1:07:47.440 --> 1:07:53.560 I mean, I've seen the, I've seen the developers screens that people take shots of inside of 1:07:53.560 --> 1:07:54.560 Google. 1:07:54.560 --> 1:07:55.560 Yeah. 1:07:55.560 --> 1:07:58.560 And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple. 1:07:58.560 --> 1:08:04.160 We're not, we're engaged, they're engaging us in the wrong conversations. 1:08:04.160 --> 1:08:06.280 We're not at this low level. 1:08:06.280 --> 1:08:08.320 Here's one of my favorite questions. 1:08:08.320 --> 1:08:17.320 Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase in tech space equipped as a listening device? 1:08:17.320 --> 1:08:19.800 Where's my physical shutter to cover my lens? 1:08:19.800 --> 1:08:26.080 We had this in the 1970s, cameras that had lens caps, you know, how much would it cost 1:08:26.080 --> 1:08:29.920 to have a security model, pay five extra bucks? 1:08:29.920 --> 1:08:33.120 Why is my indicator light software controlled? 1:08:33.120 --> 1:08:38.000 Why when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on by putting it as something 1:08:38.000 --> 1:08:39.800 that cannot be bypassed? 1:08:39.800 --> 1:08:45.480 Why have you set up my, all of my devices at some difficulty to yourselves as listening 1:08:45.480 --> 1:08:47.760 devices and we don't even talk about this? 1:08:47.760 --> 1:08:50.880 This is, this thing is total fucking bullshit. 1:08:50.880 --> 1:08:53.160 Well, I hope, wait, wait, wait. 1:08:53.160 --> 1:08:55.400 These discussions are happening about privacy. 1:08:55.400 --> 1:08:57.120 Is there a diff, more difficult than you're given? 1:08:57.120 --> 1:08:58.320 It's not just privacy. 1:08:58.320 --> 1:08:59.320 Yeah. 1:08:59.320 --> 1:09:01.160 It's about social control. 1:09:01.160 --> 1:09:03.680 We're talking about social control. 1:09:03.680 --> 1:09:07.240 Why do I not have controls over my own levers? 1:09:07.240 --> 1:09:11.800 I just have a really cute UI where I can switch, I can dial things or I can at least see what 1:09:11.800 --> 1:09:13.440 the algorithms are. 1:09:13.440 --> 1:09:17.480 You think that there is some deliberate choices being made here. 1:09:17.480 --> 1:09:21.680 There is emergence and there is intention. 1:09:21.680 --> 1:09:23.000 There are two dimensions. 1:09:23.000 --> 1:09:26.480 The vector does not collapse onto either axis. 1:09:26.480 --> 1:09:34.560 But the idea that anybody who suggests that intention is completely absent is a child. 1:09:34.560 --> 1:09:39.520 It's really beautifully put and like many things you've said is going to make me think. 1:09:39.520 --> 1:09:40.840 Can I turn this around slightly? 1:09:40.840 --> 1:09:41.840 Yeah. 1:09:41.840 --> 1:09:45.680 I sit down with you and you say that you're obsessed with my feed. 1:09:45.680 --> 1:09:47.720 I don't even know what my feed is. 1:09:47.720 --> 1:09:49.680 What are you seeing that I'm not? 1:09:49.680 --> 1:09:54.840 I was obsessively looking through your feed on Twitter because it was really enjoyable 1:09:54.840 --> 1:09:57.920 because it was the Tom Laird element, is the humor in it. 1:09:57.920 --> 1:10:03.280 By the way, that feed is Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter, Eric R. Weinstein. 1:10:03.280 --> 1:10:06.760 No, seriously, why? 1:10:06.760 --> 1:10:10.200 Why did I find it enjoyable or what was I seeing? 1:10:10.200 --> 1:10:11.200 What are you looking for? 1:10:11.200 --> 1:10:13.040 Why are we doing this? 1:10:13.040 --> 1:10:14.800 What is this podcast about? 1:10:14.800 --> 1:10:16.480 I know you've got all these interesting people. 1:10:16.480 --> 1:10:19.040 I'm just some guy who's sort of a podcast guest. 1:10:19.040 --> 1:10:21.440 Sort of a podcast. 1:10:21.440 --> 1:10:22.440 You're not even wearing a tie. 1:10:22.440 --> 1:10:27.640 I mean, it's not even a serious interview. 1:10:27.640 --> 1:10:33.680 I'm searching for meaning, for happiness, for a dopamine rush, so short term and long 1:10:33.680 --> 1:10:34.680 term. 1:10:34.680 --> 1:10:37.160 How are you finding your way to me? 1:10:37.160 --> 1:10:41.440 I don't honestly know what I'm doing to reach you. 1:10:41.440 --> 1:10:48.000 The representing ideas, which feel common sense to me and not many people are speaking, 1:10:48.000 --> 1:10:54.680 so it's kind of like the intellectual dark web folks. 1:10:54.680 --> 1:11:00.040 These folks, from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson to yourself, are saying things where it's 1:11:00.040 --> 1:11:05.440 like you're saying, look, there's an elephant, he's not wearing any clothes. 1:11:05.440 --> 1:11:09.560 And I say, yeah, yeah, let's have more of that conversation. 1:11:09.560 --> 1:11:10.920 That's how I'm finding it. 1:11:10.920 --> 1:11:14.680 I'm desperate to try to change the conversation we're having. 1:11:14.680 --> 1:11:17.360 I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020. 1:11:17.360 --> 1:11:23.920 I don't think we can afford four more years of a misinterpreted message, which is what 1:11:23.920 --> 1:11:25.760 Donald Trump was. 1:11:25.760 --> 1:11:28.360 And I don't want the destruction of our institutions. 1:11:28.360 --> 1:11:30.680 They all seem hell bent on destroying themselves. 1:11:30.680 --> 1:11:34.880 So I'm trying to save theoretical physics, trying to save the New York Times, trying 1:11:34.880 --> 1:11:38.280 to save our various processes. 1:11:38.280 --> 1:11:44.480 And I think it feels delusional to me that this is falling to a tiny group of people 1:11:44.480 --> 1:11:49.720 who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out that everything they say will 1:11:49.720 --> 1:11:52.800 be misinterpreted and that their lives will be ruined through the process. 1:11:52.800 --> 1:11:57.560 I mean, I think we're in an absolutely bananas period of time and I don't believe it should 1:11:57.560 --> 1:12:02.560 fall to such a tiny number of shoulders to shoulder this weight. 1:12:02.560 --> 1:12:08.040 So I have to ask you on the capitalism side, you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism 1:12:08.040 --> 1:12:15.240 or has effects that are unintended, well, not unintended, but not what economists would 1:12:15.240 --> 1:12:18.760 predict or speak of capitalism creating. 1:12:18.760 --> 1:12:23.560 I just want to talk to you about in general, the effect of even then artificial intelligence 1:12:23.560 --> 1:12:29.000 or technology automation taking away jobs and these kinds of things and what you think 1:12:29.000 --> 1:12:34.240 is the way to alleviate that, whether the Andrew Ang presidential candidate with universal 1:12:34.240 --> 1:12:38.800 basic income, UBI, what are your thoughts there? 1:12:38.800 --> 1:12:42.280 How do we fight off the negative effects of technology that 1:12:42.280 --> 1:12:43.280 All right. 1:12:43.280 --> 1:12:44.280 You're a software guy, right? 1:12:44.280 --> 1:12:45.280 Yep. 1:12:45.280 --> 1:12:48.880 A human being is a worker is an old idea. 1:12:48.880 --> 1:12:49.880 Yes. 1:12:49.880 --> 1:12:53.400 A human being has a worker is a different object, right? 1:12:53.400 --> 1:12:54.400 Yes. 1:12:54.400 --> 1:12:59.600 So if you think about object oriented programming as a paradigm, a human being has a worker 1:12:59.600 --> 1:13:01.920 and a human being has a soul. 1:13:01.920 --> 1:13:07.760 We're talking about the fact that for a period of time, the worker that a human being has 1:13:07.760 --> 1:13:11.680 was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has. 1:13:11.680 --> 1:13:18.280 However, we have two separate claims on the value in society. 1:13:18.280 --> 1:13:22.600 One is as a worker and the other is as a soul and the soul needs sustenance. 1:13:22.600 --> 1:13:23.600 It needs dignity. 1:13:23.600 --> 1:13:24.600 It needs meaning. 1:13:24.600 --> 1:13:27.480 It needs purpose. 1:13:27.480 --> 1:13:34.680 As long as your means of support is not highly repetitive, I think you have a while to go 1:13:34.680 --> 1:13:39.960 before you need to start worrying, but if what you do is highly repetitive and it's 1:13:39.960 --> 1:13:46.040 not terribly generative, you are in the crosshairs of four loops and while loops. 1:13:46.040 --> 1:13:48.160 And that's what computers excel at. 1:13:48.160 --> 1:13:53.200 Repetitive behavior and when I say repetitive, I may mean things that have never happened 1:13:53.200 --> 1:13:56.800 be through combinatorial possibilities, but as long as it has a looped characteristic 1:13:56.800 --> 1:13:59.040 to it, you're in trouble. 1:13:59.040 --> 1:14:07.200 We are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address the 1:14:07.200 --> 1:14:10.800 fact that a worker may not be able to make claims. 1:14:10.800 --> 1:14:17.960 A relatively undistinguished median member of our society still has needs to reproduce, 1:14:17.960 --> 1:14:27.680 needs to dignity, and when capitalism abandons the median individual or the bottom tenth 1:14:27.680 --> 1:14:32.720 or whatever it's going to do, it's flirting with revolution. 1:14:32.720 --> 1:14:37.680 And what concerns me is that the capitalists aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand 1:14:37.680 --> 1:14:39.320 this. 1:14:39.320 --> 1:14:45.160 You really want to court authoritarian control in our society because you can't see that 1:14:45.160 --> 1:14:49.960 people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the marginal product 1:14:49.960 --> 1:14:55.120 of their labor is too low to feed their dignity as a soul. 1:14:55.120 --> 1:15:02.280 So my great concern is that our free society has to do with the fact that we are self organized. 1:15:02.280 --> 1:15:06.360 I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan when Lehman Brothers collapsed 1:15:06.360 --> 1:15:11.920 and thinking, who's going to tell all these people that they need to show up at work when 1:15:11.920 --> 1:15:17.520 they don't have a financial system to incentivize them to show up at work? 1:15:17.520 --> 1:15:22.040 So my complaint is, first of all, not with the socialists, but with the capitalists, 1:15:22.040 --> 1:15:28.200 which is you guys are being idiots, you're courting revolution by continuing to harp 1:15:28.200 --> 1:15:32.880 on the same old ideas that, well, try harder, bootstrap yourself. 1:15:32.880 --> 1:15:36.400 Yeah, to an extent that works, to an extent. 1:15:36.400 --> 1:15:41.040 But we are clearly headed into a place that there's nothing that ties together, our need 1:15:41.040 --> 1:15:45.560 to contribute and our need to consume. 1:15:45.560 --> 1:15:49.520 And that may not be provided by capitalism because it may have been a temporary phenomena. 1:15:49.520 --> 1:15:55.480 So check out my article on anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy. 1:15:55.480 --> 1:16:00.320 I think people are late getting the wake up call and we would be doing a better job saving 1:16:00.320 --> 1:16:05.840 capitalism from itself because I don't want this done under authoritarian control. 1:16:05.840 --> 1:16:11.080 And the more we insist that everybody who's not thriving in our society during their reproductive 1:16:11.080 --> 1:16:17.240 years in order to have a family is failing at a personal level, I mean, what a disgusting 1:16:17.240 --> 1:16:22.280 thing that we're saying, what a horrible message, who the hell have we become that we've so 1:16:22.280 --> 1:16:27.360 bought into the Chicago model that we can't see the humanity that we're destroying in 1:16:27.360 --> 1:16:28.360 that process. 1:16:28.360 --> 1:16:32.160 And I hate the thought of communism, I really do. 1:16:32.160 --> 1:16:37.240 My family has flirted with it decades past, it's a wrong bad idea, but we are going to 1:16:37.240 --> 1:16:43.920 need to figure out how to make sure that those souls are nourished and respected and capitalism 1:16:43.920 --> 1:16:44.920 better have an answer. 1:16:44.920 --> 1:16:48.240 And I'm betting on capitalism, but I gotta tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with my 1:16:48.240 --> 1:16:49.240 team. 1:16:49.240 --> 1:16:55.280 So you're still on the capitalism team, you just, there's a theme here, radical, radical 1:16:55.280 --> 1:16:56.280 capitalism. 1:16:56.280 --> 1:17:02.040 I want, I think hyper capitalism is going to have to be coupled to hyper socialism. 1:17:02.040 --> 1:17:07.580 You need to allow the most productive people to create wonders and you got to stop bogging 1:17:07.580 --> 1:17:14.760 them down with all of these extra nice requirements, you know, nice is dead, good has a future. 1:17:14.760 --> 1:17:20.400 This doesn't have a future because nice ends up with, with gulags, damn, that's a good 1:17:20.400 --> 1:17:21.400 line. 1:17:21.400 --> 1:17:22.400 Okay. 1:17:22.400 --> 1:17:23.400 Last question. 1:17:23.400 --> 1:17:30.520 You tweeted today, a simple, quite insightful equation saying, uh, imagine that every unit 1:17:30.520 --> 1:17:35.760 F of fame you picked up as stalkers and H haters. 1:17:35.760 --> 1:17:39.520 So I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame, perhaps a little bit. 1:17:39.520 --> 1:17:42.680 Well, it's not a simple, I mean, people always take these things literally when you have 1:17:42.680 --> 1:17:46.040 like 280 characters to explain yourself. 1:17:46.040 --> 1:17:50.320 So you mean that that's not a mathematical, uh, no, there's no law. 1:17:50.320 --> 1:17:51.320 Oh, okay. 1:17:51.320 --> 1:17:52.320 All right. 1:17:52.320 --> 1:17:55.400 I just said, I put the word imagine because I still have a mathematician's desire for 1:17:55.400 --> 1:17:56.400 precision. 1:17:56.400 --> 1:17:57.400 Yeah. 1:17:57.400 --> 1:18:01.600 Imagine that this were true, but it was a beautiful way to imagine that there is a law that has 1:18:01.600 --> 1:18:06.840 those variables in it and, uh, you've become quite famous these days. 1:18:06.840 --> 1:18:12.600 So how do you yourself optimize that equation with the peculiar kind of fame that you have 1:18:12.600 --> 1:18:13.720 gathered along the way? 1:18:13.720 --> 1:18:14.720 I want to be kinder. 1:18:14.720 --> 1:18:16.160 I want to be kinder to myself. 1:18:16.160 --> 1:18:17.360 I want to be kinder to others. 1:18:17.360 --> 1:18:23.000 I want to be able to have heart, compassion. 1:18:23.000 --> 1:18:27.960 These things are really important and, uh, I have a pretty spectromy kind of approach 1:18:27.960 --> 1:18:28.960 to analysis. 1:18:28.960 --> 1:18:29.960 I'm quite literal. 1:18:29.960 --> 1:18:32.880 I can go full rain man on you at any given moment. 1:18:32.880 --> 1:18:33.880 No, I can't. 1:18:33.880 --> 1:18:34.880 I can. 1:18:34.880 --> 1:18:37.640 Uh, it's faculty of autism, if you like, and people are going to get angry because they 1:18:37.640 --> 1:18:39.280 want autism to be respected. 1:18:39.280 --> 1:18:46.920 But when you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics, I'm, you know, I speak with speech 1:18:46.920 --> 1:18:47.920 apnea. 1:18:47.920 --> 1:18:54.520 Uh, uh, uh, be right down to dinner, you know, we have to try to integrate ourselves and those 1:18:54.520 --> 1:19:00.920 tensions between, you know, it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul. 1:19:00.920 --> 1:19:06.000 Many of us are optimizing one to the, at the expense of the other. 1:19:06.000 --> 1:19:11.640 And I struggle with social media and I struggle with people making threats against our families 1:19:11.640 --> 1:19:15.960 and I struggle with, um, just how much pain people are in. 1:19:15.960 --> 1:19:21.960 And if there's one message I would like to push out there, um, you're responsible, everybody, 1:19:21.960 --> 1:19:27.640 all of us, myself included with struggling, struggle, struggle mightily because you, 1:19:27.640 --> 1:19:30.400 it's nobody else's job to do your struggle for you. 1:19:30.400 --> 1:19:34.360 Now, with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure 1:19:34.360 --> 1:19:38.160 out how to better yourself and where you've failed and where you've let down your family, 1:19:38.160 --> 1:19:43.560 your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break. 1:19:43.560 --> 1:19:48.880 You know, if, if, if it's not working out, I have a lifelong relationship with failure 1:19:48.880 --> 1:19:49.880 and success. 1:19:49.880 --> 1:19:56.320 There's been no period of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another. 1:19:56.320 --> 1:20:00.720 And I do wish to say that a lot of times people think this is glamorous. 1:20:00.720 --> 1:20:05.200 I'm about to go, you know, do a show with Sam Harris, people are going to listen in 1:20:05.200 --> 1:20:07.360 on two guys having a conversation on stage. 1:20:07.360 --> 1:20:08.360 It's completely crazy. 1:20:08.360 --> 1:20:11.720 Well, I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum 1:20:11.720 --> 1:20:18.320 value and, uh, that's why I'm doing this podcast, you know, just give yourself a break. 1:20:18.320 --> 1:20:20.560 You owe us, you owe us your struggle. 1:20:20.560 --> 1:20:26.000 You don't owe your family or your coworkers or your lovers or your family members success. 1:20:26.000 --> 1:20:30.680 Um, as long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up, recognize that this 1:20:30.680 --> 1:20:37.040 this new situation with the economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions 1:20:37.040 --> 1:20:41.760 has caused the people who've risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal 1:20:41.760 --> 1:20:43.800 and cruel. 1:20:43.800 --> 1:20:45.400 Everybody is lying at the moment. 1:20:45.400 --> 1:20:47.440 Nobody's really a truth teller. 1:20:47.440 --> 1:20:50.280 Um, try to keep your humanity about you. 1:20:50.280 --> 1:20:55.200 Try to recognize that if you're failing, if things aren't where you want them to be and 1:20:55.200 --> 1:20:57.680 you're struggling and you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, which you could 1:20:57.680 --> 1:20:58.680 do. 1:20:58.680 --> 1:21:01.360 It's not necessarily all your fault. 1:21:01.360 --> 1:21:02.960 We are in a global situation. 1:21:02.960 --> 1:21:08.640 I have not met the people who are honest, kind, good, successful. 1:21:08.640 --> 1:21:12.040 Nobody that I've met is chick is checking all the boxes. 1:21:12.040 --> 1:21:14.560 Uh, nobody's getting all 10s. 1:21:14.560 --> 1:21:18.960 So I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough. 1:21:18.960 --> 1:21:24.040 Either people want to hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable. 1:21:24.040 --> 1:21:25.040 You have to struggle. 1:21:25.040 --> 1:21:26.040 You have to try. 1:21:26.040 --> 1:21:32.160 Or they want to say you're 100% responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense. 1:21:32.160 --> 1:21:33.160 Beautifully put. 1:21:33.160 --> 1:21:34.400 Eric, thank you so much for talking today. 1:21:34.400 --> 1:21:56.360 Thanks for having me, buddy.