The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, his fourth time on the podcast, both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind, and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being who I am fortunate to call a friend. Quick mention of our sponsors, indeed, hiring site, thoroughgoing muscle recovery device, win access online wine store and blankest app that summarizes books. Click the sponsored links to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note.

Let me ask that whenever we touch difficult topics and this or other conversations that you listen with an open mind and forgive me or the guests for a misstep in an imperfectly thought out statement to have any chance. The truth, I think we have to take risks and make mistakes in conversation and then learn from those mistakes. Please try not to close your mind and heart to others because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea. Try to assume that the people in this conversation are just people in general are good but not perfect and far from it, but always striving to add a bit more love into the world in whatever way we know how.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review Adap.tv podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter, Hilex Friedemann, as usual. I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but I'll give you time stamps. So if you skip, please, to check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

This episode is brought to you by indeed a hiring website, I've used them as part of all the hiring efforts I've done for the engineering teams I've led.

The main point, I think, is to go from the initial posting to a shortlist of great candidates as quickly as possible. They search through millions of resumes and instantly show you good candidates and indeed delivers for X more hires than all other job sites combined. As a small side comment, I think getting a good pool of candidates is really difficult. But of course, a critical part is those final steps in figuring out which is the perfect candidate through the interview process.

That partizan you or me when I'm hiring. I've learned a lot about this process, actually, but it's still incredibly challenging anyway. Right now, listeners get a free 75 dollar credit to upgrade your job post and indeed, Dotcom Friedman, however the heck is my last name. This is India's best offer available anywhere I get it. And indeed, Dot Slash Friedman F.R. Idi Amin offer valid through March 31st. Terms and conditions apply to. I really have to say that part.

I don't know. OK, this show is also brought to you by their gun, a hand-held percussive therapy device that I use after hard running or bodyweight exercise sessions for muscle recovery and easing muscle tension. A lot of elite athletes use it, but it's also good for regular folks like me. It's surprisingly quiet, easy to use comes with a great app that guides you through everything you need to know.

Recently I've been training, though not as much as I would like for the Gorgons. Four by four by forty eight challenge on March 5th. You should check out details on Gorgons Challenge Dotcom if you want to join me and Mr. David Goggins in this madness. Anyway, their gun is a part of the massive recovery in this training process that I'm going through. Try them for thirty days. There is no substitute for the thare gun gen four with an all that screen personalize their gun app and the quiet power you need.

That sounds pretty badass. Starting at one hundred and ninety dollars, go to their Garden.com slash leks. That's Therrell gun dot com slash likes. This podcast is also sponsored by Wine Access Online Store with expertly selected wine. This is a new sponsor and an awesome one. They make it easy for anyone from novices to wine enthusiasts to order the most delicious wines from around the world. I am in the novice category in terms of my understanding of wine, but I have drank a lot of wine in my life and always love it.

For me, nothing's better than a good, delicious wine. The good steak and a good friend, a friend helps out to wine access makes it easy for someone like me to figure out what wines I'm likely to enjoy. My favorite from there has been the 2017 Foxon Block 43 Pinot Noir. It's like a brown orange label. Actually, the label sucks, but the wine is delicious.

The site gives you ratings for the wine, including in specific categories like fruit intensity, OK, intensity, body and so on. They don't have a category for labels because I would give this label a three out of five.

But you should not be judging a book by its cover and a wine by its label.

The Fuxin Flock 43 gets three out of three on the fruit intensity and it definitely tastes like it. Also, there's recommendations on what food to pair it with and there's a story to the wine. You really can't go wrong with any wine in the site. And the shopping experience feels like a wine tasting with experts. This is a trial run, so please buy all of their wine right now. So they choose to sponsor the podcast long term. I'd love to have them as a sponsor honestly, and probably will just start keeping wine and whiskey on the podcast table, since I think sometimes a little bit of alcohol can be a catalyst for magic in conversation, get 20 percent off your first order.

When you go to wine access that complex, the discount will be applied. Checkout, that's wine access Dotcom's. Let's go there now. Buy all their wine.

This episode is supported by Linkous, my favorite app for Learning New Things. Blankest takes the kids from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just fifteen minutes that you can read or listen to. I'm a big believer in reading every day. As part of that I use blinkers to try out a book I may otherwise never have a chance to read. And in general, it's a great way to broaden your view of the idea landscape out there and find books that you may want to read more deeply was blankest.

You get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books. I also use blankest, short guests to quickly catch up on podcast episodes I've missed right now, Blankest has a special offer just for the listeners of this podcast. They say that to all the girls, go to blink.

Is that councilor's legs to start your free seven day trial and get twenty five percent off of a Blanca's premium membership? That's Blinco Starcom Flex. And now here's my conversation with Eric Reinstein. You often talk about getting off this planet. And I think you don't often talk about extraterrestrial life, intelligent life out there, do you wonder about this kind of thing about intelligent civilizations out there? I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way.

In a certain sense, I do find that speculating about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens is kind of a recreation for when things aren't going very well. At least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives. So I worry about, for example, the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion. You can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend. So then you just take up an interest in in the simulation theory, because that's something like what you do for your job coding.

I do think that in some sense the issue of aliens is a really interesting one, but has been spoiled by too much sort of recreational escapism. The key question that I find is. Let's assume that it is possible to look out at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds and then go visit them, if that is possible. It's almost certainly possible through some as yet unknown, unknown or not accepted theory of physics beyond Einstein.

And I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, but probably if that theory exists, there would be a percentage of the world that have life and sort of a Drake equation, kind of a way that would have encountered the ability to escape soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom at a minimum.

And whatever they have, that is probably analogous to the cell on that world. So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing that arises, probably not carbon based, probably didn't have DNA, but that something that fits the pattern of Darwinian theory, which is descent with variation, differential success and thereby constantly improving and so on, that through time there will be a trajectory where there will be something increasingly complex and fascinating and beautiful like us humans, but much more that can also off gas, whatever entropy it creates, to give an illusion that you're defeating thermodynamics.

Right. So whatever, whatever these things are probably has an analog of the bio lipid layer so that cells can get rid of the chaos on one side of the barrier and keep order on the other. Whatever these things are that create life, assuming that there is a theory to be found that allows that civilization to diversify, we would have to imagine that such a civilization might have taken an interest in its concept of the universe and have come here. They would come here.

They would have a deep understanding of the physics of the universe sufficient to have arrived here.

Well, there's two questions whether they could arrive physically and whether their information could be sent here and whether they could gain information from us. It's possible that they would have a way of looking into our world without actually reaching it. I don't know. But yes, if my hope, which is that we can escape this world is can be realized, if that's if that's feasible, then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true and that somebody else should be here.

First of all, I want to say this, my purpose when I come on to your show and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you. I can sit inside all of those to give you better audio and video, because I think we've been on an incredible roll. I really love what you do. And so I am trying to honor you by being as disagreeable about frame breaking as possible. I think some of your listeners don't understand that is actually a sign of respect as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic, which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames and that these are sort of offerings to get the conversation started.

So let me try to break that frame and give you something different. Beautiful.

I think what's going on here is that I can prove effectively that we're not thinking about this in very deep terms.

As soon as I say we've got to get off this planet, the number of people who assume that I'm talking about faster than light travel. Is very high and faster than light travel, assume some sort of Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken by some small adjustment. And I think that that's fascinating. It shows me that our failure to imagine what could be being said is profound. We don't have an idea of all of the difference, different ways in which we might be able to visit distant worlds.

All we think about is OK, must be it must be Einstein in space times and then some means of exceeding the speed limit. And it's just it's fascinating to me that we don't really have. We've lost the ability to just realize we don't know the framework and what is what does it even mean? So one of the things I think about a lot is worlds with more than one temporal dimension. It's very hard to think about more than one temporal dimension.

So that's a really strong mental exercise of breaking the framework in which we think because most of the frameworks, we have a single temporal dimension. Right? Well, first of all, most of the frameworks in which we think would have no temporal dimension would have pure like in mathematics, the differential geometry that Remon came up with in the eighteen hundreds, we don't usually talk about what we would call split signature metrics or Laurentian signature.

In fact, if it weren't for relativity, this would be the most obscure topic out there. Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature. And then there's this one freakish case of relativity theory in physics that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions. Fascinating.

So it's usually momentary. And just look at space. Yes. You know, we have these three kinds of equations that are very important to us. We have elliptic hyperbolic and parabolic. Right. And so the idea is if if I'm chewing gum after eating garlic bread, when I open my mouth and I've got chewing gum between my lips, maybe it's going to form an elliptic object called a minimal surface. Then when I pop that and blow through it, you're going to hear a noise that's going to travel to you by a wave equation, which is going to be hyperbolic.

But then the garlic breath is going to diffuse towards you and you're eventually going to be very upset with me according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic. So those are the three basic paradigms for most of the work that we do. And a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is Elliptic, whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case and I don't even know what to do about more than one temporal dimension, because I think almost no one studies that.

I can't believe you just captured much of modern physics in the example of chewing gum, an off color one which I chose not to share, but hopefully the kids at home can imagine.

OK, so, OK, that is the place where we come from.

Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility of breaking the framework's act with two versus zero temporal dimensions, how do we even begin to think about.

Well, let's think about it as you and I are getting together in New York City. OK, so if you tell me, Eric, I want to meet you in New York City, go to the corner of 34th Street and Third Avenue, and you'll find a building on the northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor. Right. So when we have Third Avenue, that's one coordinate, 34th Street, that's the second coordinate and go up to the 17th.

And what time is it? Oh, 12:00 noon. All right, well, now imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a particular height in a building, that's all Flatland but I believe you two temporal cords.

So meet me at 5:00 p.m. and 12:00 noon at the corner of 34th and 3rd. That gets to be too mind blowing. I've got two separate watches and presumably that's just specifying a single point in those two different dimensions, but then being able to travel along those dimensions.

Let's let me see your right hand. You have no watch on that. Yeah, OK, I'm very concerned, Lex, that you're going through life without a wristwatch. That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch. I want you to wear it.

This guy is funnier than basically any human on earth that has been in my family for months.

It's a Fitbit. Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman is now in a position to live in two spatial and two temporal dimensions, unlike the rest of us. I clearly am only fit for four four spatial dimensions. So I'm frozen. Whereas you can double move, I can double move, which is funny because this is set in Austin time. So it's 4:00 p.m. and this is set in Los Angeles Times. Well, that's just with an Afghan shift in my Twelver.

But my point is, is that wouldn't that be interesting if there were two separate time skills and you had to coordinate both of those, but you didn't have to worry about what floor of the building because everything was on the ground floor? OK, that is the confusion that we're having.

And if you do one more show right, then they can put a watch on your ankle and you're only have one spatial dimension that you can move around. But my claim is, is that all of these are actually sectors of of my theory in case we're interested in that, which is geometric unity. There is a two two sector and a three one and a one three and zero four and a four zero. And all of these sectors have some physical reality.

We happen to live in a one three sector, but that's the kind of thinking that we don't do when I say we have to get off this planet. People imagine, OK, it's just Einstein plus some ability to break the law.

By the way, even though you did this for humor sake, I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin out. What? Who am I going to get whacked? No, not quite. But he was given a Super Bowl ring to to look at, and he instead of just looking at it, put it on his finger and walked away with it.

Robert Kraft. Robert Kraft. That's right. In the same way, I will, if you don't mind, walk away with this Fitbit and taking the entirety of your life story with it, because there's all these steps on it.

Boy, have you lost a lot of weight and where have I been? Exactly right.

That's what that's what we're talking about. We're talking about you want to get into aliens. Let's have an interesting alien conversation. Let's stop having the typical freewill conversation, the typical alien conversation, the typical ajai morality Congress. It's like we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves because we're not making progress. Time to have better versions of all these conversations. Is there some version of the alien conversation that could incorporate the breaking of frameworks?

Well, I think so. I mean, the key question would be we've had the Pentagon release multiple videos of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us. I just think it's also really fascinating to talk about the fact that those of us who were trained call B.S. on all of this stuff just had the rug pulled out from under us by the Pentagon choosing to do this. And you know what the effect of that is? You've open the door for every stupid theory known to man.

My aunt saw a ghost. OK, now we're going to have to listen to what hey, the Pentagon used to deny it, then it turned out there were UFOs do. Whoever is in charge of lying to the public. They need a cost function that incorporates the damage and trust, because I held this line that this was all garbage and all B.S. Now I don't know what to think. There's a fascinating aspect to this discussion, the breaking of frameworks that involves the release of videos from the Pentagon, which is almost like another dimension.

That trust in itself or the nature of truth and information is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling constantly that is messing with my head to think about because. I like because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that into your study of the nature of reality is like the constant shifting of the notation, the tools we use to communicate that reality. And so, like, what am I supposed to think about these videos? Is is it a complete distraction or is it a kind of cosmic joke?

I don't know. But you know what? I'm tired of these people, just completely tired of the people on the Pentagon side or the people who are interpreting the stuff in the Pentagon.

So I'm tired entirety of tired of the authorities playing games with what we can now. The fact that you and I do have a security clearance, some level of it for because I was fond of that before, I don't have a security clearance.

You know, I am going to release whatever theory I have. And my guess is, is that there is zero interest from our own government. And so the Chinese will find out about it at the same time our government does, because Lord knows what they do in these buildings. I watch crazy people walk in and out of the intelligence community, walk in and out of Dapo.

And I think, wow, you're talking to that person.

That's really fascinating to me. We don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.

Complete lack of transparency. Do you think it's possible there's the government is in possession of something deeply fundamental to understanding of the world that they're not releasing. So this is one things is this is one of the famous distractions that people play with. The narrative assumed that that were true of alien life forms, spacecraft and possession, that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft.

Assume that narrative. Yeah. I don't think the government really exists at the moment. I believe and this is not an idea that was original to me, there was a guy named Michael Teitelbaum who used to be at the Sloan Foundation, and at some point I pointed out that the US government had completely contradictory objectives when it came to the military and science.

And one one branch said this one branch said that. I said, you know, I don't understand. Which is true. What does the government want? He said, Do you think there's a government? And I said, What do you mean? He said, What makes you think that the people in those two offices have ever coordinated? What is it that allows each office to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office, and that's when I first started to understand that there are periods where the government Cahiers and then there are periods where the coherence just decays.

I think that that's been going on since 1945, that there have been a few places where there's been increased coherence. But in general, everything is just getting less and less coherent. And that what war did was focus us on the need to have a government of people and mission. Capacity, technology, commitment, ideology, and then as soon as that was gone, you know, different people, those who had been through World War Two had one set of beliefs, those born in the 1950s, you know, or late 40s.

By the time they got to Woodstock, they didn't buy any of that.

The coherence is the is the complete opposite of like a lot of bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy. So coherence is efficient, functional government, because when you say there's no government, meaning, there's no. Emergent function from a collection of individuals is just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices without any kind of efficient communication with each other on a single mission.

And so a government that is truly at the epitome of what a government is supposed to be is when a bunch of people working together. And what are we about?

Are we about freedom or are we about growth? Are we about decency and fairness? Are we about the absence of a national culture so that we can all just do our own thing? I've called this thing the USA and the United States of absolutely nothing. These are all different visions for our country. So it's possible that there's an alien spacecraft somewhere and there's like 20 people that know about it. And then they're kind of it. Like as you communicate further and further into the offices, that information disappears.

It gets distorted in some kind of way, and then it's completely lost the power. The possibility of that information is lost. We bought a house and I had this idea that I wanted to find out what all the switches did, and I quickly found out that your house doesn't keep updating its plans as people do modifications, they just do the modifications and they don't actually record why they were doing what they were doing or what things. So there are all sorts of bizarre, like there's a switch in my house that says privacy.

I don't know what purposes does it turn on an electromagnetic field that is to some lead shielding go over the house? That's what we have. We have a system in which the people who have inherited these structures have no idea why their grandparents built them.

I'd be fine if there's a freedom of speech, which they could also control and they would be perfect. Well, that's different because what they figured out is, is that if they can just make sure that we don't have any public options for communication, then, hey, every every thing that we say to each other goes to a private company. Private companies can do whatever they want. And this is like one of the greatest moves that we didn't really notice.

Electronic and digital speech makes every other kind of speech irrelevant. And because there is no public option, guess what?

There's always somebody named Sundar or Jack or Mark who controls whether you could speak and what it appears to be that is being said and whose stuff is weighted more highly than other. It's an absolute nightmare. And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite Lord knows what is going on.

People are so busy making money that they are not actually upholding any of the values. So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally against it has this kind of libertarian, free, progressive sheen to it when it goes to Burning Man. And then it quickly just imposes rules on all of the rest of us what we can say to each other if we're not part of the elite.

So what do you think the ideal of the freedom of speech means? Well, this is very interesting.

I keep getting lectured on social media by people who have no idea how much power the Supreme Court has to abstract thing.

Right now, you have the concept of the letter of the law in the spirit of the law, and the spirit of the law would have to say that our speech that matters is free, at least at the level of ideas. I don't claim that I have the right to endanger your life with speech or to reveal your private information. So I really am not opining about directed speech intended to smear you. And that's a different kettle of fish. And maybe I have some rights to do that.

But I don't think that there is. What I am saying is, is that the freedom of speech for ideas. Is essential that the court abstracted and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon. Whoever these infrastructure companies are, because it really matters which abstraction is the case that I really like is search and seizure. If I have private data that I entered in my house that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house, but I view the is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter of my house that I have the right to protect, or does my password extend the perimeter of my house to the data on the server that is located outside of my house?

These are our choices for the court. And the court is supposed to pretend that they can divine the true intent of the framers. But all of the sort of and I have taken to calling this the problem of Internet hyena's people with ready-Made answers and Lowell's and you're such a moron. These folks love to remind you it's a private company to do whatever you want.

No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are and just the way, for example, the Griswold decision found that there was a penumbra because there was too little in the Constitution. Therefore, there were all sorts of things implied that couldn't be in the document. Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now that says. Jack cannot do it if he wants. It's really, as you say, the courts, but it's also us people who think about the world.

You know, it's the courts, but the courts don't do this. We're toast.

But we can still think about it. I mean, I'm sure, but I don't feel like going down the drain.

Here's what I'm thinking about it, because it's tricky how far it should extend. I mean, that's an ongoing conversation, don't you think? The interpretation of the law?

I think I'm trying to say something very simple and it's just not going to be popular for a while.

Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication. Print or shouting in a public park. And so, you know, I can go to a public park and I can shout if I get a permit even there, I think it was in the 9th, late 1980s in Atlanta, we came up with free speech zones where you can't protest at a convention, but you can go to a park twenty three miles out and they'll fence off a little area where you can have your free speech.

If no speech is dangerous, ideas are dangerous. We are a country about danger and risk. And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that, that was very different. So forget a lot of that stuff. But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous. And people will die as a result of free speech, the idea that one life is too much is preposterous. Like why did we send if one life is preposterous, why do we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy?

I just don't get this.

So one thing that I was clearly bothered by, and maybe you could be my therapist as well, I you were mine.

This is this is a little bit of a miscommunication on both of our parts then, because who's paying for this?

I was really bothered by Amazon banning parler from us because my assumption was that the infrastructure I drew a distinction, which was the infrastructure on which competing platforms could be created. Is different than the actual platforms, so the standard of that ideal of freedom of speech, I in my mind, in a shallow way, perhaps applied differently to us than I did to Twitter. It felt that we've created a more dangerous world, that freedoms were violated by banning parler from Adewusi, which I saw as the competing infrastructure, which enables the competition of tools, the competition of frameworks of communication.

What do you think about this?

First of all, let me give you the the Internet hyena answer understanded. Just build your own Amazon. Yeah, right.

Yes. Well, so that's a very shallow statement, but it's also one that has some legitimacy. We can't completely dismiss it because there's levels to this this game. Yes and no. But if if you really wanted to chase that down. Yeah. One of the great things about a person to person conversation as opposed to like let's have 30 of our closest friends whenever we have a conversation with 30 of our closest friends, you what happens? It's like passing light through a prism.

Every person says something interesting and as a result, it's always muddled like nothing ever resolves.

Well, one of my conversational techniques you mentioned, you push back is first this childlike naiveté and curiosity, but also Muehler simulated real I'm afraid I say percent real.

Right.

So in this paradigm. Yeah. How could you not see this coming? I mean, I did a show with Ashley Matthews is the woman behind Riley Reed and specifically about this, it was about the idea that if I move away from politics and go towards sex, I know that there's always a move to use the infrastructure to shut down sex workers. And in this case, we had Operation Choke point under the Obama administration. We have a positive passion for people who want to solve problems that they they don't like this company.

They don't like that company. Payday loans would be another one. And so you have legal companies that are harassed by our financial system that you can't you know, as Riley Reed, Ashley couldn't get a MailChimp account, according to her, if I understand correctly.

And this idea that you charge these people higher rates because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards, even if they're chargebacks or low. Yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment. There's something about everybody who shows up at Davos. They get drunk in the Swiss Alps and then they come back home and they coordinate and they coordinate things like build back better.

We don't really understand what build back better is. But my guess is, is that build back better has to do with extremism in America. How do we shut down the Republican Party as the source of extremism now? I do think the Republican Party got very extreme under Trump. And I do believe that that was responsive to how extreme the Democratic Party got under Clinton first and then Obama and then Hillary, and in all of these circumstances, it's amazing how much we want to wield these things as weapons.

Well, our extremism is fine because we pretend that Tifa doesn't exist and we don't report what goes on in Portland. But your extremism.

My God, that's disgusting. This is the completely ridiculous place that we're in. And by the way. Our friends in part. Are coked up on tech money, and they don't appear to hold the courage of their convictions at a political level because it's not in keeping with shareholder value. You know, at some level, shareholder value is the ultimate shield with which everyone can cloak themselves.

Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, and I'm not sure it was a good financial decision for Twitter. Right. But perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong, but are you thinking locally or are you thinking if Twitter used to?

Well, if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump, what is the odds that the full force of the antitrust division might find? I don't know.

I see. I see. So there's a complicated thing.

Well, there's a look, these guys are all having a discussion in very practical terms. You know, you can say you can imagine the sorts of conversation Jack Marx under. We're really glad you're all here where we're all trying to sing from the same hymnal row in the same direction. We understand free speech. We're completely committed to it. But we have to draw a line with extremism. Guys, we just need we need to make sure we're all on the same page.

Well, they use the term violence, too, and they, I think, overplay it.

So basically, anybody I'm telling you, I say dumb things to to incentivize thoughtful conversation.

Well, whatever these things are. There is no trace like how old are you? You're in your mid 30s. Yeah, to late 40s, mid late 20s to late 40s. Yeah, somewhere in that. That's the demographic. I do think that partially what's happened is, is that your group has never seen functional institutions. These institutions have been so compromised for so long, you've probably never seen an adult. Sometimes I think Ellen looks like an adult.

I know that he has a wild lifestyle, but I also see it look like an adult. What does an adult look like exactly? Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things carefully thinks about the future beyond their own life's lifespan. Somebody who is pretty good idea of how to get things done, isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions, is more focused on breaking new ground than playing rent seeking games. I mean, I really had a positive I was so completely chest up as the world's richest person.

I was like, well, that's interesting. Back to work. It's just like that's that's what that's what that's what a grownup would do. And it just made, you know, weirdly, I said something about, isn't it amazing that the world's richest person knows what it Lagrangian is? And he made a terrible LeoGrande joke about potentials. But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately, Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult.

And I can tell you that the Internet hyenas will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is for pumping his stock price, talking his book and all the stuff. Shut up. Just looking at the world seriously and regressing.

You're saying that the people who are running tech companies are running the mediums on which we can exercise the ideal of free speech are not adults?

I think not.

I think, first of all, a lot of them are Silicon Valley utopian businessmen where you talk a utopian line and you use it. You've heard my my take, which is that the idealism of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts. And I believe that in many ways, the idealism of Silicon Valley about connecting the world, a world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is really about the software eating the world.

As Marc Andreessen likes to say it there, all these legacy properties.

And by simply being a bad tech version of something that previously existed, like a newspaper, you could immediately start to dwarf that by aggregating newspapers and their digital versions because digital is so much more powerful as a result. Yes, we have lots of man children wandering around what once was the Bay Area and is now Austin in Miami and other places, maybe Singapore, that all of these. People that these are friends of ours and they're brilliant with respect to a certain amount of stuff, but none of them can get off the drip.

It's amazing that none of them have few money. We've got billionaires who don't have your money.

OK, I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence and not just that actors by everybody that was banning people. And then this word violence was used as a kind of just like extremism and so on to without much reason behind it. You think it's impossible for Jack Dorsey or anybody else to be, as you said, an adult, a grown up and which is pretty close to being the Granton seems like he is.

Yeah, he's he's as under pressures as you've discussed. He it seems that he's been on the verge of almost being quite serious and transparent. And I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went.

And I worry that that must be something behind the scenes that I can't see from my perspective, what I think is the stress, the burden of that when people are screaming at you in its offices and monk.

He really is.

Yeah. Jack is an incredibly impressive person. Intellectually, morally, spiritually, at least. For a couple of meetings, I don't know him very well, but I'm very impressed by the person I met and I don't know where that person is and that terrifies me. But do you think somebody could step up in that way? No. So does a human being have the capacity to be transparent about the reasoning behind the banning, or do you think all banning eventually?

All banning of people from mediums of communication is eventually destructive or it's impossible for human beings to reason with ourselves about it.

Well, let's let's see what the problem is. So my phone has been on airplane mode. I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to take a picture of Lex Frieden now, if I can. I'm going to tweet that picture out. Great. But here's the weird part about it. Yeah, that picture. Sitting with Lex today, this is how the sausage is made.

OK, in so doing, yes, I have just sent. A picture of you and a tiny piece of text all over the planet that is arrived at. If statistics tell the truth, just under half a million different accounts from. And then more from sharing and so on, and we well, in some of those accounts are dead. We don't really know how many places it went.

Yeah, but the key issue with that tweet is that.

That is a non-local phenomenon. Yes, so I just broadcasted to an entire planet, somebody in Uganda is reading that at the same time as somebody in Uruguay.

Yeah. There is no known solution. To have so many people with the ability to communicate nonlocal because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech inside of the Constitution, friction locally, there were all sorts of other aspects to speech. So if you think about speech is a bundle. I like this. Then it got unbundled. And some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on to retard the impact of speech.

Aren't present, and we don't have the courage to say, I wonder if the First Amendment really applies in the modern era in the same way, or we have to work through an abstraction either. We probably have to amend the Constitution or we have to abstract it properly. And that issue is not something we're facing up to. I watch us constantly look backwards. We don't seem to try to come up with new ideas and new theories, nobody really imagines that we're going to be able to wisely amend the Constitution anymore in the inside of the United States, many people abroad will say, why are these guys talking about the U.S.?

It's a US centric program. Well, that's because nobody knows where this program lives. The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be in a physical place together is also bizarre. Could be anywhere, doesn't really matter that it happens to be here. So the difference between logical and between physical, local, non-local friction and nonfictional, it's the same thing with firearms. Nobody.

Imagine that the Gatling gun was going to be present when you had to reload a musket and. That's fascinating to think about. You're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom that seems so foundational to the to this nation, to what made this nation great and perhaps much of the world that is great made a great is changing completely.

Can we try to reason through how the idea of freedom of speech is to be changed? I mean, I guess I'm struggling. It feels really wrong, perhaps because I wasn't paying attention to it. Feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump. Now, from Twitter to Ben, not just the president, that's really wrong to me, but this particular human for being divisive, but then when there is an incitement to violence. That is an overused claim, but perhaps there was actual brewing of local violence happening.

So one of the things I know was happening in parla is people were. Scheduling meetings together in physical space. So you're now going back from this dynamic social, large scale people from Uganda, people from all over the world being able to communicate.

You're now mapping that into now back meeting in the physical space that is similar to what the founding, but the violence was digital if ransomware suddenly was unleashed.

Sure. The key issue is the abstractions. So what was freedom of speech is a bundle. And now it's and then how do you extract the bundle into the digital era? Do you think we just need to raise the question and talk about it? Do you have do you have ideas? Because sure, I have ideas.

But the key point is that I'm not even welcome in mainstream media.

I've never seen you on mainstream media, do you do mainstream media, so we exist in part of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story, which I have called the gated institutional narrative. And the institutions pretend that they plug their fingers in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of MSNBC. Talking to CNN about what was in The New York Times as covered by The Washington Post. And so that's effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they, you know, the undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper.

OK, well. That's very different than me. You've recently been on Glenn Beck's program. Yeah, and there was just kind of one of the things you've talked about is being able to have this conversation.

I don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside the mainstream media, but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews. You're right. Having a nuanced or just like a respectful. Conversation is grounded in Mitchell, but we can't have the reality because the main model is. The center, both left and right, is in the process of stealing all the wealth that we built up, and they've organized the extremes into two laughing teams that I've called magazine and Walkerston.

And then you have everybody who isn't part of that complex, all seven of us, the number of us who are able to earn a living, looking at all of these mad people playing this game, you know, there's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks are trying to look at price action and somebody says this doesn't make any sense. And some people say it's just the locals stealing from each other. And that's really what we have. We have we've got the leaders of Mangosteen and Walkerston.

You know, championing these two teams is sponsored by the center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver and cut the paintings out of the frames.

That's what you and I are looking at. So when you ask me, like, do you have any ideas about the abstraction for free speech? I've never met Mark Zuckerberg, I've never met some guy, I never met Larry Page, I was once in a room with Sergey Brin. I've never spoken to Elon Musk. I hang out with Peter Thiel, but we have a very deep relationship. But I don't really speak to that many other people. You know, sort of at this level, we're not having any kind of smart conversation now at a national level.

In fact, it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox in which we could play together. There's no place that we actually talk except long form podcasting. And by the way, they've found. You see what was going on with Alex Stamos and the Hoover Institution with, you know, there's a loophole left over from podcasting, allows people to speak at levels above daytime's here. Yeah, it's like, well, why do you think they're not watching daytime CNN?

But that's that's just silly journalism. They currently have no power to displace podcasting. That's why it's so powerful RSS feed. I mean, that's why the big challenge of Joe Rogan and Spotify is like, there's this dance that's fascinating to see is dialog is not part of the system. And then he's also on cancelable. And there's this tension that's happening, I think, about Howard Stern.

The Howard Stern became much less relevant. So if they can't control Joe by bringing him in house, the key question is, is he going to continue like. You know, this just does the thing about your money. Yeah. Just one of the only people with few money who's actually said a few.

Yeah, I don't understand this, I don't have your money, what exactly is we break apart if you money because I always thought I've been fortunate enough to have always have a few money in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary in the United States.

This is the stoic point, which is you can live on rice and beans. Your unconsolable because you're always rich relative to your needs.

Isn't that a few?

Fundamentally, if you mean why do you say that tech billionaires don't have a few money when you need to hire private security to protect your family? How do you protect your two children? I don't have those yet. Bingo. Yeah. My point is, is that few money. Insulates everything that you care about. It's not just about you. So you're saying as the level of responsibility grows, the amount of money required for a few, we have a war going on.

The war is on academic freedom. Academic freedom used to be present in the system as a in terms of the idea. We trust our elite. Now we have an idea like you want to be the elite. You know, you want to lord above us. That's first of all, there's like a populist, anti elitist thing. Then there's the idea that we're going to defer tenure for forever. Then we're going to help people stay in your lane. Your tenure is only good for your own particular tiny micro subject.

Then we're going to also control your grants and we'll be able to load up your teaching load. If we don't like who you are, we'll make your life absolutely impossible.

We lost academic freedom. And we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster, and then we lost funding so that people were confident they would have the ability to do research no matter what they said.

And as a result, what you find is, is a world in which there's no ability to get people to say, no, I'm not going to sign your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath. I won't sign any loyalty oath.

Get the hell out of my office, you f you and your connecting money to that. But my point is, is that academic freedom is the the whole idea behind it was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire on a much smaller scale.

Right. OK. We've lost that. Yeah, the only reason in part that I wanted to go into. Academic academics as a profession, as opposed to wanting to do physical or mathematical research, the great prize was freedom. And Ralph Gomory of the Sloan Foundation, previously of IBM Research, pointed it out. He says, if you lose freedom, you lose.

The only thing we had to offer top minds. Top minds value their intellectual freedom and their physical and economic security at a different level than other human beings. And so people say, you know.

I understand do you have the ability to do X, Y and Z? What's the problem? It's like, well, I value my ability to raise the middle finger as an American. Practically above everything else. I want to talk to you about freedom here in the context of something you've mentioned, which. One way to take away freedom is to put a human being into a cage to create constraints. The other thing that worries me is something that I think you've spoken to to Twitter a little bit on Twitter is.

We bleed freedom by kind of slowly. Scaring you into not doing not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities you can as freedom. So like when you ban Donald Trump, when you ban parler, you give a little doubt in the minds of millions like me, person who is a tech person who's an entrepreneur, entrepreneur.

There's a little that's what I'm afraid of when I look in the mirror. Is there now a little doubt in there? Sure. That limits the amount of options. I will try.

How certain are you that the covid virus didn't come from the Wukong lab and its biosafety level four? We both know that. We're both supposed to robotically say. The idea that the covid virus came from a lab is a discredited conspiracy theory, there is no evidence to suggest that this is true. The World Health Organization and the CDC have both upon this. To say otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible. And the threat of that is the thing that ultimately limits the freedoms we feel.

I should be tweeting about Jeffrey Epstein all the time. And you're afraid it's also, in a sense I mean, I said it in the public that many times, why is it we don't ask where the records are from Villard House, where where are the financial records, where the SEC filings?

Where are the questions on on the record to the intelligence agencies? Was he known to be part of the intelligence community?

So we're not interested in asking questions like, am I going to die?

As a result of asking the question, was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community of any nation, is there a reason we're not asking about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund that he didn't run? Just like the one lab. OK, how do we get to the core of the Jeffrey Epstein the the truth behind Jeffrey Epstein, in a sense, I mean, there's there's some things that are just like useless conspiracy theories around it. Even if they're true.

There's some things that get the heat to say you're not going to like it.

Look at the 1971 Media Pennsylvania breakdown of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI. Those kids and by the way, they were not kids. Did what had to be done? They broke in, they broke the law, it was an incredible act of civil disobedience. And God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her she was going to take to her grave that she'd been part of this like the coolest thing of all time. They didn't say anything for forever.

So civil disobedience, I mean, you have to we are founded on civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is incredibly.

You screw it up and you're just a vandal, you screw it up, you're a hooligan. Yeah, those those cats were so disciplined.

It's an art form and it was an art form. And they risked everything they were willing to pay with their freedom. Those are the sorts of people who earned the right by putting themselves at risk. I would not do this. I am not volunteering to break into anything. I think it was William Davidson who was a student of Murray Delmon and a physics professor at Haverford. Who corralled these people and led this effort and right now what we need is somebody to blow the lid off of what is controlling everything we have, I I'm happy.

To hear that it's a system of incentive structures, that it's a system of selective pressures, I'm happy to find out that it's emergent. I'm happy to find that it's partially directed by our own intelligence community. I'm happy to hear that, in fact, we've been penetrated by North Korea, Iran, China and Russia.

But I need to know why people aren't like the firebombing of the courthouse in Portland, Oregon, has no explanation.

And somehow this is normal, this is not normal to any human being. We have video that people don't believe, and, you know, I come back to the shaggy defense of it wasn't me, you know, was like. You remember that song Shaggy wasn't me caught, you know, banging the tower on the counter? Yeah, exactly. It wasn't me. It wasn't me, he says. But his friend says, well, your strategy makes no sense at all.

This is what MSNBC is doing. You dropped him from the graphic.

It wasn't me. It wasn't me. You came up with another gang. It wasn't me.

I will never see MSNBC the same again. So you've spoken about before, I think would be nice to maybe honor him to break it apart a little bit to Aaron Schwartz. Yeah.

Why was he a special human being in this ilk of what we're talking about now?

Civil disobedience. How do we honor him now moving forward as human beings who are willing to take risks in this world?

Well, I don't know. I mean, are you inspired by Aaron Schwartz? I am. How do you feel about Jay's story? Let's talk about Jay Store first. So let's let's let's say what Jason was all about.

We the taxpayer. Pay for research. And then. The people who do the research do all the work for a bunch of companies who then charge us thirty dollars an article to read what it is that we already paid for, and if we don't cite these articles, we're told that we're in violation. OK. I almost never call for civil disobedience because they don't really want to. But. Fuck J-Star, fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer. Who the fuck are these people?

The smart people need to take the greedy people behind the woodshed and explain to them what sciences, I have a very old fashioned idea that's so out of favor that I will immediately be seen as a knuckle dragger.

Yeah, I believe in the great woman theory of history and the great man theory of history. Aminatta is fantastic. That's an example, and I believe in editors over peer reviewers, and I believe that wrong things should be allowed into the literature and I believe that the gatekeeping should go towards zero because the costs associated with distribution are very, very slight.

I believe that. We should be looking at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly into your competitors clutches, particularly if you're a young person being reviewed by an older person, are you familiar with the duties in your area? Are you familiar with the legend of the Mughniyeh? No, the magni is the Miller's daughter and the largest food fight in the entire universe, I believe is held, I think, in Italy called the Battle of the Oranges, and it celebrates.

The Millers daughter who had fallen in love with her beloved and when it came time for them to marry the virginal, Mughniyeh was in fact told that the Lord of the Land had the right to have the first night with the bride. Hmm. Well, the Mughniyeh had a different idea, so she seemed to consent to this perhaps mythical right.

Also called the preeminently the first night and by by legend, she concealed a dagger underneath her robes. And when it came time for the hated Lord of the manor to extract this right, she pulled the knife out and killed him.

And I think that also echoes a little bit of particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones, but that inspired both men and women.

And the Mughniyeh is the legendary hero right now.

What we need to do is we need to resist the preeminently the right of first look, right? Mm hmm. Phew.

You don't have the right of first look. I don't want to send something blindly to my competitors. I don't want to subject myself to you.

Naming what what work I've done. What why are you in my story?

That's my question. Get out of my story. If I do work and then you have an idea.

Oh, well, the Matthew principle to him who has much more will be given. I've gone to the National Academy of Sciences and talked about these things. And it's funny, I've been laughed at by the older people who think, well, Eric, you know, science proceeds funeral by funeral. That's plonk. You know, the Matthew principle, you know, the mattilda principle, the things done by women are attributed to men that these are not new.

And you guys just live like this. Yeah. So the revolutionary act now is to resist all of these things that we need where things that are not new. So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz and Schwartz with the Mughniyeh. One of the things you've done very beautifully is to communicate love. And I think about, you know, some of our conversations. And you got me to talk a little bit about my own experiences and two one three eight and three nine.

Mm. We are the product of our trauma.

And what people don't understand is that very often when you see people taking countermeasures against what appear to be imaginary forces, they're really actually replaying things that really happen to them.

And having been through the system and watching all of the ways in which it completely rewrites the lives of the people who I am counting on to cure diseases, build our new industries, keep us safe from our foes.

The amount of pressure the system is putting on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable.

And so my my goal is to empower somebody like an Aaron Schwartz in memory. And to talk about it, Jeffrey Epstein situation, you know that the first person outside of me to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey.

How did he know I was working on this? I don't know. So your idea is that formed geometric unity was something that his eyes had seen.

I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein as one of the only people who could help me. No, no, listen to this.

How does this how does this connect? OK.

Well, first of all, my old synagogue, my old school was the conservative minyon at Harvard, Hillel. And I believe it's called Osofsky Hall after Henry Rostowski in the economics department, who is a Japan scholar, if I'm correct, and he became provost or dean of Harvard.

I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein's money. And I wondered in part whether the Jewish students at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck of Harvard Hillel, so that was something I found very curious, but I don't know much about it.

I also found that Jeffrey Epstein hanging around scientists. I don't think that either you or Joe. Exactly.

I mean, got me correct in your last interchange. For the record, for people who haven't listened to your program, Joe's claim that Eric Stein was the only person who has gotten paid. Oh, and you said you also got paid as a young man. Right. I believe the word was laid, but allegedly my hearing isn't so good at age 55. All right, leaving that aside. Yes.

What was Jeffrey Epstein doing hanging around all of these scientists?

I don't think that was the same program.

That was about compromising political leaders and business people and entertainment figures. I think these are two different programs that were being run through one individual. And Joe seem to think that I didn't think he was smooth. I thought he was glib. I think what Joe's really trying to get at is that I found his mysticism meretricious, he had an ability to deflect every conversation that might go towards revealing that he didn't know what he was talking about. Every time you started to get close to something where the rubber hit the road, the rubber wouldn't hit the road.

And yet, can you help me untangle the the fact that you thought deeply about the physics of the nature of our universe and Jeffrey Epstein was interested, how did he know I wasn't really talking about the stuff until.

You know, even my close friends didn't really know what I was up to, and yet you're saying he did not have sufficient brilliance to understand when the rubber hit the road. So why why did he have sufficient interest and what I thought.

I have been waiting to find out, does my government even know exist? Do you have an answer to that question? I have a couple times the government has reached out to me. In general, there is zero interest in me, like less than zero interest. I find that fascinating. As far as you know, right, I mean, well, that's what I'm trying to say. The question about not being able to see through a half silvered mirror, you don't know what's going on behind the half silvered mirror to you.

It's it's all you see is is your reflection, but your intuition still holds.

Like, this is where I've mentioned that I this is where I'll say naive, dumb things. But I still hold on to this intuition that Jeff not I'm not confident in this, but I'm leaning towards that direction. Jeffrey Epstein is the source of evil, not something that's underlying him. You have you have a bias.

It's different than mine are Bayesian priors are tutored by different life experiences? Yeah. If I was mostly concerned, like Sam Harris was is concerned that people fill their heads with nonsense. I would have a very strong sense that people need order in the world, that they take mysterious situations, they build entire castles in the air, and then they go move in if they really get crazy. You know, the old saying is that neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics move in.

Coming from a progressive family, we had a different experience. It's really weird when the government is actually out to get you, when they actually send a spy, when they actually engage in disinformation campaigns, when they smear you.

And if you've ever had that brought to bear on your family, you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country, which is different than having a wow, do people believe crazy stuff because they watch too much TV and both of these things have some merit to them. But it's a question of regulated expression. When do you want to express more Sam Harris and when you want to express more Howard Zinn? And you can express both, correct, the one human being can express both, sure, but there's a trade off between them.

In other words, most of most people, like the Michael Sherman of the world, are going to tilt very strongly to extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence that you can have that kind of energy. And then somebody else is going to say, how many times do I have to get hit on? You know, how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb before I realize that there's a problem?

So, you know, my feeling about this is, yes, people see patterns in clouds, they see faces and scripture and all sorts of things. And it's just random cloud patterns. And it's also the case that there's tremendous pressure not to see conspiracies when conspiracies are relatively more common than the people who show conspiracy theory will claim. So both of these things are true. And you have to ask, when do you express your inner Zen and when you're in a Harris and those are different or more fundamental division.

You and I biases aside, is you've actually met Jeffrey Epstein and I'm listening to, like, reverberations years later. Of stories and narratives throughout the story, luckily, I only met him once and I think I had. One or perhaps two phone conversations with him, other than the one meeting, you can learn a lot in just a few words, right, from a human being.

Well, that's true. But I think that the bigger issue was I saw something that I don't hear much remarked upon, which is Jeffrey Epstein is all there that there is. In other words, there's the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes, there's all this stuff. That kind of has the same feel to it, a little bit of variation in different Department of Energy, if you fall outside of that, there's just Jeffrey Epstein, that's what you're told.

Yes. That's not quite true. There's maybe Jim Simons is now in the game. Peter Thiel has done some stuff. You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try. So there is other money running around Templeton.

But very strongly there was a belief that if you're doing something really innovative and the system can't fund it because it's we've become pussies, Jeffrey Epstein's your guy so that because it's fun all these cycles to go through.

That's right. And the idea is that you get called to the great man's house and, you know. The sort of. Lou Brittas, version of Ralph Lauren, you know, takes you in and asks you bizarre questions and maybe he has an island, maybe he has a plane and you know, when you're starved, you know, somebody's showing you a feast or when you're dehydrated and at death's door and somebody says, oh, you know, I have a well, you know, that's what it is.

And so the thought is, wow, can you can somebody get some effing money into the science system so that we don't have super creeps trying to learn all of our secrets ahead of time? WTF, what is your problem with transparency and taxpayer dollars? Just all of you.

You wouldn't have a country. You'd be speaking German. So essentially, you believe that human beings would not be able to win when the money is lacking in the system, like unresearched produce public goods?

You and I are meant to produce public goods now.

I sell athletic greens and I sell Thoroughgood and I sell Lunardi scooters. And Chili pat type guys love these products, but. I didn't get into this game for the purpose of selling, I'm trying to figure out how do you have an FSU lifestyle? But you know, something like this, I don't know why you built this channel. It's kind of a mystery. I don't know why.

I'll tell you why I built my channel is going to be a lot harder to roll me this time in an alley. Yeah, I got rolled multiple times. And my point is I didn't want to become a celebrity. I didn't want to become well known.

But it's a lot harder. To roll somebody who's getting you know, I think I'm I don't know if this is mistaken, but I think I'm the math Ph.D. with the largest number of followers on Twitter.

And there was nothing you could do before.

I mean, again, to put a little responsibility on, you see, you've created something really special for the distribution of your own ideas. I mean, but because it's not necessarily currently scalable, you also perhaps you and I have the responsibility of giving other people also a chance to spread their ideas.

I mean, Josh Rogin did this very effectively for a bunch of people, that that's why they're angry at him, because he's a gatekeeper and he let all sorts of people through that gate from Roger, from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones to Jordan Peterson to I mean, even first of all, to you and to Abby Martin, who added Martin to Barry Weiss.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Well, but you you have now successfully built up a thing that allows that to carry. Oh, no, no, no.

We are all vulnerable to reputational attack. Because what happens, you see, the problem, Lexy's, is that you are now an institution at some level. You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag, the last the last suit you'll ever need, and you have the reach of something like CNN to people who matter. OK, so now the question is, how do we control something that doesn't have a board, doesn't have shareholders, doesn't have to make it, SEC filings FCC.

So the best answer they have is. Well, we just have to destroy reputations, all it takes is for us to take something that gets said or done or alleged. And I think it's incredibly important, one of the things people don't understand is, is that I'm I'm going to fight general reputational attacks, not because some people don't deserve to have their reputations dragged through the mud, but because it's too powerful of a tool to hand it to CNN, MSNBC, Princeton, Harvard, the State Department.

Yes, but as some of it is also JP Morgan, Muhammad Ali style, being good enough at doing everything you need to do without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks, not being afraid, but not giving enough meat.

I don't see why the people who have good ideas have to lead lives that are that clean.

If you can do it, can be messy. Yeah, you should be able to be messy that otherwise where we're suppressing too many people look too many to brilliant minds.

Can you believe Elon Musk spoke to. But I still people tell me this. OK, I have discussions about you and people the Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist who's talking about a more and more that it might be alien technology.

He told me his this outside the box thinker.

Yeah. When speaking to me about Elon said they called him the guy who smoked. He smokes weed the blunt in a dismissive way like this guy's crazy because he smoked some weed I was looking on.

I was like, why, wow, wow. I think you should be able to have consensual drug filled orgies. Fuck perfect lives. Yeah. You should be allowed to be messy.

You're right. I take back my state. I'm just saying respectability is the unique prison where all of the gates are open and the inmates beg to stay inside. It's time to end their prison of respectability because it's too effective of a means of sidelining and silencing people, including it is better that we have bad people in our system.

Then this idea of no platforming, people who are beyond the pale because it's such a simple technique, so how do we what's the heroic action here on the well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program, by the way, she was absolutely delightful as a guest.

She was she is polite in the extreme, far more polite than I am. And I had a right after Roger Penrose as a guest because I wanted to highlight this program can go anywhere. We can talk to anyone. What about social media?

You've started highlighting people being banned on social media. How do we fight this? Like if you get banned from social media. So you're saying nobody will stand up to me.

Let's just figure out what your incentive structure is before I assume that they're going to get banned on social media because somebody wants to make sure that my message doesn't interfere with the dominant narrative. Yeah, OK. What will happen, by the way, I'm very glad to be able to explain this on your show because that video will presumably be archived and they can't easily make you take it down.

OK, so what's going to happen is, is that there'll be a whole bunch of very low quality like accounts that dog you every time you talk about.

Dude, it's getting old, getting boring. We already heard you, dude, that was like, let it go. Not a good look, not a good look is one of my favorites.

But what about the high profile ones?

Well, I think you'll get a few high profile ones and some of the high profile ones command armies. Like at some point I had 10000 people using exactly the same templated tweet tweeting at me. It was just actually it got to the point where it was funny because everybody said, did you did you hear that hipster coffee shop? And I was like, why are you all suddenly talking about hipster coffee is hilarious.

Those things will cause you to think better of it, you'll start to see your follower can't go down because it's easy to give you a bunch of, like followers and then just pull them. So I think that's pretty well known how. And then maybe your account will be suspended.

It can't be revoked and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then three days later, you'll be told it was an error. So let me push back.

I just don't see not defending you. OK, so what are the things you would do that given that I can actually talk to you offline that would make me not defend you. Well, first of all, I can't I mean, no, I can imagine, yes, but all of us have things. If somebody says, do you hear what your boy Lex said about you?

What would it say about me? Oh, he said you were flawed, dude. Oh, shit, yeah, you know. They so distrust because none of us want to stand behind flawed people. That's why you have everybody rushing to say, I need to condemn nor condone. I don't condemn. You know, what is that?

We're all trying to say. For the record, I said that Eric is smarter than me and a brilliant human being, but flawed like all humans are.

My point is, I've now come up with a new policy, which is I don't care what my friends have done. I am not disavowing my friends, not because they didn't do the wrong thing, maybe they did did the wrong thing. I don't know. What's the value of friendship if if that's not that like, for example, we've had the situation with Brian Cowan, Brian Cowen was featured recently in the Los Angeles Times. I know nothing about the allegations.

I can't I didn't even know Brian at the time. Right. I've known him for roughly the time. I've been in Los Angeles maybe a year and a half during that period of time. Never seen anything wrong. Now I'm in a situation.

What do you think he did? Do you think he didn't like you know what? I don't know. But I do know this. Everyone is entitled to have friends because we can't afford isolated people. And if your friends do the wrong thing, they're still your friends. Yeah, and if they do terrible, terrible things, you bring that up with them privately. And it's not my responsibility to disavow in public. You know, we've had the situation.

That I don't like where, you know, particular people that I've been close to, I'm put under tremendous pressure to disavow that.

What do you think now about your buddy, like Dave Rubin, all that kind of stuff? Here's the thing. Just because my friends are my friends, I don't disavow my friends.

We all need. To make a statement that we will not be brought under pressure to disavow our friends, our family members because. Mass murders. Are dangerous, the more isolated they become. It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people. Yes, and it's dangerous.

And so it sends a signal to everybody else to to fit in to be more cynical about this. So my feeling is, if I find out you've been selling heroin to elementary school students, you're still my friend and I will not be disavowing you. And if I have a problem with you selling heroin to elementary school students during school hours. I will bring it up with you privately, because we don't need to hear my voice added to that condemnation, are there things that you could do that would cause me to say, actually f this guy?

Yeah, above and beyond that. But simply doing the wrong thing?

I think we've gone down a terrible path. I think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing we could have in a heavily armed society.

So I deeply agree with you on Brian Callen and all these people that, quote unquote got canceled.

And I'm not saying that they I, I don't know the truth value because we can't. And even if I did know the truth value, I'm not setting up an incentive structure for the personal destruction as a means of letting institutions combat the fact that individuals are the last thing that can say none of you guys make any sense. I don't treat these things like, you know, I had a conversation where Kevin Spacey was at the dinner table when I came down from my hotel room and I had a very long conversation with Kevin Spacey.

I will not detail because I don't do that as to what we discussed, but we talked very specifically about him being canceled. And I don't think that the world has heard that story in part because there is a very strong sense that he has to be outgroups and as a result. You know, I mean, do we want. Do we want to disavow the space program because it touched Wernher von Braun? Do we want to disavow quantum mechanics because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg passed through it?

Is Ironfist Theorem false because he murdered his child? I mean, at what point do we recognize that we are the problem? Humans are humans and there is no perfect. There is no perfect group of people, even all of the most oppressed people, the supposed victims of the world, who we now have fetishized into thinking that they're all oracles because their lived experience informs us and their pain is more salient than everyone else's pain. Those people aren't necessarily great people.

You know, it's like none, none of us. We can't we can't do this in this fashion. So when we sit down to have a conversation across the table from somebody, you should be willing to. Like, you should not have NPR in your mind, you should be willing to take the full risk and to see the good in the person without with limited information and to do your best to understand that person. Everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget.

I don't believe this is of institutions. Yeah, OK, everybody is entitled to a certain amount of screwing up in life. You're entitled to a mendacity budget, you're entitled to an aggression budget.

The idea of getting rid of everybody is, you know, people haven't even blown through their budgets and we're already yeah, I think about, for example, one person I'd be curious to get your thoughts about Alex Jones. Let's not talk about Alex Jones for saying let's talk about the National Enquirer. Is everything the National Enquirer says false? No. OK, do you remember the John Edwards story to cheat on his wife? Sorry, I hit a child from an extramarital affair.

Yes, I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story. And then what is The New York Times to The New York Times, I think is allowed to report that the Inquirer is making a claim that way they don't have to substantiate the story. So why is The New York Times talking to Mike Semenovich or using the National Enquirer as the source? Are they using Alex Jones as the source? Who here's the big problem that we're having. Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody and other people are entitled to talk to no one?

I don't really understand that. This is an indulgence. This is how the Catholic Church used to do things. It's hard to fight the system because the reason you don't talk to Alex Jones is because the platforms on which you do the communication will will do platform will be movie.

I'm not platformed it. I used to I used to do NPR and I used to do the NewsHour and I used to provide stories to Washington Post, New York Times that has gone away. They've circled the wagons closer and closer and more of us are unacceptable. And right now I have no question that they're going through anybody who has a platform trying to say, OK, what do we have against that person in case we need to shut that down, we have to make a different decision.

And the different decision is that it doesn't matter how many times Joe said the N-word. Yeah, it doesn't matter that somebody else, you know, like with mathematical theorems, if the worst person in the world proves a mathematical theorem like the Unabomber, we can't undo the theorem. Yeah, you know, and I point out Charles Manson song, Look At Your Game Girl is an amazing song. It's a really good song. I don't think it's one of the greatest songs ever, but it happens that he wasn't a no talent.

And, you know, I don't know how Hitler was as an artist fiction, not that, OK, we've got to get past this. We've got to get past this idea that we're going to purge ourselves of our badness. And we're just going to say this is like I likened it to teenage girls and cutting. We're just all we're doing is destroying ourselves in search of perfection. And the answer is, no, we're not perfect. We're flawed.

We're screwed up. And we've always been this way. And we're not going to silence everyone who you can point a laser beam at and say, well, that person, look at how bad that person is. If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye, we might as well just let's learn Chinese.

But there is an art to having those messy conversations, whether it was with Alex or anybody else.

OK, let's talk about Alex and this particular stuff that Alex does. It's absolutely nauseating. And there's other stuff that he's doing that's funny, the methodology of of the way he carries.

And sometimes he's talking about the truth and sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy. His variance is incredibly high.

The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O'Keefe or the National Enquirer or anything you don't like is to say great Galong short.

I mean, well, if you invest in a mutual fund, all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long, but if you invest in a hedge fund, you do something called relative value trading. It's like while you long tech or short tech. Well, actually, I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Google. Why is that? Because I believe Google got way too much attention and that Microsoft has been unfairly maligned. And so this is really a play on legacy tech over more modern tech.

OK, which part of Alex Jones are you long and which part of you short? One of the things that should be a requirement for being a reporter is like, what? What did Donald Trump do that was good? Nothing. OK, then you're not a reporter. What did Hitler do that was good? The Rosenstrasse, the protest. Non Jewish women campaign for their Jewish men to be returned home to them from certain death almost in death camps.

It should have been that there were no death camps. It should have been that everybody was returned home. But you know what?

The fact that the women of the Rosenstrasse protest, I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about, you know, some of the baddest ass chicks in the world.

Got their husbands returned to them. Coleco vote. And not. I'm not celebrating Hitler, there's the worst of the worst, but God damn it, you know, this idea that we can just say everything that person does is a lie. Everything that person does is evil. This reflects a simplicity of mind that humanity cannot afford. Is Google evil, evil, because it will sell you Mein Kampf is Amazon evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf if you find out that Mein Kampf rests on somebody's bookshelf.

Do you have any idea what it means if you find out that a scholar use the N-word? Should that person lose their job? Come on, grow the hell up. I guess our responsibility to lead by example on that, because you have to acknowledge that the fact, like the current have somebody on your podcast who you're worried about.

But but do it in a principled fashion. I mean, in other words, I'm not here to whitewash everything, on the other hand. If somebody makes some allegations. I don't know that I'm obligated to treat every set of allegations as if, you know, how do you defend yourself against. Now, allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.

Well, my sir, my standard I don't know, maybe you can speak to it as I don't care. Like in a case of Alagoas, for example. I don't.

I'm willing to have a conversation with Alex Jones and people like him if I know he's not going to try to manipulate me so that he is going to try to manipulate, I can't then then we're not going to be two humans.

OK, but Lex, I want you to think well of me. I put on a jacket. I don't usually wear a jacket.

OK, thank you. All right. I'm trying to manipulate. There's an entire field. There's an entire field that says that speech may be best thought of as an attempt to manipulate each other. This is too simplistic, everything that we keep talking through. Yes, you know better than this.

I disagree. I think I think there is ways there's of course, it's a gray area, but there is a threshold where your intent with which you come to a meeting, to an interaction is one that is not one that's grounded in like a respect for common humanity, like a love for each other as deeply as if somebody is doing really bad stuff.

I expect you to try to keep them from doing really bad stuff. But, you know, just keep in mind that when I was a younger man, I saw an amazing anti pornography document documentary. And it was called rated X and I don't know where it went. But the conceit of it was we're going to get some pornographers in front of a camera because they want to talk and we're going to ask them about what they do for a living and why it's OK.

No commentary. OK, you could potentially, if you really think Alex Jones is the worst, and I again, I'm not intimately familiar with him. You could decide to. Just let him talk. Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people. You know, I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux, Stefan Molin, who makes many good points and makes many bad points, and he makes many good points in bad ways, and I worry about it.

And I don't feel that it's it's not my obligation to make sure that Stefan Molyneaux has a voice on the portal. But I did stand up and say I didn't want him banned from social media. And I do think that a lot of the people who are being banned from social media were worried that they're right rather than that they're wrong. I certainly don't really think that I'm worried in some sense that some of the really wrong people are wrong. But, you know, if you look at, for example, Curtis Javin, there's a tremendous amount of interest is Eric and I speak to Curtis Javin.

Curtis Urines is many interesting things. And he says many horrible, stupid things, very provocative. And I don't I haven't I haven't invited him on to the portal, but I haven't said I will never invite him on to the portal. We are all in a difficult position.

That's why I'm saying you're making a kind of I think it's a much more difficult task that and burden carry as people who have conversations, because Curtis Aaron is a good example. How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis work to really talk about the problem of Curtis Garvin?

Yes, because I think it's probably illustrative. There's this big question is why does somebody who says such stupid ass things listen to by so many people, very smart people, people who are part of our daily lives? Discuss Curtis Javin in hushed tones. Now to a question. My belief is that Curtis Javin has made a number of very interesting, provocative points, and they associate Curtis Javin as the person who has made these points. And they treat the completely asinine stuff that he says that super dangerous.

As well, that's Curtis. Right, right, they give him the credit for he he's he's kind of like to use the term first principles, deep thinker, but in some way to have some spaceball in the world.

But as a result, we don't actually know why Curtis Javin is knocking around. So many Silicon Valley luminaries lives was see, so you said that he said a lot of asinine, stupid stuff and that's the sense I got from a few things I've read, not just about it. This is not just like Wikipedia stuff, is he? He's a little like I've said before. He seems to be careless.

I don't think it's like Jim Watson. Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things in order to prove that he's free. It's not a question of careless. He enjoys the freedom to say these things. Yeah, and the key point is, is that there's, I expect something more of Curtis. I expect that if somebody is insightful about all sorts of things up to that point. That they're going to have enough care now, for example, make this point repeatedly that vaccines are not 100 percent safe.

Most people who have an idea that anybody is an anti vaccine should be silenced, are in a position where they they they probably don't say vaccines are 100 percent safe. But you keep finding that statement over and over again, like believe all women vaccines are 100 percent safe, climate science is settled. Science, whatever.

This Martin Baily is where you make extraordinarily vapid blanket claims and then you retreat into something well defined. The you know, we don't want no more police actually just means we want the police to not take on mental health duties. We've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society, and what I'm claiming is, is that I might talk to Curtis Sharpton, but I have really very little interest to talk to a guy who seems to be kind of giddy about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves.

It's like, why do I want to do that on the portal?

One of first of all, because just as you said, that's not Curtis's main thing is a lot of ideas. And what I've read of him, which is not a huge amount, is that he's very thoughtful about the way this world works. And on top of that, he's an important historical figure in the birth and the development of the art. Right. Or what we call the right. The new reactionary. Yeah. And there's so he's just an important intellectual.

And so it makes sense to talk to him. The question is, how much work do you put in?

Well, this is the issue of Fugo. I'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that food. So you have you have a puffer fish, you can eat the puffer fish, you can you can get a kind of a tingling sensation on your tongue if you get a little bit of the poison organ. But my point is, I don't know how to serve Curtis Javin. Yeah. So that, in fact, I'm not worried about what happens. And I believe that if somebody else was a student of the new reactionary movement, that person might be in a better position to host Curtis Yala.

So somebody that's a really good example. Somebody I think is spoken with that's an intermediary, that's a powerful one is Michael Malice. And he's spoken with Curtis.

And Michael wrote a book about, by the way, Michael somewhat changed my mind about Michael Mallis. I'm glad he did. I think I would call him a friend, and I think he's a underneath it all.

I really kind human being, and I think your skepticism about him was initially from a surface level of what did you call him, hyena's the trolls and so on. I'm not happy about his.

It's been so long since I've seen good troll's. Yes, so he is a higher quality of trolling, but he aspires to that, I mean, you know, disagree or not, I really enjoy how much care he puts into the work he does, like a North Korea and study of the world and how much privately, but also in public love he has for people, especially those who are powerless. Yeah, just a genuine admiration for them.

For Betka. I think Curtis actually does, too. I don't know. I mean, you have to appreciate the first time I met Curtis, he introduced me, says I'm the most right wing person you've ever met. It's just like, well, this is the conversation that's already over.

It's theatrical in a way that's not conductive to actually having a real connection to me. So it turn me off because it was like you need to be the most right wing person. And so I'm a troll. I'm a troll. Yeah. OK, why are we doing this? Yeah, but what I'm trying to get as different I'm trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend of yours. If you found out something terrible. She said, Dear friend, you should still continue to be his friend and in this case is very likely that we'll find something, Curtis is an acquaintance of mine because he hangs around with some people that I know.

I did not get it. I've started to understand why the people in my life, some of them are Curtis Javin fans. Many of them disregard the stupid stuff. But my feeling is, is that. Too much poison, Oregon, not enough fish, I don't know how to serve that too intermingled.

I'm not your chef speaking for defending your friend, staying with your friends and bringing the old band together again. You coined the term A.W. until Dark Web, but I like it.

It represents a certain group of people that are struggling with that are almost like. Challenged the norms of social and political discourse from all different angles, right? What do you think is the state of the tea w what do you think is its future? Is it still a useful. Well, it never existed. Is it a protocol?

Is it a collection of people featured in an article? What I learned very clearly is that there's a tremendous desire in the Internet age to pin people down.

What do you say? Who's in it? What are the criterion?

It's like, I understand you want to play the demarkation game and you want to make everything that is demarcated instantly null and void. No, thank you. So I resisted saying who was in it. I resisted saying what it was, I resisted saying that Barry Weiss's article was the definitive thing. They've chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs that we couldn't get out of. I did not want those photographs taken. They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer needed to take them all at twilight.

You know, I don't know something I didn't even want to do the article.

Barry convinced me that it was the right thing to do. Undoubtedly, Barry was right.

I was wrong. But the key point is nothing can grow in this environment. There's a reason we're not building. It does not appear that we found a way to grow an ything organic and good and decent that we need right now, and that's kind of the key issue. Who's the weed? You mean us as those of us who wish to have a future for our great grandchildren. Let's let's take the subset of people who are worried about things long after their demise.

But do you think it's useful to have a term like the AGW to capture some set of people, some sort of. Ideas or maybe principles that capture what I think that you can say it's not supposed to mean doesn't exist, it doesn't mean anything but to the public, to me, OK, I'll just speak to me.

It represented something. Yeah.

And it represented I think that this is my in my first attempt to interview the great equines, then I said that I spoke about you, but I in general is trying to point out the elephant in the room or that the emperor has no clothes, the set of people that do that in their own way if there are multiple elephants in the room.

Yes. The point is, is that the Iaw is more interested in seeing the totality of elephants and trying to figure out how do we move forward as opposed to, say, I can spot the other guy's elephant in the room, but I can't see my own. And, you know, in large measure, we didn't represent an institutional base and therefore it wasn't maximally important that we look at our own hypocrisy because we weren't on the institutional spectrum. This is where friendship comes into play with a different figures that are loosely associated with that, GW is you are somehow.

Responsible for, you know, the exactly thing that you said, did you hear what I don't know. I figured, oh, who what Sam Harris said about stuff.

Yeah, that that kind of thing is I chuckled lovingly or chuckle like or I was angry at some people who had said things that cause Sam to say what Sam said about turning his imaginary club membership into the Iaw. People said very silly things. And, you know, I think that there is just this confusion that integrity means calling out your friends in front of the world. Right. And, you know, I've been pretty clear about this. I try to choose my friends carefully.

And if you would like to recuse me, because I'm not a source of reliable information, people that I know and love the most, maybe that's reasonable for you. Maybe you prefer somebody who was willing to throw a friend under the bus at the first sign of trouble. By all means, exit my feed. You don't have to subscribe to me if that's if that's your concept of integrity, you're barking up the wrong tree. What I will say is, is that I knew these people well enough to know that they're all flawed.

Thank you for the callback and but the issue is that. I love people who are flawed and I love people who have to earn a living, even if you call them a grifter. And I love people who, you know, like the fact that Donald Trump didn't get us into new wars, even if you call them. All right. I love the fact that some people believe in structural oppression and want to fight it, even if they're not WOAK, because they don't believe that structural oppression is hiding everywhere.

I care and love different people in different ways, and I just I think that the overarching thing that we are not getting at is that we were sold a bill of goods that you can go through life like analyze a program with preprogramed responses.

Well, what about them, it's both sides of them, it's all right, it's the loony left campus madness, you know, it's like, OK, why don't you just empty the entire goddamn magazine? All of those prerecorded. Snips. Now that you've done all of that. Now we can have a conversation, your son put it really well, which is we should add in all things, resist labels, but we can't deal without labels.

We have to generalize. But we also have to keep in mind that just in the way in science, you deal with an effective theory that isn't a fundamental one.

In science, most of our theories we consider to be effective theories, if I generalize about Europe, about women, about, you know, Christians, those things have to be understood to mean something and not to have their definitions extend so broadly that they mean. Nothing at all, nor that they're so rigid that their claims that clearly won't bear scrutiny. Lex, what do you really want to talk about? That's always my question to you. That always gets me.

That's a good thing. Maybe you are the therapist, but like you and I could talk about, people love up until now, at least, people have loved listening to the two of us in conversation.

Yeah.

And my feeling is, is that we're not talking about neural nets. We're not talking about geometric unity and we're not talking about where distributed computing might go, and I don't think that we're really focused on. Some of the most exciting things we could do to transform education, we're still caught in this world of other people that we don't belong in. I don't belong in the world as it's been created. I'm trying to build a new world and. I'm astounded that the people with the independent means to help build that world are so demotivated that they don't want to build new structures and the people who do want to build new structures seem to be wild eyed, wild eyed.

What do you mean by while that? They're not they're not. I guarantee you that I will get some message in my DMS. Hey, Eric, you know, I'm a third year chemistry student at South Dakota State and I've got a great idea. I just need funding. I want to build. They don't have the means.

So the people who have the means or the sophistication or, you know, it's like you're looking for somebody who's proven themselves a few times to say, you know, I've got four billion dollars behind me that soft circled. I want to figure out what a new university would be and what it would take to protect academic freedom and who we would hire and what what are the different characteristics, because I can clearly see that everything following the current model is falling apart.

Nobody in my understanding is saying that. Nobody is saying.

Let's take that which is functioning independently and make it less vulnerable and let's boost those those signals and a critical component as money think, it's not only that, but it's also a kind of these people are mobbed up, hands off.

Let's imagine for the moment that Sándor Pitty Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg founded a. University cum social media entity. Mm hmm. And they said this is the purpose of this is to make sure that academic freedom will not perish from this earth because it's necessary to keep us from all going crazy. And we are going to lock ourselves out, we've come up with this governance system and the idea is, is that these people will be assigned the difficult task of making sure that society doesn't go crazy in any particular direction, that we have a fact based, reality based, feasibility based understanding.

We can try to figure out where a real opportunities are. It feels like everybody with the with the ability to do something like that and with the with the brains and experience and the resources. Would rather sit in the current system. And hope to figure out where they can flee to if the whole thing comes apart. Well, yeah, and maybe push back a little bit, I agree with you, but, you know, it feels like there some people are trying.

So, for example, Google purchased deep mined deep. Mine is a company that kind of represents a lot of radical ideas.

They've become acceptable, actually, ajai artificial general intelligence used to be really radical of a thing to talk about and deep mine open fire to places which is made it more acceptable.

I know you can now start to criticize what they're really now that has become acceptable. They're not taking the further step of being more and more radical. But, you know, that was an attempt by Google to say that let's let's try some wild stuff, sort of like Boston Dynamics, like Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics is a really good example of trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose whatsoever except to try to try out their ideas.

Well, the idea is that innovation is like dessert and you can have dessert after you solve the problem of the main course. And the main course is a bunch of insoluble problems so that we can get into innovation. Sure. Once we once we perfect ourselves. And you're saying that we need to make innovation the main meal?

Well, I'm saying that there really is structural oppression.

I mean, if you train a deep learning system on exclusively white faces, it's going to get confused. Yeah. So let's not disagree that there are real issues around this. In fact, that's an issue of innovation and data. Your data should be responsive.

On the other hand, there are things we can't do anything about that are actually, you know, fundamental and. Those things may have to do with the fact that, you know, some of us taste cilantro with soap and some of us don't like there are differences between people and some of them are in the hardware.

Some of them are in firmware, some of them are in software. That is the human mind. And this completely simplistic idea that every failure of.

Of an organization to promote each person who has particular intersexual characteristics. We cannot. Hold progress hostage to that, and you've talked about perhaps we'll save this for another time because it's such a fascinating conversation. We talked about this with Glenn Beck is the host of Stagnation of Growth and all that kind of stuff. Your idea is that inasmuch as the current situation is a kind of Ponzi scheme, the current situation in the United States is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise of constant, unending innovation we need.

We need to fund the true innovators and encourage them and empower them and sort of culturally say that this is what this country is about is let's put it this way. Brilliant minds. We're going to kill each other if we don't grow. Growth is like an immune system. And you always have pathogens present, but if you don't have growth present, you can't fight the pathogens in your society and right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere. So if we don't get growth into our system fairly quickly, we are in really seriously bad shape.

So it's very important that if I had a horrible person who was capable of building something that would give us all a certain amount of what I've called financial Beita to some new technology where we all benefit, let's say quantum computing comes in and everybody the dry cleaner has a quantum computing angle, right?

Yes. OK. That's necessary to keep this system that we built going. We can try to redesign the system, but our system expects growth and we've started starved for growth. And the madness that we're seeing is the failure of our immune system to be able to handle the pathogens that have always been present. So people can say, well, this was always there, yes, it was what's changed was your immune system. We have got to make sure that, one, we understand why diversity is potentially really important.

We have mined certain communities to death, you and I are Ashkenazi Jews. Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews are good at technical stuff. We know that the Chinese are good at technical stuff. The Indians have many people who are good at technical stuff as the Japanese. I also believe that we have communities where if you think about the Parado idea of diminishing returns, if you've never mind a community. Many of the people you're going to get at the beginning are going to be amazing because that community, it's like did you drill for more oil in Texas?

Texas pretty thoroughly picked over. Do you find someplace that, you know, completely insane? Maybe there's oil there. Who knows? In particular, I would like to displace our reliance on our military competitors in Asia, in our scientific laboratories, with women, with African-Americans, with Latinos, people who are in different categories than we have traditionally sourced. And I would like to get them the money that the market would normally give these fields were we not using visas in place of payment right now.

I predict I have a crazy idea, which is that I play you and I both play music and I find the analytic work that I do when I'm trying to figure out chord progressions and symmetries and Triton's, all these sorts of things to be very similar to the work that I do when I do physics or math. I believe that one of the things that is true is, is that the analytic contributions of African-Americans to music are probably fungible to science. I don't know that that's true, it's true, I haven't done controlled research, but I believe that is very important to let the People's Republic of China know that they are not staffing our laboratories anymore and that we need to look to our own people.

And in particular, we are going to get a huge benefit from making sure that women and black Americans, Latinos are in a position. To take over some of these things, because many of these communities have been underutilized now, I don't know if that's an insane idea. I want to hear somebody tell me why it's an insane idea. But I believe that part of what we need to do is we need to recognize that there is there are security issues.

There are geopolitical issues with the funding of science. And that what we've done is we've starved our world for innovation. And if we don't get back to the business of innovation, we should be doing diversity and inclusion out of greed rather than guilt. Now, part of the problem with this is, is that a lot of the energy behind diversity and inclusion is based on guilt and accusation. Yeah. And what I want I want to kick ass. And my hope is, is that diminishing returns favors mining the communities that have not been traditionally mined.

In order to extract output from those communities, unless there's a flaw in that plan, if there's a flaw, somebody needs to tell me if there isn't a flaw. We need to get greedy about innovation rather than guilty about innovation.

That's really brilliantly put. My biggest problem with what I see is exactly speaks to that in the discussions diversity. It's used when it's grounded in guilt. It's then used as a hammer to shame people. They don't care about enough that shit.

So my point is, I'm excited about the idea of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field theory.

I'm excited about the idea of Art Tatum trying to figure out what the neural nets figured out about protein folding. I have some idea of the level of intellect of people who have not found their way into STEM subjects in incredibly technically demanding areas. And if there's a flaw in that theory, I want somebody to present the flaw. But right now, my belief is, is that these things are merit based. And if you really believe in structural oppression, you do not want an affirmative action program.

You want to make sure that people have huge amounts of resources to get themselves in the position. I want to push out. I just tried this on this clubhouse application. I want to push out Klein bottles as a secret sign inside of rap videos and hip hop. Right. I want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world and I want to get the people who hopefully I'm trying to lure into science and engineering.

I want to get them paid. I don't want them as just cheap substitutes for the fleeing white males who have learned that they can't make any money in science and engineering. Yeah, so the problem is, is that we need we need to take over the ship and it doesn't need to be you and me, because quite honestly, I have no desire to administer. I want to be the chief executive officer of anything.

What I do want is I want the baby boomers who've made this mess and can't see it. To be gone, they had almost all of our universities and I want fresh blood, fresh resources, I want academic freedom, and I want greed for our country and for the future to determine diversity, inclusion, as opposed to shame and guilt, which is destroying our fabric.

That's as good of a diversity statement as I've ever heard. This is a U-turn. But somebody commented on the tweet. You sent that as one of the top comments there. Definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency. So it's a U-turn, but not really OK.

Since you're an economist, since you're not an economist, I'm an I pretend to be an economist, hoping that the economists will take issue, that I'm not an economist so that I can advance gauge theoretical field, theoretical economics, which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge was a major innovation that happened approximately 25 years ago. I don't think that economists understand what a price index is that measures inflation, nor do I think economists understand what a growth index or a product or the quantity index is that measures GDP.

I think that they don't even understand the basics of price and quantity index construction, and therefore they can't possibly review field theoretic economics. They can't review Gates theoretic economics. They're intellectually not in a position to manage their own field.

You talked about that. There's a stagnation in growth currently.

I looked at from my macroeconomics macroeconomics in college perspective, GDP doesn't seem to capture the productivity, the full. The spectrum of what I think is as a function, that successful society. Do you think is broken about GDP?

What does it need to include at these indices?

Like let me let me explain what they don't understand to begin with. Sure.

Imagine that all prices and all quantities of output are the same at the end of a year as they are at the beginning. And you ask what happened during that year? Was there inflation they meandered over the course of the year, but miraculously they all came back to exactly their values. The amount produced at the end of the year is the same as the beginning in every single quantity. Typically, the claim would be that the price index should be one point zero and that the quantity index should be one point zero, that's clearly wrong.

Well, it's much easier to see with it speaks to a fundamental confusion that economists have, they don't understand that the economy is curved and not flat. In a curved economy, everything should be path dependance, but they view path dependance as a problem because they are effectively the flat earth society of market analysis. They don't understand what they've called and they've actually called it. The cycling problem is exactly what they need to understand to advance their field. So I'll give you a very simple example.

OK, let's imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund and Ted and Alice in another. In both cases, the females, that is Alice and Carol are the chief investment officers and Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers in charge of trying to get money into the fund and trying to get people not to, in fact, remove their their money from the funds. OK. If you, in fact, had. Bob and Carol said analysts and both hedge funds.

We're invested in assets whose prices came back to the same levels and whose exposures were in the same quantities. And you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds, would you compensate them the same necessarily? What if, for example, Carol was killing it in terms of investments every time she bought some sort of security, the price of that security went up? Mm hmm.

OK, but Bob was the worst marketing officer and its chief marketing officer. There were tons of redemptions because Bob was constantly drunk. Bob was making off color comments. Now, as a result, at the end of the year, the fund hasn't grown in size because even though Carol was crushing it in terms of the investments, Bob was screwing up everything and the redemptions were legendary.

So people were making money and still pulling it out of the fund in the other fund.

Alice can't seem to buy a base hit.

Every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets. But Ted's amazing marketing skills allowed the fund to get all sorts of new subscriptions and halted the redemptions as people hoped that the fund would get its act together.

OK. Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated. In quantity indices should be how Bob and Ted are compensated. So even though both funds had closed loops to come back to the original states, what happened during the period that they were active tells you how people are supposed to be compensated. Now, we know that whatever the increase in the price index is, is compensated by a decrease in the quantity index or conversely, because prices in quantities returned to their original values, you can have another fund where nothing much happened.

There were no redemptions, no subscriptions prices. The fund remained in cash the whole time. So in that third fund, you know, let's call that Tristan and Isolde, right. That fund should have no bonuses paid because nobody did anything. But nobody should be fired either. Now, the fact that economists don't even understand that this is what their price and quantity indices were intended to do, that they don't understand that you can actually give what would be called ordinal agents the freedom to change their preferences and still have something defined as a Coneys cost of living adjustment.

They don't even understand the mathematics of their field. So the indices need to be able to capture some kind of dynamics that we have had indices that capture these dynamics due to the work of Francois, the vizier, since 1925. But the economists have not even understood what Devizes Index truly represented. What do you mess with with such crude indices then?

Well, you missed the fact that you're supposed to have a field theoretic subject. The representative consumer should actually be a probability distribution on the space of all possible consumers, weighted by the probability of getting any particular pull from the distribution. We should not have a single gauge of inflation like what does that in 1973 dollars any more than you should be able to say. It was fifty nine degrees Fahrenheit on Earth yesterday. So when we get to the cryptocurrency, what I'm going to say is that because we didn't found economic theory on the proper marginal revolution, because we missed the major opportunity, which is that the differential calculus of markets is Gaige theory.

It's not ordinary differential calculus. We found that out in finance, that it was stochastic differential calculus. We have the wrong version of the differential calculus underneath all of modern economic theory.

And part of what I've been pushing for in crypto currencies is the idea that we should be understanding that gold is a theory, just as modern economic theory is supposed to be a theory, and that we should be looking to liberate crypto currencies and more importantly, distributed computing from the problem of this unwanted global aspect, which is the block chain. The thing that is most celebrated in some sense about Bitcoin is in fact the reason that I'm least enthusiastic about it.

I'm hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi. But it's an intermediate step towards trying to figure out what should digital gold actually be if physical gold is a collection of up quarks and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons held together the quarks but gluons with electrons orbiting it held together by photons with the occasional weak interaction, beta decay. All of those are gaged theories. So gold is actually coming from gaged theory and markets are coming from Gaige theory and the opportunity to do locally enforced conservation laws, which effectively is what a Bitcoin transaction is, should theoretically be founded on a different principle.

That is not the block chain. It should be a theoretical concept in which effectively the tokens are excitations on a network of computer nodes. Mm hmm.

And the fact that let's imagine that this is some token by moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship, effectively, I pushed that class as a gauge theory towards your region of the table. We should be recognizing that gaged theory is the correct differential calculus for the 21st century. In fact, it should have been there in the 20th century.

You're saying it captures these individual individual dynamics much richer.

Why should my giving you a token have to be? Why should we alert the global community in this Tolkan that that occurred? You can talk about side change. You talk about any means of doing this. But effectively, we have a problem, which is if I think about this differently, yeah, I have a class that is extant. You have a glass that is absent. We're supposed to call the constructor method on your glass at the same moment we call the destructor method on my glass in order to have a conservation principle.

It would be far more efficient to do this with the one system that is known never to throw an exception, which is nature and nature, chosen theory and geometry for her underlying language.

We now know do the work of Malani at Harvard in Economics in the mid 1990s, which I was her coauthor on. But I wish to promote her as as well as this being my idea.

We know that modern economic theory is a naturally occurring gaged theory and the failure of that community to acknowledge that that work occurred and that it was put down for reasons that make no analytic sense. Is important in particular due to the relatively new innovation of distributed computing and Satoshi his brainchild.

So you're thinking we need to have the mathematics that captures that enforces cryptocurrency as a distributor system, as opposed to a centralized one where the block chain says that crypto should be centralized.

The abundance economy, much discussed in Silicon Valley or what's left of it, is actually a huge threat to the planet, because what it really is, is that it is what Marc Andreessen has called software eating the world. And what that means is that you're going to push things from being private goods and services into public goods and services and public goods and services cannot have price and value tied together. Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value to to the world that they cannot command price and they will not be able to capture the value that they have created or a significant enough fraction of it.

The abundance economy is a disaster. It will lead to a reduction in human freedom. The great innovation of Satoshi is locally enforced or semi locally enforced conservation laws where the idea is just as gold is heart. You know, why is gold hard to create or destroy? It's because it's created not only in stars, but in violent events involving stars like supernova collisions when gold is created.

And we transact, we're using conservation laws, the physics determines the custodianship, whatever it is that I don't have, you now have. And conversely, in such a situation, we should be looking for the abstraction that most closely matches the physical world because the physical world is known not to throw an exception. The block chain is a vulnerability. The idea that the 51 percent problem isn't solved, that you could have a crazy race, conditions, all of these things.

We know that they're solved inside of Gaige theory somehow. So the important thing is to recognize that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever in the history of economic theory took place already and was essentially instantly buried.

And I will stand by those comments. Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you. Are you Satoshi? No. No, no, no, I don't have that kind of ability. I really don't. I do other things. Speaking of Satoshi engaged Thierry. You've mentioned to Brian Keating. That you may be releasing a geometric community paper this year or some other form of additional material, the topic, what is your thinking around this? What's the process you're going through now was very trying this.

I used April 1st to try to start a tradition which I hope to use to liberate mankind.

The tradition is that at least one day a year you should be able to say heretical things and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off or Mark Zuckerberg. Your Prova shouldn't call you up and say, what did you say? We need at some level to have a jubilee from centralized control. And so my my hope is that, you know, what is tradition is in America, something a baby boomer did twice. Impeachment is very funny anyway, so what I'm I'm not a baby boomer, but is an exer.

I've thought about whether or not April 1st would be a good date on which to release a printed version of what I already said in lecture form, because I think it's hysterically funny that the physics community claims that it can't decode video. Yeah, it must be paper. And you know what? There will be a steady stream of new complaints up until the point that they fit it into a narrative that they like. Yeah, I'm thinking about April 1st as a date in which to release a document and it won't be perfectly complete, but it'll be very complete, and then they'll try to say.

It's wrong or you already did it or no, that was done, but what we just did on top of it is brilliant or it doesn't match experimenter who knows what to go through all of their usual nonsense.

It's time to go. Is there still puzzles in your mind they need to be figured out for you to try to put it on paper? I mean, those are different mediums, right?

That's a great question. I did not count on something that turns out to be important. When you work on your own outside of the system for a long time, you probably don't think you're going to be doing this as a 55 year old man. And I have been so long outside of math and physics departments and I've been occupied with so many other things, as you can see that. The old idea that I had was if I always did it in little pieces, then I was always safe because it wouldn't be steerable.

And so now those pieces never got assembled completely, in essence, I have all the pieces and. I can fit them together, but there's probably a small amount of glue code, like there are a few algebraic things I've forgotten how to do. I may or may not figure them out between now and April 1st, but it's pretty complete.

But that's the puzzle you're kind of struggling to now figure out to get it all on and send the glue together.

I can't tell you whether the theory is correct or incorrect, but like, you know, for example, there's with the exact form of the supersymmetry algebra or how what's the rule for passing a minus sign through a particular operator? And all of that stuff got a lot more difficult because I didn't. I didn't do it. Look, you know, it's a little bit like if you're you know, if you're a violinist and you don't touch your violin regularly for 15 years, you come back to it and you pretty much know the pieces sort of.

But there's lots of stuff that's missing. Your tone is off and that kind of stuff. I would say I've got I'll get the ship to the harbor and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in. And if the tugboat doesn't show up, then I'll pilot the thing right into the dock myself. But it's not a big deal. I think that it is essentially completely psychologically as a human being. This is I remember perhaps by accident, but maybe there's no accidents in the universe.

I was tuned in. I don't remember where reference on April 1st. Yeah. To you. I think I you discord. Yeah.

Kind of thinking about thinking through this release. I mean, it wasn't like it wasn't obvious that you were going to do it, you were thinking through it.

And I remember there intellectual, personal, psychological struggle with this. Yeah. Right. Well because I thought it was dangerous. If this turns out to be right, I don't know what it unlocks. If it's wrong. I think I understand where we are, if it's wrong, it'll be the first. Fool's gold, that really looks like a theory of everything. It'll be the iron pyrites of physics, and we haven't even had fool's gold, in my opinion, yet.

Got it. So what is your intuition on why this looks right to you, like why it feels like it would be if if wrong?

I can say it very simply. It's way smarter than I am. Can you break that apart a little more like every time you poke at it is giving you intuitions that follow with the criminal?

Well, let's put it in computer science terms. Yes, please. OK, there's a concept of technical debt that computer scientists struggle with. As you commit crimes, you have to pay those crimes back at a later date. Mm hmm. In general, most of the problem with physical theories is that as you try to do something that matches reality, you usually have to go into some structure that gets you farther away. And your hope is, is that you're going to be able to pay back the technical debt.

And in general, these wind up as check kiting schemes. Or like you're funding a startup and there are too many pivots around, so you keep adding epicycles in order to. To cover things that have gone wrong, my belief is, is that. This thing. Represents something like a summit to me, and I'm very proud of having found a route up the summit. But the route is what's due to me, the summit can't possibly be due to me.

You know, like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Did not create Mt. Everest. They know that they didn't create that they figured out a way. You got to tell me what Mount Everest is in this metaphor relative and also connected to the technical does the technical. That is a negative thing that it's kind of you will eventually have to pay it off, saying in the end, the ascent that you're seeing now, you the theory is you do not have much technical debt.

Well, that's right. I think that what happens is, is that early on?

What I would say is, I believe now. That the physics community. Has said many things incorrectly about the current state of the universe. They're not wildly off, which is why, like, for example, the claim is that there are three generations of matter. I do not believe that there are three generations of matter. I believe that there are two generations of matter. And there's a third collection that looks like a generation of matter as the first two, only at low energy.

OK, well, that's not a frequent claim, people imagine that there are three or more generations of matter, I would claim that that's false. People claim that the matter is chiral. That is, it knows that's left from its right. I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental, but it is emergen. We could keep going and all these sorts of things, people think that space time is the fundamental geometric geometrical construct. I do not agree.

I think it's something that I've termed the observers. All of these different things represent a series of over interpretations of the world that preclude progress. So you gave I think you gave some credit to string theory as string theory, I think loop quantum gravity, if I remember correctly, as far as like getting close to the fool's gold.

I said that Garrett Lisi phenomenologically gets a lot of things right. He gets his he's got a reason for chirality, a reason for uniqueness using Aetate and the fact that it uses something called vile fermions, which are chiral. He has a way of getting geometry to. Get remands, geometry underneath general relativity to play with Erisman geometry, which is underneath the standard model using something called Khatun Connections that are out of favor, he's figured out something involving super connections to make sure that the fermoy on the matter in the system isn't quantized, the same way as the bosons were, which is a problem in his old theory.

He's got something about three generations for Trailered. He's got a lot of phenomenological hits. I don't think Garretts Theory works. It also has a very simple aggrandize. Basically using the Yáng Mills Norm squared the same thing you would use as a as a cost function if you were doing neural nets. OK. The string theorists have a different selling point, which is that they may have gotten a renormalize Zable theory of gravity.

If quantum gravity was what we were meant to do and they've done some stuff with black holes, that they can get some solutions correct. And then they have lots of agreements with where they show mathematical truths that mathematicians didn't even know. I'm very underwhelmed by string theory based on how many people have worked on it and how little is supporting the claims to it being a theory of everything, but those are the two that I take quite seriously. I don't yet take Wolfram's quite seriously, because if he really finds one of these cellular automata that are really distinct and generative, it'll be amazing.

But he's looking for such a thing. I don't think he's found anything. Text Tegmark I view as a philosopher who is somehow taking credit for Platonism, which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max because I like Max. But if it ever comes time, I'm putting a Post-it note that I'm not part of the mathematical universe. Hypothesis is really anything new and in general loop, quantum gravity really, I think grew out of some hopes that the general relativistic community had for that they would be able to do particle theory.

And I don't think that they've shown any particle theoretic realism. So essentially, here's what I really think, Lex. I think we didn't understand how big the difference between an effective theory and a theory of everything is conceptually, maybe it's not mathematically that different, but conceptually trying to figure out what a theory of how does the universe and I've compared it to Escher's drawing hands, how do two hands draw themselves into existence? That's the puzzle that I think has just been wanting.

And I'll be honest, I'm really surprised that the theoretical physics community. He didn't even get up on their high horse and say this is the most stupid nonsense imaginable, because clearly I'm I always say I'm not a physicist. So I'm just a I'm I'm I'm an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors.

So in your journey of releasing this, and I'm sure the further maybe it will be another American tradition on April 1st, there will continue for years, Locarno.

In my eye, there's sort of. Crumbs along the way that I'm hoping to collect, in my naive view of things of the beauty.

That in your geometric view of the universe. So one question I'd like to ask is. If you were to challenge me to visualize something beautiful, something important about geometric unity in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty from the outsider's perspective, what would that thing be? Just the question, perhaps, who can both have a journey towards April 1st? Take a look at that. Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose, not Melrose and Montana in Santa Monica.

Now, you'll notice that all of those disks rotate independently, yes. If you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous but not uniform everywhere, what you're doing is the so-called gage transformation on the Taurus, seen as a one bundle over a new one space time. So the concept of space time here in a very simplified case isn't four dimensional, but it's one dimensional, just a circle. And there's a circle above every point in the circle represented by those little disks.

Imagine, if you will, that. We took a rubberband. And placed it around here and decided that that was a function from the circle into. The circle that is representing a y axis that's wrapped around itself. Well, you would have an idea of what it means for a function to be constant if it just went all around the outside, but what happens if I.

Turn this a little bit, then the function would be mostly constant, it would have a little place where it dipped and it went back, it turns out that you can transform that function and transform the derivative that says that function is equal to zero when I take its derivative at the same time, that's what a gage transformation is amazing to me that we don't have a simple video visualizing things that I've already had built. And then I can clearly demonstrate when you do that tourists whose the code of the tourist is itself generated contradictory.

Yeah, this is a you one principle one. And the world needs to know what a theory is, not by analogy, not with Lawrence Krauss saying it's like a checkerboard if you change some of the colors this way, not saying, you know, that it's a local cemetery involving it's none of those things.

It's a theory of differential calculus where the functions and the derivatives are both subject to a particular kind of change, so that if a function was constant under one derivative, then the new function is constant under the new derivative, transformed in the same fashion.

And would you put that under the category? Just transformations?

Yes, that would be Gaige transformations applied to sections and connections where connections are the derivatives in the theory. This is easily explained, it is pathological that the community of people who understand what I'm saying have never bothered to do this in a clear fashion for the general public. You and I could visualize this overnight. This is not hard. The public needs to know in some sense that let's say quantum electrodynamics, the theory of photons and electrons, more or less electrons are functions and photons are derivatives.

Now, there's some you can object in some ways, but basically a theory is the way in which you can translate. A shift in the definition of the functions and the shift of the definition of the derivative so that the underlying physics is not harmed. Or changed, so you have to do both at the same time. Now you and I can visualize that. So if what you wanted to do, rather than going directly to geometric unity, is that I could sit down with you and I could say here are the various components of geometric unity.

And if the public needs a visualization in order to play along, we've got a little over two months and I'd be happy to work with you. I love that as a challenge and I'll take it on. And I hope we do make it happen.

And David Goggins, if Lex doesn't do some super macho thing because you've got to work to get some of the stuff done, you'll understand he'll be available to you after April.

Thank you for the thank you for this escape, cause I really needed the escape clause. I'm glad that you're forty eight miles and forty eight hours, by the way.

I just want to say how much I admire. Your willingness to keep this kind of hard core attitude, I know that Russians have it and Russian Jews have it in spades, but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy and that's weak and that's lazy. And the fact that you bring so much heart to saying, I'm going to bring this to jiujitsu, I'm going to bring this to guitar, I'm going to bring this to I am going to bring this to podcasting.

It comes through loud and clear. And I just find it completely and utterly inspiring that you keep this kind of hard core aspect at the same time that you're the guy who's extolling the virtue of love in a modern society and doing it at scale.

Thank you. That means a lot. I don't know why I'm doing it, but I'm just following my heart on it and just going with the gut. It seems to make sense of my. But I personally think we better get tougher or we're going to get in a world of pain, and I do think that when it comes time to lead, it's great to have people who, you know, don't crack under pressure. Do you mind if we talk about love and what it takes to be a father for sure?

Do you mind if Xev joins us? I've been on her. So, Erica, I've talked to your son, Zev, who's an incredible human being, but let me. Ask you this might be difficult because you're both sitting together. What advice do you have for him as he makes his way in this world, especially given that as we mentioned before and Joe Rogan, you're flawed in that just like all humans, you're mortal. Well, at some level, I guess one of my issues is that I've got to stop giving quite so much advice.

Early on, I was very worried that I could see the possibilities and I could see his challenges and I saw them in terms of myself, so a certain amount of Ze'ev rhymes with whatever I went through as a kid. And I don't want to doom him to the same outcomes that that sufficed for me. I think that he's got a much better head on his shoulders at age 15 is much better adjusted. And in part, it's important for me to recognize that because I think I did a reasonably decent job early on.

I don't need to get this part right. And, you know, I'm looking at at Zeb's trajectory and saying you're going to need to be incredibly, even pathologically self-confident. The antidote for that is going to be something you're going to need to carry on board, which is radical humility.

And you're going to have to have those in a dialectical tension which is never resolved, which is a huge burden. You are going to have to forgive people who do not appreciate your gifts because your gifts are clearly evident and many people will have to pretend not to see them, because if they see your gifts, then they're gonna have to question their entire approach to education or employment or critical thinking. And what my hope is, is that you can just forgive those who don't see them and who complicate and frustrate your life and realize that you don't have to take care of them to survive.

Let me ask you the more challenging question, because the guy sitting right here, what advice do you have for your dad since after talking to you? I realize you're the the more brilliant aside from the the better looking member of the family.

The question I'm sorry, could say anything you want is the last time we're going to be seeing this awkward drive home, I think sort of a new perspective I've taken on parenting is that it is a task for which no human is really supposed to be prepared.

You know, there are you know, in Jewish tradition, for example, there are myriad analogies in the Torah and the Talmud that compare the role of a parent to the role of a god. Right.

No human is prepared to play God and create and guide a life. But somehow we're forced into it as as people. And I think sometimes it's hard for children to understand that.

However, they're their parents are failing sort of theme. There is is something for which we must budget because our parents play a role in our lives, of which they're they're not worthy and they devote themselves to regardless because that becomes who they are in a certain sense. So. I hope to. I hope to have realistic, realistic expectations of you as a human, because I think too often it's easy to have Godlee expectations of people who are far from such a role.

And I think I'm really happy that you've been as open as you have with me about the fact that, you know, you really you don't pretend to be a God in my life.

You you are a guide who allows me to see myself. And that's been very important considering the fact that by yourself teaching paradigm, I will have to I will have to guide myself. And being able to see it and see myself accurately has been one of the greatest gifts that you you've given me.

So I'm very appreciative.

And I want you to know that I don't buy into the the role that you're you're supposed to.

Sort of fake your way through in my in my life, but I. And unbelievably happy with a more realistic connection that we've been able to build in lieu of it, so I think it's been easier on you actually, as you come to realize what I don't know what I can't do and that there's been a period of time. I guess that's fascinating to me where you're sort of surprised that I don't know the answer to a certain thing as well as you do.

And that I remember going through this with a particular mathematician who I held I still hold in all named David Casden. And, you know, he famously said to me and weirdly, our family knew his family in the Soviet Union, but he said, you know, Eric, I always appreciate you coming to my office because I always find what you have to say interesting. But you have to realize that in the areas that you're talking about, you are no longer the student.

You were actually my teacher. And I wasn't prepared to hear that, and there are many ways in which, as I was just saying with the Mozart, I am learning at an incredible rate from you. I used to learn from you because I didn't understand what was possible.

You were you were very much I mean, the weird thing there used to be this thing called Harvey the Invisible Rabbit. This guy had a rabbit that was like six feet tall that only he could see. Maybe he was talking. And that was like you at age four, as you were saying, batshit crazy things that were all totally sensible and nobody else could put them together. And so what's wonderful is, is that the world hasn't caught on, but enormous numbers of people are starting to.

And I really do hope that that genuineness of spirit and that outside the box intellectual commitment serves you well as the world starts to appreciate that. I think you're a very trustworthy voice. You don't get everything right. But the idea that we have somebody at your age who's embedded in your generation who can tell us something about what's happening is really valuable to me. And I do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice more than just at the dinner table.

I apologize for saying this, Four-Letter Word, but do you love. I was really worried it was going to be another four letter word. There's so many to choose from. It doesn't even rise to the level of the question. I mean, I just. There are a tiny number of people with whom you share so much life. That you can't even think of yourself in their absence, and I don't know if that would find that, but it's.

You can have a kid and never make this level of connection. I think I think even right down to the fact that, you know, when Zeb's chooses boogie woogie piano.

For his own set of reasons why I would choose boogie woogie piano if I could play in any style. It's a it's a question about a decrease in loneliness, you know, like my grandfather.

Played the mandolin and I had to learn some mandolin because otherwise that instrument would go silent. You don't expect that you get this much of a chance to leave this much of yourself in another person who. Is choosing it and recreating it rather than it being directly instilled, and my proudest achievement is in a certain sense, having not taught him and having shared this much so, you know, it's not even love.

It's like well beyond to imagine the love for you making a less lonely world. I think I speak for, I would argue, probably millions of people that you, Eric, because this is a conversation with you have made for many people, for me, a less lonely world. And I can't wait to see how you develop as intellect. But also, I'm so heart warmed by the optimism and the hopefulness that was in you that I hope develops further.

And lastly, I'm deeply thankful that you, Erica, my friend, and would give me would honor me with this watch. It means more than words can say. Thanks, guys. Thanks for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors indeed, hiring site, their gun muzzle recovery device, win access online wine store and blankest app that summarizes books. Click the sponsored links to get a discount to support this podcast.

And now let me leave you some words from Socrates to find yourself. Think for yourself. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.