Why physics is being buried: It would shift global power

Eric Weinstein 0:00 Jeffrey Epstein was a product of at least one element of the intelligence community. I would bet money on it.

Steven Bartlett 0:05 The CIA, FBI?

Eric Weinstein 0:07 I don't know who ran him, but he knew a tremendous amount about my scientific work in ways that he wasn't supposed to. Very powerful people told me I needed to meet him. He certainly was not a financier in any standard sense. That was a cover story. I need to know what this thing was, and I wanna know why people don't investigate it. I wanna know why nobody asks for the filings. But I think more than anything, we don't trust our scientists, because our scientists are the most powerful people in our society.

Steven Bartlett 0:32 So do you think science is being controlled so that it can be used in a way that's beneficial?

Eric Weinstein 0:37 Let's put it this way- Eric Weinstein is a renowned mathematician.

Steven Bartlett 0:40 and one of the most fearless and provocative thinkers of our time.

0:43 He dissects the failures of science-

0:45 ... exposes elite networks, and proposes bold new theories that could save humanity.

Eric Weinstein 0:50 So top of mind for me at the moment is the apocalypse and tropical fruit.

Steven Bartlett 0:53 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 0:54 I'm not kidding. You're looking at the end, man.

Steven Bartlett 0:56 Do you really think this is the start of the end?

Eric Weinstein 0:58 Of course it is. Look at how much has happened in the last month. And the big problem is that we share one atmosphere. All of humanity's eggs are in one basket.

Steven Bartlett 1:07 So, what needs to happen to get me a future?

Eric Weinstein 1:09 So I think Elon is 100% right. We gotta get to another sphere. But he's being a complete (beep) when it comes to science and he's being a total hero when it comes to engineering. But you can't engineer your way to the stars with the science we have. But physics opens the universe to you. But we have a real problem. A new idea in physics changes the balance of power in the world. The desire of our government is to get the science to give us as much power as possible, but then they castrate the scientists, belittle them, destroy their families, their lives, their ability to earn, because our government isn't good enough to keep its own secrets.

Steven Bartlett 1:43 Are- do you think-

Eric Weinstein 1:44 My employer was a special informant to the FBI. There's a doctrine that says physicists don't have free speech. They're stopping the world's most important group from making progress. Physics is the only thing that's gonna get you a future, so let's talk about it.

Steven Bartlett 2:00 I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe, so if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going and this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do double check if you've subscribed and, uh, thank you so much. Because in a strange way, you are- you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you. Eric, you are a particularly captivating individual for the very fact that you grace so many different intellectual subjects. As we sit here now having this conversation, I wanna know what subjects at this moment in- in time are occupying most

Steven Bartlett 2:49 of your thoughts and most of your thinking? We have a- a strong listenership here, and I think the responsibility that I have meeting someone like you is to understand what we should be talking about.

Eric Weinstein 3:03 So top of mind for me at the moment is tropical fruit and physics.

Steven Bartlett 3:07 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 3:07 I'm not kidding.

Steven Bartlett 3:08 Tropical fruit and physics?

Eric Weinstein 3:09 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's just because you're catching me on a particular day.

Steven Bartlett 3:12 Okay.

Eric Weinstein 3:13 And, uh, my l- my local, um, 99 Ranch Market ran out of rambutan, which I'm addicted to.

Steven Bartlett 3:21 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 3:21 No, I have serious issues with tropical fruit. I'm, uh, completely obsessed by them.

Steven Bartlett 3:24 What about this week? What- what's been occupying most of your thoughts this week?

Eric Weinstein 3:28 Well, the apocalypse and physics.

Steven Bartlett 3:31 Why do you say the apocalypse?

Eric Weinstein 3:34 Um...

Steven Bartlett 3:34 And what do you mean by the apocalypse?

Eric Weinstein 3:36 Well, we're, we're becoming, uh, uh, inert to, to the apocalypse. We just watched hypersonic missiles flame into a modern city on TV, and we're watching one of the world's most remarkable civilizations, the Persians, take, uh, direct hits from both Israel and the US and I'm just beside myself. I mean, it, it, it... This is incredibly dramatic. If, if you think about, you know, just the idea of the Jews and the Persians (laughs) are both still here. And, you know, one of the things that I find really just painful is that... Well, I care about certain, certain cultures that I know well more than others, and these are two of my absolute favorites.

Steven Bartlett 4:26 What's, what's going on at this moment in time? Because it feels like there's more conflict than there's ever been. And I don't know whether that's just a, a bias that I have in this moment or whether I'm looking at the wrong social media algorithm, but it feels like the world is in- is tense.

Eric Weinstein 4:40 Well, you're too, you're too young for the Cold War.

Steven Bartlett 4:42 Hmm.

Eric Weinstein 4:43 So, I don't know how old you are.

Steven Bartlett 4:45 32.

Eric Weinstein 4:46 Yeah. So you, you, you really missed... I grew up in a different world where things were tense because there were two players and it, you know, it was more or less the US and the Soviets. And then we decided... And one, one of the dumbest things we ever came up with, a very smart man came up with the dumbest, one of the dumbest ideas which was the end of history. And, you know, the, the post-World War II order is here to stop us from using the technologies that came out of this, and I, you know, I talk about this a lot. There was a six-month period between November of '52 and April of '53 where we unlocked first the power of the nucleus because we could fuse hydrogen, and the, uh, other thing we were able to do (laughs) was, uh, figure out the three-dimensional structure of nucleic acid in the form of the double helix. And suddenly, w- in, in no time flat, we had access to the two most powerful levers, uh, humanity has ever had or perhaps ever will. And so, we're just not in a position to deal with this. And the remarkable thing...

Steven Bartlett 5:53 What does that mean, sorry? In terms of, you said we had access to the two most remarkable things.

Eric Weinstein 5:58 Well, the hydrogen bomb is not something that has ever been used by anyone against-... an enemy. (rocket launching)

Narrator 6:07 This is the first full-scale test of a hydrogen device. If the reaction goes, we're in the thermonuclear era. Three, two, one.

Eric Weinstein 6:20 So we're, we're awaiting its first use in war. We, we, we did use fission devices but we didn't use fusion devices and they're completely different scales. So the Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only two situations in which a nuke has ever been used against a c- uh, a population, civilian or otherwise and we don't know, for example, whether or not, I don't know, um, at least COVID had its origins in a bioweapons program. So at some level, we're playing with levers and tools that are so powerful. Do you realize that the, the key ingredient that made COVID so unique was a four amino acid sequence inserted into spike protein? So that's 12 nucleotides coding for four amino acids shut down planet Earth for a couple of years. That's how powerful this is, you know, and, and there are very few things that have this kind of leverage. In 2017, we had a discovery, a white paper called Attention Is All You Need and oddly, many of us dealing with AI and LLMs and talking that language don't even realize there's a paper that you can read that changed everything. Uh, it's eight authors out of Google, I think, um, and that opened up AI. Uh, Satoshi in 2008, 2009, with the, the solution to the double... distributed double-spend problem where you could effectively port, um, conservation laws from the physical world into the digital world, giving us digital gold. Uh, but just-

Steven Bartlett 7:56 Bitcoin.

Eric Weinstein 7:57 ... as a be- as a beginning. These ideas that have such high leverage are making us powerful beyond any previous world with no attendant increase in our wisdom, in our ability to use and wield these things. And right now, you're seeing the face where we're unveiling, what does drone warfare look like in FPV? What does-

Steven Bartlett 8:24 FPV?

Eric Weinstein 8:25 First person y- y- th- where, you know, where you're looking through-

Steven Bartlett 8:29 Oh, like first person video.

Eric Weinstein 8:29 ... the lens, uh, of the drone as it slams into a personnel carrier. You know, maybe you've, maybe you've seen this on Telegram where you're just watching individuals being menaced by mechanical flying birds equipped to kill them. So w- we didn't know what drone warfare looked like. This is the beginning of drone warfare. We didn't know what hypersonic missiles look like when they slam into a population center. I was just in Tel Aviv-

Steven Bartlett 8:57 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 8:58 ... a couple of months ago and I was in, you know, shelters because the Houthis and some of the, um, Palestinian Arabs in Gaza were letting off missiles, but not like this. The Persians really (laughs) , you know... A- and by the way, they're choosing, I think, to not inflict maximal damage. I don't, I don't think that they... They could've gotten the body count, uh, a lot higher if they'd wanted to. They're trying to speak the language of violence in a very measured fashion.

Steven Bartlett 9:31 So is this a particularly tense moment or is it just the bias that I have because I've not been through these things before? Is there something different?

Eric Weinstein 9:38 N- no. You're look (laughs) ... I can't even believe the question. You're looking at the end, man. This is the beginning. This is a slow roll out of a completely different world. You've been in, we've all been in a completely artificially stagnant bubble for decades. My entire life up until now has been in a bubble. The only people who have seen real life are extremely old.

Steven Bartlett 10:05 Who are those people that have seen real life?

Eric Weinstein 10:07 Well, I would say people who went through the Depression, World War II. You know, in China, people who went through Mao's Gr- Great Leap Forward. But most of us have no idea of what, like, a real pandemic, like a Spanish flu or Black Plague is like. We don't know what, uh, Poland went through where they lost, you know, I don't know, 20, 25% of their population to war. Look at the stat- statistics on the Battle of Stalingrad. We don't really understand. We've, we, we've just... Our whole life has been in a bubble.

Steven Bartlett 10:40 You said, "I'm looking at the end."

Eric Weinstein 10:42 Yeah. Remember all the talk about the singularity?

Steven Bartlett 10:46 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 10:46 Like Ray Kurzweil, we're heading to the singularity. What is the singularity gonna be like? Uh, you're in it. Th- this is, this is now. You're looking at the disintegration of NATO. You're looking at people who don't know how to maintain the systems that were engineered by their great-grandparents after World War II, that order that, you know, you're from the UK. If you think about how, how the UK woke up to the idea that they had built into their heads that we are the masters of the world, so you, you saw the beginning of the end of this concept of the British Empire. That moment is coming for the US and it, it may be that it's coming for Israel or it may be that it's coming for Iran. See, in 1967, the Israelis felt invincible in the Six-Day War. And then in 1973, they had the Yom Kippur War and all the people that they were, uh, you know, priding themselves as having beaten these ferocious enemies that were arrayed against them woke up on Yom Kippur in 1973 and blooded the Israelis and they surprised them. So the Israelis underestimated their enemy and that changed the entire character of the country. It went from being a triumphal state that felt that David could defeat Goliath to realizing that Goliath was quite powerful. And, you know, the same thing is going to happen here. You, you saw the celebration that Trump-... you know, had dealt this blow to the Iranian nuclear facilities. You, you watch the Persians come back. It's gonna... We're starting to realize what the boundaries are as people are more bold in trying things. Maybe Xi is gonna try to cross the Taiwan Strait. I don't know. But the era of stasis, where very little happened over very long periods of time, is over.

Steven Bartlett 12:42 So you think this is the start of escalation?

Eric Weinstein 12:44 This is the start of the undoing of the post-World War II order. The idea that the post-World War II order is still in place is astounding.

Steven Bartlett 12:53 (inhales deeply) So what happens next?

Eric Weinstein 12:56 We either scare the crap out of ourselves and come to our senses, or we don't.

Steven Bartlett 13:00 We scare the crap out of ourselves and come to our senses?

Eric Weinstein 13:02 Or we don't.

Steven Bartlett 13:03 Hmm. And what does that look like, scaring the crap out of ourselves?

Eric Weinstein 13:06 Well, I don't know. How did you feel about the hypersonic missiles? Like... And we started this, and I'm talking about tropical fruit 'cause I'm trying to figure out whether I, I should buy a jackfruit and stink up my wife's kitchen. You know? And on the other hand, I just saw hypersonic missiles slam into the buildings I was just in for meetings in Tel Aviv.

Steven Bartlett 13:25 There's an, a nuclear threat that weirdly hangs over us, and I, I almost feel at some deep level, we all understand and feel that threat, that there's these nine or 10 countries around the world that have the ability to basically wipe out all of us at any moment. I feel like that's almost within us all, that knowing is within us all.

Eric Weinstein 13:45 I totally disagree.

Steven Bartlett 13:46 Really?

Eric Weinstein 13:47 Yeah. I think about nothing else sometimes, and I still don't believe it. I don't believe it. There's a difference between knowing something in your head-

Steven Bartlett 13:53 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 13:53 ... and knowing something embodied.

Steven Bartlett 13:55 Yeah. I don't know if we, we're able to distinguish whether we know it in our head or whether it's embodied unconsciously to the point that it's changing how we act. Do you know what I mean? Because I'm, I'm now aware that there's nine country... And I'm also aware of that really it's one individual's res- ch- decision as to whether those nuclear bombs were to fly. So there's a part of me that's, I don't know, maybe in suspended disbelief or at a deeper level feels an angst.

Eric Weinstein 14:21 But nobody knows what to do with it, and this is part of what, what Elon is all about, which is that I am convinced that everybody else needs to be talking about this much more and I need to be talking about this much less. I talk about this all the time. You know, people are always... I wanna survive more than anything else. There's so many things that I love about this place, and I don't like the idea that we're all trapped here with one atmosphere, with nine individuals, if you like, who could all wake up on the wrong side of the bed and say, "Uh, today's the day." Part of what I'm so exercised about with respect to the apocalypse is how many things I wanna save. I mean, th- this city just went up in flames. It's very...

Eric Weinstein 15:08 It focuses the mind. How many things can I save in one car load if I know that the police are not gonna let me come back to my home? Do you save photos? Do you save musical instruments? Do you save financial records? What, what is it that you save, you know? It was a very focusing question. We're already over it. We can't even remember the fires.

Steven Bartlett 15:29 On that point of the things that give us meaning-

Eric Weinstein 15:32 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 15:32 ... in our lives, where do you think we're at as a society in terms of our feelings of meaning and purpose and connectedness to maybe something transcendent or... I was mulling over this idea the other day. I actually posted it on, on my LinkedIn page, of all places. Uh, uh, I said that, um, I think we need to ladder up to things to feel, like, anchored and content in life. Like, we, you know, we ladder... We start with ourselves, then we ladder up to family, then community, then maybe a mission or a purpose, and then maybe to something transcendent. And it feels like because of the design of our lives and the optimization of it, we, w- we're increasingly laddering up to just ourselves.

Eric Weinstein 16:06 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 16:06 I think even in my life, I'm wondering whether there's, like, a layer missing, like, which is the religious layer or a spiritual layer.

Eric Weinstein 16:13 Do you pray?

Steven Bartlett 16:15 Hmm. That's a good question.

Eric Weinstein 16:17 You'll come over Friday night and pray with us.

Steven Bartlett 16:19 I'd say I do pray.

Eric Weinstein 16:22 That's pretty weak.

Steven Bartlett 16:23 But it's not a... It's not the way that I see prayer on, in movies and stuff.

Eric Weinstein 16:27 So, that's the thing, right? We have this idea that somebody puts their hands together-

Steven Bartlett 16:30 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 16:31 ... and they just believe.

Steven Bartlett 16:32 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 16:33 But a lot of time when you're praying, you don't really believe. You're not sure that you're doing anything sensible. You, you feel ridiculous.

Steven Bartlett 16:38 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 16:39 And that's true even if you're a believer.

Steven Bartlett 16:42 Do you think we need religion?

Eric Weinstein 16:44 "Yeah," said the atheist.

Steven Bartlett 16:47 Are you an atheist?

Eric Weinstein 16:48 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I take religion super seriously. I don't think we're meant to live without it.

Steven Bartlett 16:59 That's an interesting conundrum.

Eric Weinstein 17:02 I don't think so. Everybody gets hung up on it. I sort of wonder what their problem is.

Steven Bartlett 17:06 Please explain. So you believe that we sh- aren't meant to live without religion. We're meant to be orientated by something transcendent, but you don't believe that, that it's real?

Eric Weinstein 17:15 I think that... You know, there's this great trick that I learned when I was scuba diving, which is that your, your need to breathe is triggered by the buildup of CO2 in your lungs, and there are all sorts of things you can do to decrease your need to breathe. One is you can hyperventilate. You can get rid of all of the CO2 that's residual. You can also inure your lungs to CO2 by smoking. You can also breathe out the precious air that your instincts tell you to hold in. You can do all these things, and then you can go super deep. You can equali- learn how to equalize the pressure in your ears by holding your nose and, and, and these techniques. And suddenly, you're far deeper than you've ever been and you're exploring the rocks and the fishes, and there's a turtle, and there's an eel. And you get a message, "You're out of air." And you look up, and you see, "I am really far from the surface. This is terrifying."

Eric Weinstein 18:13 That's what happens when you unhook the proximate, which is air hunger, from the ultimate, which is the need to breathe.So thirst is proximate to dehydration. Hunger is proximate to the need for nourishment. In part, religion and prayer is there to keep us from unhooking all of these protective things and just turning life into a hoot. You can have a hoot without religion, but if everybody has a hoot, the whole society collapses. At some point, I think, uh, a president of the United States may have said that people who defend this country were suckers, something like that. And I thought, "Goddamn you." Maybe it's true even. But how many families have, have received a, a flag-draped coffin and felt pride? Like, we lost something precious but we are part of the American tapestry in a way that few families can be. And when we outsmart ourselves, when we unhook all of these things... You know, every single young woman has an idea about what the opportunity cost of not going on OnlyFans is. Before, we didn't know what the opportunity cost. There was no measurement of it. We're becoming too sophisticated, we've got too much information, we're deranging ourselves, we're having a blast, and we're completely undoing all of the superstructure of the world. The number of people who don't have children or want children

Eric Weinstein 19:59 or... My kids make fun of me, that I just go around telling people to make babies. And it's the most normal thing in the world. I meet parents who don't harass their own children to get married and have families. Like, "What are you doing?"

Steven Bartlett 20:19 The superstructures of the world?

Eric Weinstein 20:21 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 20:23 One being f- fami- family.

Eric Weinstein 20:25 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 20:26 Love of-

Eric Weinstein 20:26 Traditions.

Steven Bartlett 20:27 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 20:28 Things that ground, that connect you to...

Steven Bartlett 20:31 And what are the symptoms of that unhooking from the superstructures of the world?

Eric Weinstein 20:34 How much do you care about things? How much do you care about people saying your name four generations out?

Steven Bartlett 20:42 Me?

Eric Weinstein 20:42 Yeah, you.

Steven Bartlett 20:44 You're probably asking the wrong person because I just don't think legacy matters because I'm gonna be dead.

Eric Weinstein 20:47 That's right. But you're, I'm asking all of you who believe that.

Steven Bartlett 20:52 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 20:53 That is so sad. It is so weird that no one cares about their legacy because they don't see a future. So what I'm trying to say is, I'm desperate to get you a future so that you care.

Steven Bartlett 21:08 What needs to happen to get me a future?

Eric Weinstein 21:10 Something remarkable, something utterly remarkable because it's not, uh, it's not going that way, and that's what, that's what the physics part is. Like, I talk about physics constantly. Physics is the only thing that's gonna get you a future.

Steven Bartlett 21:23 And h- how? How?

Eric Weinstein 21:25 Well, right now, the big problem is that we share one atmosphere.

Steven Bartlett 21:28 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 21:29 So everything that can... (laughs) All the really bad things, whether it's pathogens, like imagine something COVID-like but far worse, or climate, or, uh, radiation, all of these things don't know anything about borders. To an extent, there's a Southern and a Northern Hemisphere that are separate, but even that's not a great border. So we can draw all the borders on land that we want but we still have basically one or two atmospheres, and I would really say one. And we've now gotten powerful enough to really screw it up. Right? And so...

Steven Bartlett 22:10 Through nukes or through carbon emissions?

Eric Weinstein 22:12 All three of those things.

Steven Bartlett 22:13 Okay.

Eric Weinstein 22:14 Right? Everything that you care about is on one sphere with more, one atmosphere. And I think Elon is 100% right. We gotta get to another sphere. I can't believe that he's focused on Mars. I mean, by, by f- sure, focus on the moon, focus on Mars, focus on chemical rockets. But throw a couple billion towards physics for God's sakes and let us get it, let us get serious about exploring the cosmos. This is our womb, this is not our home. We're... You know, you know that song Closing Time?

Steven Bartlett 22:51 No, I don't.

Eric Weinstein 22:51 Closing time. Uh, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

Steven Bartlett 22:56 Yeah, okay.

Eric Weinstein 22:56 I think it's about birth. Yeah, it's time to be born. You can't stay here. This is completely obvious to me and I am the only person who s- who talks this way and so I sound like a lunatic and I get tired of it. But the real reason, it, you know, it's about the mangoes, it's about the rambutan, it's about the music. It's about all the things that I love.

Steven Bartlett 23:22 So why would you wanna leave?

Eric Weinstein 23:23 I want to take it with us and I want to see what else is out there and I want to meet people.

Steven Bartlett 23:27 Why don't you just stay here and fix this planet?

Eric Weinstein 23:30 Because you can't. The odds of fixing one sphere for a permanent future, you've already talked about, you don't care about the future.

Steven Bartlett 23:39 I don't have children yet either so I don't, yeah, I don't have that.

Eric Weinstein 23:41 But I, my children don't have children and their children don't have children, and I care about them and they're not even here.

Steven Bartlett 23:50 We've got some time left here though, no?

Eric Weinstein 23:53 Well, we did. (laughs) If you looked what's happened in the last month... It's coming undone. Pakistan and India.

Steven Bartlett 24:06 Do you really think this is the start of the end?

Eric Weinstein 24:10 I, I have no idea where I am. Of course it is. The World War II order was keeping, it's the control rods keeping the world from going super critical.

Steven Bartlett 24:23 Can't we just put the rods back together?

Eric Weinstein 24:25 ... have you looked at who... We had an election with Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris in the US. Tell me what's going on in the UK. What are we doing in the mayoral race for, for New York? I don't know if you're watching what I'm watching. Look at the mess that's going on in Gaza. Russia is nuclear. Israel is presumably nuclear. Pakistan and India are nuclear. The US is nuclear. Iran is almost nuclear. China's pissed off about Iran because it was trying to make a play through the region. North Korea's watching. Oh, and, and look at the UK in turmoil. UK is a very nuclear country, to say nothing of France. This is not going to go well. We just, we... And by the way, look at how much is happening with AI, right? Everything was really stagnant. Uh, so I, I have this famous challenge that I give people, which is, go into a room and subtract the screens and forget about style. How do you know you're not in 1973? Like drones are the beginning. Imagine I needed a refill on my coffee and, you know, you did something and a drone brought me a coffee to not interrupt the flow. That would, we'd know we weren't in '73. But in general, drones aren't a big part of our lives. Uh, these robots, I've never seen a humanoid robot actually doing anything other than on YouTube where it's, like, doing the mashed potato.

Steven Bartlett 26:02 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 26:03 So in general, yeah, things were just really stagnant for a really long time. And then during that period of stagnation, we, we had this crazy narrative which is like, "The dizzying pace of change is making it almost impossible to keep up," while things were incredibly stagnant. And so it just shows you sort of this weird way in which w- our, our minds can be programmed to completely ignore what we're experiencing.

Steven Bartlett 26:26 Is there not a chance that we'll just continue to...

Eric Weinstein 26:31 Okay, if you wanna go with chance... Look, until, until you're worried about your great-great-grandchildren, I don't want to have this conversation with you. I want you to start caring about that. I want you to go to church. You're, you're, you're heir to a great tradition. One of the most important traditions in the world has to be Christianity, because both Judaism and Islam are screwed up over the law, were legal traditions. Christianity, not so much. Uh, I think I, first time somebody crystallized that for me was Sam Harris. It's a really important point. But you're heir to an incredibly powerful and important tradition. And if we don't have a Christian substrate, we're in real trouble, because all of our society is based on a, on an assumption of a Christian substrate.

Steven Bartlett 27:21 Y- you're advising me to be w- christian in tradition but not in, necessarily in belief?

Eric Weinstein 27:29 Well, this is the thing. You're alienated because you think that you have to be a believer in order to go in, otherwise you're faking it.

Steven Bartlett 27:35 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 27:37 Get over yourself. That's not how it works.

Steven Bartlett 27:38 That, that's true. That's me, just me being honest. I do think that if I went to a church-

Eric Weinstein 27:41 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 27:42 ... and I, I sung and I, I prayed and stuff, and I didn't believe-

Eric Weinstein 27:44 That's so funny.

Steven Bartlett 27:44 ... I would, that I'd be like, it'd be, it'd be fake.

Eric Weinstein 27:49 Oh, okay.

Steven Bartlett 27:51 And-

Eric Weinstein 27:51 Did you, did you imagine that all those people who go to church are just sitting there 100% sure that there's a, there's a Jesus to pray to? Do you know any Christians?

Steven Bartlett 28:00 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 28:00 Yeah. They're not like that. They sneak off and do bad things. If they were confident that Jesus was watching everything that they were doing, they're constantly talking about how they sin. "I'm a sinner," right? It's a very complicated, interesting piece of kit. And my claim is that, you know, I said the Lord's Prayer as part of going to high school.

Steven Bartlett 28:30 Hmm.

Eric Weinstein 28:33 I sat in a church, a chapel at a high school in LA that had a stained-glass window with an American soldier trampling a Nazi flag, into the stained-glass window. It was amazing.

Steven Bartlett 28:47 How does this link to me, I was about to say, can't, don't you have faith that we'll just be able to kind of keep this... It feels like a bit of a standoff going.

Eric Weinstein 28:55 So you're the one with the faith. I'm the one who's nervous. You, look, you're the believer. I'm not gonna trust that. No, no, no, I'm gonna get my hands dirty and try do something about it. (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 29:08 Do you know what? I think, uh, in part it's because I- uh, as you said, I've been alive for 32 years-

Eric Weinstein 29:11 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 29:11 ... and through that time, there's been relative peace, especially in the Western world. So it's all I've ever known. So you, I, I'm born with this assumption that this is just kinda how it goes, that there's always threat but we kind of figure it out.

Eric Weinstein 29:21 Come to the Pacific Palisades. It looks like Gaza.

Steven Bartlett 29:25 Yeah. Yeah, I've got some friends that lost their houses there, you know?

Eric Weinstein 29:31 Checked out Lahaina

Eric Weinstein 29:33 in, uh, West Maui recently?

Steven Bartlett 29:35 No.

Eric Weinstein 29:37 It's an absolute disaster.

Steven Bartlett 29:41 Is AI a protagonist in this story? Is it-

Eric Weinstein 29:43 Sure.

Steven Bartlett 29:43 In what, in what respect?

Eric Weinstein 29:45 Well, what do you, well, how, what do you think about it? We're going through, going through a wild revolution at the moment, and I just hear people saying the dumbest things about it.

Steven Bartlett 29:55 What do I think about him? 'Cause I'm scared I'm, I might say something dumb now, but I-

Eric Weinstein 29:58 Well, let's try

Eric Weinstein 29:59 'cause I, I'm gonna say-

Steven Bartlett 30:00 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 30:00 ... something dumb.

Steven Bartlett 30:00 I think, uh, when I look at both sides of the coin and I look at the opportunity and the, and the threat, my concern when I hear about the CEOs of the biggest AI companies in the world talking about this fast takeoff-

Eric Weinstein 30:11 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 30:11 ... is that the transition will be too quick for us to adjust. And when they say fast takeoff, they mean the AGI like arrives and it, the rate of its learning accelerates so quickly that it really, um, disrupts the need for...... human beings to do a lot of the sort of jobs we're doing today that are centered on intelligence.

Eric Weinstein 30:33 Which jobs require intelligence?

Steven Bartlett 30:34 Pretty much all of them these days because we've had the industrial revolution where we've outsourced a lot of labor to machines, but...

Eric Weinstein 30:41 I don't think so.

Steven Bartlett 30:42 Really? Like, I thought-

Eric Weinstein 30:42 Yeah, I think a large portion of our conversation was actually an LLM. We didn't actually get to the stuff outside of the LLM. You and I are two chatbots for the most part. You're a good one.

Steven Bartlett 30:57 Thank you.

Eric Weinstein 30:57 I'm on a huge, I'm on a huge platform again. You know? But my claim is, is that that's the really disturbing part. That more or less we're LLMs. More or less we don't do a single intelligent thing all day long, and the reason that they're able to mimic us is because we don't realize that intelligence is a last resort for us. We try to automate... Like, e- even if you think about greetings. Your assistant was very kind. I got out of a, a black car that you guys sent around and I was greeted with the phrase, "There he is. The man, the myth..." And I knew what was coming next, "The legend."

Steven Bartlett 31:36 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 31:36 Right? Because that is a sort of humorous way of giving an intimate greeting. But it's still an LLM. And I'm not saying that your assistant is an LLM. I'm saying that more or less what we do all day long is LLM interactions. "Hey, buddy, how are you?" "Good, good. Things have been really busy. How about you?" "Well, I got some travel coming up. Kind of excited about it, but I have to get through some work first." "I understand." That's an entirely scripted conversation. That's why I'm trying to say that I want to do podcasting that is outside of the LLM model. I don't want to just do dangerous, stupid stuff, but I wanna talk about things that I've never explored, where I don't have something, you know, ready.

Steven Bartlett 32:22 Do you think AI will ever break out of the, the LLM? Or will it expand-

Eric Weinstein 32:28 I don't think the LLMs will. I don't... See, I think that waiting for AGI is the problem is a, is a bad idea. I think the problems are gonna get here far before AGI. I think even that, the AGI expectation is something we're trained to do. Do you think AGI is coming? Do you think we'll survive AGI? Will AGBI be good or bad? All of that's pre-programmed into you. Why do you, why are you waiting for AGI? Did you not (laughs) AlphaFold 3? Did you, did you track that? Did you know about this?

Steven Bartlett 32:58 Is that... Was that the chess game?

Eric Weinstein 32:59 The, well it's the chess game that became the protein folding game.

Steven Bartlett 33:03 Oh, I

Narrator 33:03 didn't-

Eric Weinstein 33:03 You wanna talk about great games, protein folding. Now that's a game.

Steven Bartlett 33:06 I have no, no knowledge of this at all.

Eric Weinstein 33:08 Okay. What do you know about proteins?

Steven Bartlett 33:11 Very little.

Eric Weinstein 33:12 Okay, think about proteins as tiny machines.

Steven Bartlett 33:15 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 33:15 That there's copying machine, there's a scissors and a shearing machine. There's a light-making machine. All sorts of things. And all of those machines are weirdly coded. Im- imagine that you had like a children's show and a, a bunch of girl superheroes and they all had necklaces with, uh, 20 different kinds of beads around their neck. And so when they needed a machine, they'd take off the necklace and they'd throw it into a thing called a ribosome. The ribosome would take these 20 kinds of pearls and suddenly it would build you a car-

Steven Bartlett 33:50 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 33:50 Or a spaceship or a gun or who knows what. Well, that's, that's, that's the story of DNA, RNA, and, uh, and protein. The only thing is, isn't it weird that a linear sequence suddenly crumples up into a three-dimensional object that does something? So for example, I don't know if you've ever seen, um, these Turkish rabbits that glow in the dark?

Steven Bartlett 34:12 No.

Eric Weinstein 34:13 Okay. So they took green fluorescent protein out of jellyfish-

Steven Bartlett 34:16 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 34:17 And they, uh, spliced them into the nucleic acids of rabbits and the Turks bred all of these glow-in-the-dark bunnies. And what that is, is a structure... So there's, there's something called secondary structure in protein where sometimes you get these spirals called alpha helices and then sometimes you get a two-dimensional sheet that's made from taking, uh, a switchback in, in strings of amino acids. And then if you wrap that around, you don't have a beta sheet, you have a beta barrel, and these beta barrels are the glow-in-the-dark aspect of green fluorescent protein. Okay? And what we didn't know was how a series of A, C, Ts, and Gs could code for sequences of amino acids, could form three-dimensional structures. So if you just read DNA, you didn't know, well, that's gonna be a sports car. (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 35:11 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 35:13 AlphaFold figured it out for the most part. Like, to a, to an enormous extent. Humans were stuck there.

Steven Bartlett 35:19 And what does that mean?

Eric Weinstein 35:21 It means that you could... Uh, I don't know. You could target your enemies that have particular regions, uh, on their cell surfaces, and you could come up with proteins that only attach to them and attack. It could mean anything. It could mean nanorobots. I don't know what it means. But my point is, is that that's already here and you're not focused on it. And you're thinking AGI, and the funny part is, is that's your LLM that got programmed to wait for AGI.

Steven Bartlett 35:49 Well, I heard, you know, people that I think are very smart, much smarter than me, talk about the-

Eric Weinstein 35:53 Don't listen to them.

Steven Bartlett 35:55 Elon?

Eric Weinstein 35:56 Sure.

Steven Bartlett 35:57 He, I mean, he, he says that it's our biggest existential threat is A- AI.

Eric Weinstein 36:03 Elon has become the outsourcing for much of our intelligence. And if Elon means anything to you, he's really saying to you, "Don't listen to me. Do something remarkable." He's saying, "Where is everybody? Why is there only one Elon? There used to be lots of them."

Steven Bartlett 36:26 Why is there only one Elon?

Eric Weinstein 36:29 Yeah, not the right question. Where, where did all the other Elons go?

Steven Bartlett 36:33 Same question as before.

Eric Weinstein 36:35 No, I think that the "Why is there only one Elon?" makes Elon feel more singular. You know, if you ever get a chance to go to Cappadocia or Bryce National Park in Utah, you see what happens, which is that you'll have a stone that was resting on the soil and suddenly the wind starts to erode everything except the compactified soil right under that stone and you get what's called a fairy chimney or a hood. And so the claim is, is that sometimes you get these isolated structures and the key point is everything else eroded away. We're supposed to have tons of Elon. And everybody else got taken out.

Steven Bartlett 37:19 What or who took them out?

Eric Weinstein 37:22 Look at how much trouble Elon has being Elon. Look, we keep hearing about him, you know, he's on drugs. Great. Take drugs.

Steven Bartlett 37:33 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 37:34 No, I'm not kidding. Do you know how many amazing people take drugs? D- if you care about jazz, jazz is a wh- you know, it's a history of drugs. Whenever I'm listening to Ray Charles, I'm hearing, "Heroin." Okay. What are they doing at Burning Man? They're trying to live luxuriously under oppression, simultaneously luxuriously and as d- dirty and disgusting as you'll ever be. Hopefully they're having tons of eye-opening, mind-bending experiences, chasing some way of getting out of the LLM. And, you know, my feeling about this is, it's not even honest. I, I, I believe that Elon, for example, does understand that population and growth is really important. But I also think he just enjoys making babies, in a, in a, and in a weird way, this idea of, "I'm going to have an empire of my children," is a forbidden concept. Try explaining that to HR.

Steven Bartlett 38:37 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 38:38 You know, it's like, "What did you say at work?" So the key point is Elon is barely able to be Elon.

Steven Bartlett 38:45 Do you think we're overestimating the impact AI's gonna have? Because people f- you know, a lot of people see this as really fundamentally transformative...

Eric Weinstein 38:54 No.

Steven Bartlett 38:55 You don't think we're underestimating it?

Eric Weinstein 38:57 I think it's gonna be... I, I, I think that what AI means to us is, is bizarre. We've, we've come up with this whole script about AGI and... Uh, it's going to take... Everything we can do that's repetitive is on the chopping block, and since almost everything we do is repetitive, we don't need to get to AGI. We just need to do things where lots of people create lots of repetitive data and then we tokenize it and we train the AI on the tokens, and then for the most part it says, you know, it, it doesn't matter. It can be a photograph, it can be music, whatever it is, amino acids. Just give me a large enough dataset and let me at it and, and, and, and, you know, take a hike for, for a little while. I'll train on it, and then I'll know how to do that. You know what it's bad at? Things that where there isn't much data. So I, I just, I just found out about these orphan proteins where, like, everybody's got a different version of hemoglobin.

Steven Bartlett 39:59 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 40:01 But, you know, the, the, the quaternary structure of hu- hemoglobin is these four heme groups, you know, four different proteins around a central element. What happens when you have a protein that has no analog anywhere else? The, the system doesn't have the ability to learn it. If, if I train you on the blues and you find out what a 12-bar blues progression is and then you find out that there's a variation where the s- you know, the second bar goes to the fourth rather than just staying on the one for four bars and then sometimes the fourth bar has a seven in it to create tension. Okay, so it's gonna learn every single form of the blues (fingers snap) like that. And because there's a large corpus of that stuff, it's gonna get really good at blues music. You know? As... But if you take something that basically never happens, it's not gonna have an easy ability to train and give you more. So I think that AI is almost certainly going to transform the economy because everything that we, we know how to do through education creates repetitive behaviors. We don't know how to educate for creativity and genius. We know how to educate for doing higher level things. So radiology is a great example. Radiologists are, you know, some of the first, uh, in the crosshairs. "I'm gonna stare at some imaging and I'm gonna say, 'I think that's a tumor. I think that's benign.'" And it's gonna say, "Just gimme, gimme, gimme all of these tokens." Like, "Well, they're X-rays. They're CAT scan-" "No, no, they're just tokens." So yeah. It's going to start to automate away every repetitive behavior and then what's gonna be left is the tiny number of things that aren't really highly

Eric Weinstein 41:45 repetitive or things where we really care that a human does it. Very interesting what's happened with chess. I don't know if you've been following chess.

Steven Bartlett 41:54 I loosely understand it, mainly because I've spoken to a lot of AI experts and they often reference chess as, as an example where...

Eric Weinstein 42:01 It's one of the first things that humans did that we really cared about that fell. So they've been longer in the AI tractor beam than any of the rest of us in some sense.

Steven Bartlett 42:15 How did it fall?

Eric Weinstein 42:17 Through Deep Blue and IBM and Gary Kasparov.

Steven Bartlett 42:22 But does that mean that people, people aren't interested in chess anymore or w- what are you saying?

Eric Weinstein 42:25 No, no, no, that's the whole point. So Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player of our time and perhaps of all time was on Joe Rogan and Joe asked him the simple question, "Can your phone beat you?" He's like, "Yeah, easily." So the point is we can't compete-... with, I don't know, Stockfish or what- whatever the top chess programs of our time, I don't know anymore. But nobody cares about those programs except for AI experts. We care about the drama of, you know, Anand versus Carlsen.

Steven Bartlett 43:02 Two humans.

Eric Weinstein 43:03 Two humans, because it's about us. We're, we're very narcissistic in this way. And so there was a period, and, you know, this is something that my wife, uh, tried to popularize. So she said this thing about the golden age of AI complementarity, where the AIs aren't good enough to take over from us but they're amazing tools, and so there's a period where we're teamed up, you know, the prompt engineering revolution. They're not good enough to come up with their own prompts. And a great example of this that she and I have been talking about is the cyborg chess era, which is a period where humans and

Eric Weinstein 43:44 the AIs could form teams that would do better, but at some point the AI just looks at the human and says, "You're just holding me back."

Steven Bartlett 43:53 You've got two children.

Eric Weinstein 43:54 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 43:56 When they're thinking about their career prospects, with all that you think and know and believe about the future that we're heading towards, what, what kind of career advice would you be giving to them?

Eric Weinstein 44:04 Oh, I've given them terrible career advice. I give, I ga- gave them somewhat different career advice. So to my son, my, my advice was, "Do the hardest, most technical thing you possibly can do and be prepared to use that ability, that facility in different ways than you're, you're honing it. But train yourself." With my daughter, um, I think she cares deeply about people and, you know, th- there's a typical male/female divide. And I'm not... By the way, I'm not gonna talk overly much about them because I try to keep them out. But she is, uh, you know, somebody who is taking the same level of analytic ability but putting it in the service of the law and trying to help people who are, you know, really unfortunate. She's very idealistic. And so at some level the law is not going to allow us to have AI lawyers for quite some time. It's not gonna trust anything. We, we've got jury, uh, trials and, and judges and a legal system that's written into our founding documents. To the average person, I would say, "Get your board in the water and prepare to paddle like all get out. The tsunami of a lifetime is coming and nothing your elders have seen is gonna prepare." Th- there's no good advice to give that's specific. Let's put it this way. One of the things, when people tell me about their moving from one city to another, I have a phrase that nobody likes which is, "Every place is over." "Oh, I'm moving to Austin." Yeah, it's over. Miami, it's over. Nashville, over. You know, all these places are over and every occupation that is named is over. "I'm gonna be a dentist." (laughs) Radiologist, accountant, teacher, these are all over. Whatever's coming, get flexible. Get good. Get good on a bunch of different stuff. Learn how to think across disciplines. I have no idea what, what's gonna be left for us. But, you know, somebody's gonna come out on top and I, I hate to tell people that you should try to come out on top. I don't think it's healthy to have everyone trying to be world-class. I think you should be able to just have a life. Now, I have a golden retriever. I don't know that it's the greatest golden retriever in the world. Sometimes I think it is, but he does a lot of dumb stuff. But he's my golden retriever. I just don't think it... I think that this mania for optimization, like if you look at your own videos you'll find some of the best performing videos are, "This is how to succeed. This is how to get anyone you want. This is how to get out of a bad situation." People just want capacity, but for what? Okay, you've optimized your day, you've optimized your health. Your social media is optimized. Now what?

Steven Bartlett 47:19 Now what?

Eric Weinstein 47:21 I don't know.

Steven Bartlett 47:22 Well, what should be then... Say y- you know, is it the, is it time to just sp- One would say, "Well, now I c-" Uh, one would incorrectly say, "Well, now I can play with my golden retriever." And then one would say, "Well, you should've been playing with your golden retriever the whole time."

Eric Weinstein 47:36 Let, let me put it a little differently. Through some bizarre accident, I've gotten the chance to meet incredible people that I don't even talk about who I've met, you know. I've got a chance to see the world. I haven't seen South America but I've seen most of the other continents, the, other than the antar- the Antarctic. I've had a really rich life. Take somebody who hasn't had those opportunities but they got a chance to have three kids. I'm not sure I wouldn't trade places. I so enjoyed raising my children. It's available to everyone. It, it, it's such a strange thing that we're talking about optimization on all this stuff. I, I get to think about the, the substrate of the universe, theoretical physics. I dream about visiting the stars. I dream about multiple dimensions of time, meeting aliens, all sorts of things.I still think having kids was, like, unbeatable. I'm so sad that it's over. I'm so sad that they moved out. I cannot believe that I was dumb enough to live in a society that doesn't believe in having your kids with you your whole life. The idea that we look at places where kids live at home as backwards is beyond me. Eh, shout out to, uh, the entire Indian subcontinent. You know? It's just, like, family is everything. They drive me crazy. But it- it- i- it just... Meaning is available for you a- a- and again, you know, every time I get a chance to eat a rambutan, it's one of my favorite fruits, mangos, rambutans, jackfruit, sitaphal, if you can get custard apple, the amount of pleasure I get. I've never had a good custard apple in the entire time I've lived in the US. Not one. I've had a frozen one imported from Taiwan. You get this cherimoya. Just get out of here, cherimoya. You're not good.

Steven Bartlett 49:57 (laughs) .

Eric Weinstein 49:58 Great custard apple, great sitaphal or rambuthal, what a pleasure to be on this earth, and it's available to almost anyone. I just think that you can find meaning... You know, for God's sakes, go to Spotify if you have a, a connection, if you can afford a connection to Spotify, and put in Pablo Casals' version of the Bach Cello Suites. You're as rich as you need to be. I've flown private. I'd much f- prefer to listen to Pablo Casals playing the, the Cello Suites in economy than to be d- to be d- to be deprived of real luxury. I don't know. I just... Uh, to me, meaning is everywhere. I can't swing a cat without hitting meaning.

Steven Bartlett 50:46 Have you always been like that, or is that something that you've cultivated? The, the point about being able to swing a cat and find meaning, so many people that would be listening now could swing 100-mile stick and wouldn't hit meaning in their lives, but you seem to be able to find it in the, the purer things, the s- more simple things. And I'm wondering if that's something that we can all cultivate with a change of perspective or if it's just the way that you've always been?

Eric Weinstein 51:12 Why is Joe Rogan such a big deal? You ever listen to Joe Rogan talk about pugilism? Two gentlemen beating the crap out of each other as poetry, as chess?

Steven Bartlett 51:27 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 51:28 I, I could listen to Joe talk about MMA for days.

Steven Bartlett 51:32 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 51:34 You know? The story of Mighty Mouse, the guy trapped in some, I don't know, flyweight division with unbelievable skills who never gets to meet a formidable enemy, you know?

Steven Bartlett 51:48 Do you think that's a privilege? Do you think that there's a privilege in being able to craft a story? 'Cause so much of the meaning you're describing there comes from these st- great stories, and not everybody is able to craft the story upon seeing something. You, you probably look at this item in front of me, this glass, and create a story about it that derives meaning that makes you feel something.

Eric Weinstein 52:07 I worry about its manufacture. How is it that we got a surface of revolution? What we... What is, what is the industrial process? How do I take a picture of this and get a, uh, a photograph of the machine that made it? You know that fly that has been buzzing around us this entire interview?

Steven Bartlett 52:22 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 52:22 Do you remember when Obama had a fly?

Steven Bartlett 52:24 Yeah, and he caught it and... (snaps fingers)

Eric Weinstein 52:25 Pow! (snaps fingers)

Steven Bartlett 52:26 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 52:27 The confidence of that man.

Steven Bartlett 52:29 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 52:29 See, I try that and I'd miss, and I'd screw it up in front of millions of pe-

Steven Bartlett 52:33 (laughs) .

Eric Weinstein 52:34 You know? It's like I, I, I took so much meaning away from that fly.

Steven Bartlett 52:39 Were you trying to, or is that just a sort of predisposed-

Eric Weinstein 52:42 We all did.

Steven Bartlett 52:43 Not everyone. Some people would've gone, "Oh."

Eric Weinstein 52:45 How was it that you knew exactly what I was talking about? Because he captured a moment. He was the girl in the red dress. You know, there's this thing that women say, "Not every woman can wear red." Well, not every man can grab a fly with confidence. I, I think, I think we all see this. I think we all see beauty everywhere. Do you remember that movie American Beauty with the, the plastic bag that gets in the air funnel going up? ... And the key point is the ability to s- to see beauty wherever you find it. You know, everything behind you means something to me. Th- the letter B, uh, it's strange to me that there's only one phonetic alphabet and that every phonetic alphabet is descended from it. You know? Uh, I, I, I basically view everything as a hyperlink. I just wanna click on the world and see what it goes to.

Steven Bartlett 53:49 Not everybody does though.

Eric Weinstein 53:51 But we do.

Steven Bartlett 53:52 They don't make the step is what I'm saying 'cause people would see the B and nothing would cross their conscious mind.

Eric Weinstein 53:57 You know, it's, it's funny. There's a absolutely horrible account that has been just dogging me for years trying to make my life miserable. And-

Steven Bartlett 54:08 A social media account?

Eric Weinstein 54:09 Yeah. Doesn't matter.

Steven Bartlett 54:10 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 54:13 And the person said, "You know, one thing I just never understand is he's not... He's not hawking a book. He- he's just talking. Why, why are his numbers high?" And the answer is everybody cares about this stuff. They want an invitation. One of the funniest things that gets said about me on social media is, "He goes on forever and he never says anything." And then, like, I look at the word clouds of things that I've, I've talked about and people are just googling everything incessantly. You know? If you didn't know who Pablo Casals was, now you do. Now you know what a real cellist sounds like. Um...I don't know. I just... I can't believe that I'm so far through this life, and that there's so little left. (emotional) I can't believe this doesn't go on forever.

Steven Bartlett 55:10 Does that bother you?

Eric Weinstein 55:12 Yeah. My people just got hit, and... (sipping sound) You know, you want to talk about the river and the sea. That river is not the Jordan River, and that sea is not the Mediterranean. The Arab world stretches from the Atlantic with Morocco right up to the... What is it? Shatt al-Arabia waterway that divides Iraq from Iran. And I don't think this is stable. There is no way in which we should be fighting like this. This is ridiculous. Trump, Trump used the F word, and he's get- taking a ton of crap. Why would you use the F word? Well, well, isn't it interesting that people view Trump as so tacky? You know, he's, he's got this queen sort of bluster. He doesn't, doesn't reek of, uh, finalist clubs at Harvard or Skull and Bones or whatever. No. Trump doesn't use the F word for a reason. He needs it once in a blue moon and it better mean something. And he said this to Iran, and he said this to Israel. These two pe- two countries have been fighting for so long. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. He didn't make a mistake. The rest of the world has just forgotten how to calibrate. What do you see Trump in? How is he clothed? He's almost always in a suit and tie, and he almost never says the F word. And it's carefully calibrated to get everybody's attention, and we're so f- asleep that we don't even hear it. This is World War III, and it's already started. Biden was there in the Oval Office non compos mentis, and I was being told, "Don't worry, there's a committee that's replaced him." Because I was talking about the fact that he can't be president. I, I just don't know what we're doing. I'm so mystified by everybody else. You know, it's like Elon makes sense to me. I'm not Elon. I'm very different person, but at least Elon makes sense to me. Not 100%, but 98% Elon makes sense to me. It's everybody else that I'm completely confused by.

Steven Bartlett 58:01 What part of what Elon is saying makes so much sense to you?

Eric Weinstein 58:04 Oh, geez. Everything. One, we have to have babies. We have to keep going. Two, it can't all be about problems. You have to be excited to be alive every morning. You have to work your ass off your whole life. You want to know one of the most beautiful things that ever happened? Somebody telling Elon that he was the world's richest human being. He said, "Huh. It's interesting. Okay, back to work." Amazing, right? There's no reward that he can't have more of by stopping work and enjoying his wealth except doing stuff. And I was born in this country. My parents were born in this country. My grandparents on one side were not, but my grandparents on the other side were. Elon is so American. That cowboy spirit that... He does all sorts of stuff I can't stand. I don't want to see one more of those Pepe memes ever.

Steven Bartlett 59:15 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 59:16 I really don't. What the fuck is his problem, okay? I don't know him at all. But Elon at his best is, is the United States, you know? Anything is possible here, and we, and we just waste our lives on interpersonal drama. He wastes his life to an enormous extent as a troll. I cannot... That's the part of him that I don't understand is, one, why he's not focused 100% on physics. I think he sees it as going through grok in AI, doesn't want to trust humans. I think he sees Mars as energizing to engineers, and the stars are enervating to engineers because the science... There's no amount of engine- You can't engineer your way to the stars with the science we have. But he, he's being a complete pussy when it comes to science, and he's being a total hero when it comes to engineering. Um... But he is the quintessential American.

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1:01:11 A second ago, you said you can't believe it doesn't go on forever.

Eric Weinstein 1:01:14 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:17 You, or the universe, or...

Eric Weinstein 1:01:19 I can't believe my story doesn't go on forever. Look, I've never died before, so I have no experience with it. So as f- as far as I know, I've always been alive and it'll always go on that way. But there's another thing that, you know, I, I've talked about occasionally, which is, I'm not the most public-spirited human being. You know, I, I am somebody who will take the last, the last rambutan, you know? And I know that you're not supposed to do that in almost any culture on earth, but sometimes it just sitting there and it bothers me, okay? So I'm not the, I'm not the classiest person on earth. But I'll tell you something. If you have a kid and you have a choice about eating the rambutan yourself or giving the rambutan to your child, there's, it's a no-brainer. You'll even enjoy the rambutan so much more if you give it to your kid.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:07 Hmm.

Eric Weinstein 1:02:08 And e- you'll see.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:10 Hmm.

Eric Weinstein 1:02:11 And that's the way in which this goes on forever. And it's great. I mean, just how many young people do I have to yell at?

Steven Bartlett 1:02:24 Well-

Eric Weinstein 1:02:24 I don't know if I want to have kids. I don't wanna bring anyone into this horrible world.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:30 Why do you think-

Eric Weinstein 1:02:31 Have kids.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:31 ... it bothers y- I c- I can see it personally it bothers you?

Eric Weinstein 1:02:39 Do you have any idea how much hate there is right now for Israel? Do you have any idea how destabilizing this action against Iran was? Do you have any idea how many people have suffered for how long under the mullahs? We are being cheated of Persia. I'm not talking about Iran for the Persians. I'm talking about we are cheated of Persia, the entire planet. One of the greatest societies on earth taken offline. Uh, look, uh, you're catching me on the wrong week. And I, I don't wanna dwell on it. Th- this is just incredibly irresponsible. We're not gonna survive this. Israel is certainly not gonna survive this. If the Abrahamic world does not get its head out of its ass, if the Christian world does not start to stand up for itself without becoming this Christ is king nightmare. You know, I was in Tel Aviv before this all happened and I, I just said it from the stage, "Make the Middle East Christian again." D- does nobody understand their role, is sort of my question? How can you have Bethlehem without a strong Christian presence? Have you ever been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher?

Steven Bartlett 1:04:16 No.

Eric Weinstein 1:04:18 Can I give you another assignment?

Steven Bartlett 1:04:19 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:04:20 Get off your ass and go. You got the money. Walk the Stations of the Cross. And for God's sakes, stop with the issue about belief. You can pray like the rest of us. We're not sure if we're praying. (laughs) We're not sure if the thing is hooked up and anyone's listening. Uh, you have the right to go back even with doubt, even with knowledge. And you have the right to believe about a tomorrow, you know, where, where you're not going to be, but people are gonna be mentioning your name.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:55 When you say that your, your people are under attack, who, who are you referencing as your people?

Eric Weinstein 1:05:03 I w- would in general... Th- there is several groups of people that I would describe as my people. The Jews would be one. Dyslexics would be another. Americans would be another. Scientists would be another. It depends on, on what these things... But right now, I'm thinking about the Jews and I'm thinking about the fact that the social media businesses have lost complete control of, uh, the bot farms. And we're just seeing this unbeli- I, I, I feel like I'm living through the 1930s again. Uh, uh, we've seen this movie before. It doesn't end well. You

Eric Weinstein 1:05:41 know, what happened in Gaza is an unbelievable tragedy, and that tragedy was partially architected by the United States of America shoving a two-state solution down the throats of Palestinian Arabs who absolutely do not want a two-state solution. And the creation, in part, of this situation, where Israel has a hand, the US has a hand, the Palestinian Arabs have a hand, the creation of Hamas and, and the promotion of this just unbelievable genius in Sunwar, the leader of Hamas, who is continuing to best Bibi Netanyahu from the grave, you know? It, it's just an amazing feat. Nobody reads anymore, as you know. Um, there's an old Sherlock Holmes story called The Problem at Thor Bridge. You ever heard of it?

Steven Bartlett 1:06:40 No.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:41 So you're British.

Steven Bartlett 1:06:42 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 1:06:43 Um, Sherlock Holmes gets called in on a case in which, um, there's a murder and the murderer is traced, the murder is traced to this gentleman who still exists. Uh, what Sherlock Holmes figures out is that it's not a murder, it's a suicide in which the gun will...... fall into the river at Thor Bridge because it's tied to a weight and the person uses the suicide to frame someone else. You know, it's just one of these genius little vignettes, and that's what Sinwar was, he, he was a, a genius. He, he knew he was gonna die.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:33 Who, who is Sinwar? Sinwar's the person who f-

Eric Weinstein 1:07:36 Who's committed suicide. Sin- Sin- Sinwar's suicide was an IDF-assisted suicide. I wrote about this almost instantly after the October 7th invasion. It didn't make any sense that Gaza would undertake such an act against Israel given the asymmetry, and what this mirrored was that before the 1990s-

Steven Bartlett 1:07:58 So you think Sinwar committed suicide to then cause the people of Gaza to invade Israel on the-

Eric Weinstein 1:08:04 No, no, no, no.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:05 Oh, sorry.

Eric Weinstein 1:08:07 Sinwar would be happy enough for all the Gazans to die, and so what he did was he architected a situation in which Israel would be compelled to respond using the wrong tools. He tricked Israel and, you know, I, I'm very confident to, to talk about this because if you check my old tweets I say, "IDF-assisted suicide and Munchausen by proxy and Zugzwang," right? And I said, "These are the concepts, familiarize yourself because Israel is going to invade Gaza." And I knew what was gonna happen because it took me... Like, why would you do this? It doesn't make sense from first order logic, but third and fourth order logic, you're just like, "Oh, of course it makes sense." This is hybrid war. The most important thing for Sinwar is video.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:59 Why?

Eric Weinstein 1:09:01 Look at the effect of the video. The video of Gaza has turned the world to an extent against Israel that's sort of inconceivable. There's a doctrine called hybrid warfare and I think it came out of the US in the early 2000s, and it says that the kinetic component of warfare, the killing, the actual shooting and the planes and the bombs and all this kind of stuff, is not the major component. The social media is really important, the video is important, the memetic complex is important. And Israel has an advantage over the Gazan Arabs in kinetic warfare and Sinwar knew that and he was like, "Brilliant. All we need to do is force Israel to come after us." And this is this thing I was going to say, before the 1990s we had a spate of killings of policemen firing on people who had pulled toy guns on them, and we would, we would say things, and I remember this like, "Whatever you do, don't point a toy gun at a policeman, you're... It's... Don't you realize what's going to happen?" And then somebody coined the phrase "police-assisted suicide". The policeman is the instrument, and that's what I knew was going to happen. And for better or for worse, Bibi just couldn't figure out where he was, and Bibi was dumber and Sinwar was smarter.

Steven Bartlett 1:10:46 Is-

Eric Weinstein 1:10:46 'Cause it's-

Steven Bartlett 1:10:47 ... is there any way back from here? 'Cause you said this is World War III.

Eric Weinstein 1:10:51 Well, yeah, the, the way f- ... Yeah, there, there is but it's slim and it's evaporating. I mean, almost everything depends on Saudi Arabia and the, and the Iranians, the Persians. If the Persians didn't take this opportunity to rise up against their oppressors, I don't know what they're waiting for. Yes, you're going to get killed in some numbers, but you have to figure out whether you're interested in tyranny or not. So the Persians are absolutely falling down on the ground, uh, on the job not rising up against the mullahs. This is a coordinated moment, like, you know, there's, there's a moment for a prison break, this would be it.

Steven Bartlett 1:11:30 Who are the mullahs in this scene?

Eric Weinstein 1:11:32 The Ayatollahs, the-

Steven Bartlett 1:11:33 The government of Iran?

Eric Weinstein 1:11:34 ... Khomeini... Yeah, the, the theocratic government of Iran.

Steven Bartlett 1:11:36 So the rulers of Iran basically, the people that are... Okay.

Eric Weinstein 1:11:39 So I don't know if, if you know a, a ton of Persians, they're varied in their religiosity, but there's a... You know, there's an underground gay scene in Tehran, there's super hyper-modern people just like you and me who can't stand these guys.

Steven Bartlett 1:11:55 Mm. And so you're saying that if they rise up-

Eric Weinstein 1:11:57 They would... That would be one of the parts of the solution. The other thing is Saudi Arabia, now, and I have to be very measured and careful here. Um, you can't fantasize about the Middle East becoming Western Europe overnight. Every time we do this, we make a terrible mistake. When you have a modernizer like MBS in Saudi Arabia-

Steven Bartlett 1:12:20 He's the ruler of Saudi Arabia, right?

Eric Weinstein 1:12:21 De facto. He can't suddenly become a modern person, so, you know, if, if we end up talking about Khashoggi and murderers and murdered journalists and all this stuff, the whole conversation will derail, but he's a modernizer. And there was a moment where he needed to not condemn Israel publicly and thank it privately, but to say, "We've all been terrorized by this country and Israel did what everyone needed." We needed to rise up against the mullahs because you can't have a nuclear theocracy. You can't have a highly developed notion of heaven where this is the, this is the anteroom where you're waiting to get into the real room. That issue-... of n- needing to be rid of an asp- aspiring nuclear theocracy, something that In- that Israel undertook. Now, something that I'm going to say, there are three words in Yiddish, which you may have heard or may not- may not, schlemiel, schlimazel, and nebech. So there are three unfortunate people. You don't want to be any one of those three. But the subtlety is that the schlemiel is a klutz, and the schlemiel spills hot soup on the schlimazel. So the schlimazel is the unfortunate person to whom bad things happen. And the nebech is the weak ineffectual person who decides that it's his job to clean up the mess. So the schlemiel spills the scalding hot soup on the schlimazel and the nebech cleans it up. Now in the US we've got this terrible sort of Christian nationalist, uh, problem that we've developed, which is what sometimes people call the woke right, where we have a bunch of people who've been badly treated, white Christian Americans have been badly treated in the woke era. They've been forced to salute everybody else's, you know, "Yay for, uh," you know, I don't know, "Honduran, uh, Lesbians Day." And, and, and it's like, okay, enough. We don't, we don't want to do that anymore. We've also done great things and I absolutely think that they've been mistreated. Yeah. And they've gone sort of metastatic and their attitude is no more wars for Israel, America first. What I was getting to with the schlemiel, schlimazel, and nebech is that most Americans don't have any idea who Kermit Roosevelt was. Do you have any idea of who Kermit...

Steven Bartlett 1:15:00 No.

Eric Weinstein 1:15:01 So the US and the UK jointly overthrew a democratically elector in Iran through something called Operation Ajax. We installed the Shah, and then there's this period where everybody stupidly celebrates the miniskirts and the jazz that was going through Tehran, which was a bridge too far. In other words, the miniskirts were a really bad idea because they weren't re- they were ready for some amount of modernization and they weren't ready for that, and so we pushed it too far. And so we got the mullahs for 40 years, and now we chop off people's fingers and we pluck out people's eyes and we put homosexuals on ropes and dangle them from tr- from cranes. They're barbaric bear- they're horrible human beings. Okay. These are really bad men, the mullahs. And we did that. So the scalding hot soup is revolutionary theocratic Iran, and we spilled it all over the Middle East, which is the schlimazel. We spilled it on Saudi Arabia, we spilled it on Iraq. We spilled it on Israel. Everybody suffers from having these people installed because of the US and the UK instituting a problem back in the '50s. And who's the nebech? Who cleans this up? Israel volunteers for this job and then Saudi Arabia pretends, "Oh my God, this is terrible. Our, our Muslim brother is being attacked by our Jewish, uh, barbarian..." (laughs) I, I, I just can't believe anybody's dumb enough to fall for all of this. Like, we're involved in a story where nobody can sort things out. There's no talking heads anyone believes in. And if I didn't understand this, then how is it that I have a tweet from, you know, 10 days after October 7th, or I appeared on Trigonometry? I'm telling you, Israel hasn't even walked into Gaza yet. And I know what the strategy is. Iran sent hypersonic missiles into the ground in Israel as a message. Violence is a language, and they spoke it well. The, the mullahs may be crazy, but they're still Persians, they're, they're extraordinarily skilled. And so what they did is they wasted some of their arsenal saying, "You have no Iron Dome, and we're not gonna kill you. We're gonna put our missiles, we're gonna waste our missiles by sending them into your earth and try to kill no one." And the Israelis, these brilliant genius Israelis who pull off all sorts of things that the world can't believe are dumb

Eric Weinstein 1:17:47 enough, some of them, to say, "Ha, they sent all these missiles and they couldn't even hit anyone." And I'm just thinking, "D- d- do none of you understand anything? I, I just don't even know where I am." A- and I, I'm looking at, you know, I know Tulsi.

Steven Bartlett 1:18:06 Tulsi Gabbard, the-

Eric Weinstein 1:18:07 Yeah. Tulsi's amazing.

Steven Bartlett 1:18:09 She's the head of the intelligence program for the United States.

Eric Weinstein 1:18:14 Yeah. Director of National Intelligence, right? Tulsi has seen the devastation, not of war, but of US action abroad. Like, we haven't really had full wars, but we get involved in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever, and, and, you know, people die and there are firefights. It's not like it has nothing to do with war, but full on war is, is a very different thing. We t- we say the Iraq war, but I, I want to be very careful about the language. You know, w- w- war usually involves you getting rocked at home, not just your, your troops abroad. I don't think she... I don't think she appreciates the gravity of the situation. That somehow what we need to do is we need to stabilize this thing for 50 to 100 years while we desperately try to figure out a long-term solution. This idea of like, just... we're not taking responsibility for the world we already screwed up.... I don't want to send Americans... Uh, uh, you know, I'm not an Israeli, I'm an American. I don't wanna send my fellow Americans to die in foreign battles that we have no business being in. But we have to take ownership of our history with oil and energy in the Middle East.

Steven Bartlett 1:19:35 And what does that look like, taking ownership?

Eric Weinstein 1:19:38 Recognizing that we created the mullahs.

Steven Bartlett 1:19:40 And doing what about it?

Eric Weinstein 1:19:41 And... Wait, wait a second. Not just that. And that we also created a lot of the heartache along with Sinwar and, to a much lesser extent, Israel by foisting this two-state solution on people who would never put up with it. Like I, I lived in, in Israel for two years. And, uh, you would have conversations with Arabs, some of whom are Israelis, you know, and they would say, "Look, you know, you just don't understand the West Bank and you don't understand the difference between the West Bank and Gaza." And they would tell me straight up, "You're going to get us all killed with this two-state solution. Stop it." And I... You know, it was very hard for me to hear. But w- w- we were just having a child's conversation about the Middle East. And I will say this about the UK. The British Foreign Service had a different failure mode than the US. They really learned the regions. They learned the dialects of the languages of the countries that they were involved in. The British Empire took many places that they were involved in seriously, and they have a very complicated legacy. You know, I'm... I spent a lot of time in Bombay and there's a lot of debate among very educated Indians about figuring out how to think about the, the British legacy, all of the great institutional structures that were built, all of the prejudice and bigotry. Why was, uh, such a small country able to colonize such a large land basically working with the locals? You know, it's a rich conversation. We're having childlike conversations about all of this. I'm sorry if I'm going on about this, but it's just a very weird thing that we're... We can't get anybody's attention. You can't even get my attention, you know? I, I'm watching hypersonic missiles slam into the places I just was, and then I'm watching a cat video. And then I'm trying to figure out what to order through Uber Eats, and it's just like I can't stay focused. It's really important to put this, um, to put this right. And the US screwed up the Middle East, along with the UK, really good, and we have a lot of responsibility. And if we wanna go isolationist, I understand that. But you first have to put back the chicken soup that you spilled.

Steven Bartlett 1:22:16 And how do you do that?

Eric Weinstein 1:22:17 I'm not sure. I'm not the director of national intelligence. I'm not... I'm not the secretary of defense. I'm not in the Oval Off-... Uh, I mean, you know, it, it's very weird. I was workmates with J.D. Vance. You know? These, these are people who are... You know, Bobby Kennedy lives one canyon over from me in Los Angeles. The people around power i- in the US, Godspeed, you know? Just, just wish them well. I don't care what party you're in. But to, to try to sabotage Trump or sabotage Tulsi or sabotage Pete Hegs... I... These guys need to figure this out, and they need to be at a totally different level.

Steven Bartlett 1:23:06 And is figuring it out peace in the region?

Eric Weinstein 1:23:10 You know, the peace with... between Egypt and Israel is a shitty, crappy, horrible peace, but it's peace. It's not a loving relationship. It's not a question of everybody going back and forth between the two countries saying, you know, "We used to be f- enemies, now we're friends." It's a lousy, cold peace. I'll take it. We need to have peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs who can live in peace, and we need... The people who cannot live in peace, we need to find some place else for them to be. It is absolutely imperative. And, uh... By the way, this goes for the Israelis. There are a small number of hardcore Israeli settlers who cannot live, uh, you know, in peace with their neighbors, and it's very important that the people who cannot live in peace not be there.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:01 Do we need to go to... Are y- are you suggesting that we focus on regime change in Iran?

Eric Weinstein 1:24:09 That is really the responsibility of the Persians.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:13 So I wanna, I wanna get clear on what you see as a solution, because you're saying the Persian people have to rise up, the US need to care but not get involved in that regime change.

Eric Weinstein 1:24:23 I'm saying that a bunch of things need to happen if we're to have a long-term solution.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:29 I make you president tomorrow...

Eric Weinstein 1:24:31 I hate when people do this.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:32 But I... It's the clearest way of understanding the actions you would, you would take-

Eric Weinstein 1:24:35 Well, first of all, if I was president tomorrow, I sure as hell wouldn't be on a podcast discussing strategy with you.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:41 Trump does it.

Eric Weinstein 1:24:42 Yeah, but I decline to answer all sorts of questions on camera.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:45 Fair.

Eric Weinstein 1:24:46 Yeah. So my feeling is, is that you do a lot more behind closed doors. And this idea of just handing people, "You're the king of the world, what do you do tomorrow to stop..." You know, it's like, don't do that to me, 'cause it's just... It's a no-win question. If I was gonna... I, I do a lot of Straussian communication. I'd meet with people in private, I'd use lots of carrots and sticks, I'd try to use long-range thinking, and I wouldn't tell you what my plan is. And by the way, I very much respect Donald Trump in certain ways, one of which is, is that... And this confuses our friend Sam Harris to no end. Sam is always like, "Well, he's not being truthful, he's not making sense." He's a negotiator.You don't sit down to a negotiation with an open book saying, "Let me make sense to you." You sit there saying, "You don't know what I'm going to do next. You don't know how big the stick is. You don't know how much carrot there is. Maybe I'm prepared to give you more. Maybe my stick isn't as big as you think, or maybe it's twice as big."

Steven Bartlett 1:25:43 Do you think anyone has a good answers?

Eric Weinstein 1:25:47 I'll be honest, I think that Trump is in part respected because he has some intuitions about this stuff. His intuition is not to say everything. His intuition is that negotiation is more important than transparency. And it- it- at a time when everybody's craving transparency, "Tell me everything." No, I'm not going to tell you everything. I'm going to try to save some children today. I'm going to threaten, I'm going to cajole, I'm going to do all sorts of things and it-

Eric Weinstein 1:26:23 and it- you know, that's what I'd do. I would- I would assemble the best people around me. I would stop giving so many press conferences. I wouldn't Tweet every four seconds, I'd be extremely strategic about it. But, you know, the situation in Tel Aviv and in Gaza makes me sick to my stomach. And it- and it- and in Ukraine. Almost all of my DNA comes from Ukraine, at least pass through it. I've been there and, you know, Russians and Ukrai- Ukraine used to be known as Little Russia. This is a- a- how are we sitting here watching this? What moron decided in 2004 that we were just going to hand full Article 5 status to former Soviet republics without consequence? It is not the case that I don't... I would love to have Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in NATO. Not at this cost. Look, the world is a brutal, brutal place. We've gotten really bad at- at international understandings. I can't stand what's happened to Europe. Europe has been completely denatured. We're- we're playing with fire everywhere and I just- I don't know how to talk about it because every time I talk about things where I'm the only person who sounds like this, i- i- it's bad for my life. Look, if- if- if you're in general a Ukraine hawk and you say, "We need to make sure that U- Ukraine is completely supported so that they don't give an inch of territory," yeah, you'll take a lot of crap, but you'll be in a large group. And if you basically have the idea that Russia, you know, was minding its own business and the US was encircling it, and good Russia, bad US, you'll have a lot of company for that perspective. I don't sound like any of that. The most important thing is to stabilize the world again and we're not going to get another chance like World War II if we're not smart. We're crazy to give up this order that we have and again, you know, one more time I'm talking about this stuff and I don't want to be talking about this stuff. Elon is 100% right, we can't talk about problems all the time. It's cheap meaning. There's an entire universe to explore and we're sitting here focused on our own drama always, and I'm getting sucked into it, I don't want. I want to be talking about traveling through time and space using Easter eggs and hidden features of what we thought was the spacetime continuum.

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Eric Weinstein 1:31:43 Tell me.

Steven Bartlett 1:31:45 Um, well, I, I'd love you to tell me. This is the flower of life geometric model. And I was, I was reading

Steven Bartlett 1:31:52 through some of your work and I came across this sentence that said you kept a secret for 30 years in terms of your belief about the nature of the reality that we live in, and that you thought maybe it was more than just the dimensions we experience, maybe there was 14 dimensions. I've always wo- I wonder this a lot, you know, 'cause we- we're fixated on problems, we're fixated on what we see and what we hear and what we feel, but I wonder sometimes if, if even that is an illusion. I, I've spent a lot of time actually thinking recently about the simulation theory and is this whole reality just some simulation on some kid's video game in another dimension. Um, so I thought, you know, you're a physicist-

Eric Weinstein 1:32:29 Do me a