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Why physics is being buried: It would shift global power

How intelligence networks and Epstein-era reality management hide a slow World War III; new physics is buried because any breakthrough shifts global power.

Eric WeinsteinguestSteven Bartletthost
Jul 14, 20252h 29mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:49

    This Interview Will Change How You See the World

    1. EW

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

    2. SB

      The CIA, FBI?

    3. EW

      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.

    4. SB

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

    5. EW

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

    6. SB

      and one of the most fearless and provocative thinkers of our time.

    7. He dissects the failures of science-

    8. ... exposes elite networks, and proposes bold new theories that could save humanity.

    9. EW

      So top of mind for me at the moment is the apocalypse and tropical fruit.

    10. SB

      (laughs)

    11. EW

      I'm not kidding. You're looking at the end, man.

    12. SB

      Do you really think this is the start of the end?

    13. EW

      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.

    14. SB

      So, what needs to happen to get me a future?

    15. EW

      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.

    16. SB

      Are- do you think-

    17. EW

      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.

    18. SB

      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

  2. 2:49 – 4:26

    Why Nobody’s Talking About What Actually Matters

    1. SB

      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.

    2. EW

      So top of mind for me at the moment is tropical fruit and physics.

    3. SB

      (laughs)

    4. EW

      I'm not kidding.

    5. SB

      Tropical fruit and physics?

    6. EW

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's just because you're catching me on a particular day.

    7. SB

      Okay.

    8. EW

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

    9. SB

      (laughs)

    10. EW

      No, I have serious issues with tropical fruit. I'm, uh, completely obsessed by them.

    11. SB

      What about this week? What- what's been occupying most of your thoughts this week?

    12. EW

      Well, the apocalypse and physics.

    13. SB

      Why do you say the apocalypse?

    14. EW

      Um...

    15. SB

      And what do you mean by the apocalypse?

    16. EW

      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.

  3. 4:26 – 13:47

    Are We Already in the Most Dangerous Era of Human History?

    1. SB

      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.

    2. EW

      Well, you're too, you're too young for the Cold War.

    3. SB

      Hmm.

    4. EW

      So, I don't know how old you are.

    5. SB

      32.

    6. EW

      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...

    7. SB

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

    8. EW

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

    9. NA

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

    10. EW

      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-

    11. SB

      Bitcoin.

    12. EW

      ... 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-

    13. SB

      FPV?

    14. EW

      First person y- y- th- where, you know, where you're looking through-

    15. SB

      Oh, like first person video.

    16. EW

      ... 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-

    17. SB

      Yeah.

    18. EW

      ... 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.

    19. SB

      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?

    20. EW

      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.

    21. SB

      Who are those people that have seen real life?

    22. EW

      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.

    23. SB

      You said, "I'm looking at the end."

    24. EW

      Yeah. Remember all the talk about the singularity?

    25. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    26. EW

      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.

    27. SB

      So you think this is the start of escalation?

    28. EW

      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.

    29. SB

      (inhales deeply) So what happens next?

    30. EW

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

  4. 13:47 – 15:08

    We’ve Lost Our Sense of Meaning — And It's Killing Us

    1. SB

    2. EW

      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-

    3. SB

      Yeah.

    4. EW

      ... and knowing something embodied.

    5. SB

      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.

    6. EW

      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...

  5. 15:08 – 18:13

    Why You're More Lost Than You Realise

    1. EW

      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.

    2. SB

      On that point of the things that give us meaning-

    3. EW

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      ... 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.

    5. EW

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      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.

    7. EW

      Do you pray?

    8. SB

      Hmm. That's a good question.

    9. EW

      You'll come over Friday night and pray with us.

    10. SB

      I'd say I do pray.

    11. EW

      That's pretty weak.

    12. SB

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

    13. EW

      So, that's the thing, right? We have this idea that somebody puts their hands together-

    14. SB

      Yeah.

    15. EW

      ... and they just believe.

    16. SB

      Yeah.

    17. EW

      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.

    18. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    19. EW

      And that's true even if you're a believer.

    20. SB

      Do you think we need religion?

    21. EW

      "Yeah," said the atheist.

    22. SB

      Are you an atheist?

    23. EW

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

    24. SB

      That's an interesting conundrum.

    25. EW

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

    26. SB

      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?

    27. EW

      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."

  6. 18:13 – 19:59

    Society Is Quietly Falling Apart… Here’s How

    1. EW

      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

  7. 19:59 – 29:33

    The Systems You Trust Are Failing You

    1. EW

      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?"

    2. SB

      The superstructures of the world?

    3. EW

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      One being f- fami- family.

    5. EW

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      Love of-

    7. EW

      Traditions.

    8. SB

      Yeah.

    9. EW

      Things that ground, that connect you to...

    10. SB

      And what are the symptoms of that unhooking from the superstructures of the world?

    11. EW

      How much do you care about things? How much do you care about people saying your name four generations out?

    12. SB

      Me?

    13. EW

      Yeah, you.

    14. SB

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

    15. EW

      That's right. But you're, I'm asking all of you who believe that.

    16. SB

      Yeah.

    17. EW

      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.

    18. SB

      What needs to happen to get me a future?

    19. EW

      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.

    20. SB

      And h- how? How?

    21. EW

      Well, right now, the big problem is that we share one atmosphere.

    22. SB

      Yeah.

    23. EW

      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...

    24. SB

      Through nukes or through carbon emissions?

    25. EW

      All three of those things.

    26. SB

      Okay.

    27. EW

      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?

    28. SB

      No, I don't.

    29. EW

      Closing time. Uh, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

    30. SB

      Yeah, okay.

  8. 29:33 – 29:59

    AI Is Coming Faster Than Anyone’s Prepared For

    1. EW

      in, uh, West Maui recently?

    2. SB

      No.

    3. EW

      It's an absolute disaster.

    4. SB

      Is AI a protagonist in this story? Is it-

    5. EW

      Sure.

    6. SB

      In what, in what respect?

    7. EW

      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.

    8. SB

      What do I think about him? 'Cause I'm scared I'm, I might say something dumb now, but I-

    9. EW

      Well, let's try

  9. 29:59 – 41:45

    This Is What Happens When Machines Outsmart Us

    1. EW

      'cause I, I'm gonna say-

    2. SB

      Yeah.

    3. EW

      ... something dumb.

    4. SB

      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-

    5. EW

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      ... 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.

    7. EW

      Which jobs require intelligence?

    8. SB

      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...

    9. EW

      I don't think so.

    10. SB

      Really? Like, I thought-

    11. EW

      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.

    12. SB

      Thank you.

    13. EW

      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."

    14. SB

      (laughs)

    15. EW

      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.

    16. SB

      Do you think AI will ever break out of the, the LLM? Or will it expand-

    17. EW

      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?

    18. SB

      Is that... Was that the chess game?

    19. EW

      The, well it's the chess game that became the protein folding game.

    20. SB

      Oh, I

    21. NA

      didn't-

    22. EW

      You wanna talk about great games, protein folding. Now that's a game.

    23. SB

      I have no, no knowledge of this at all.

    24. EW

      Okay. What do you know about proteins?

    25. SB

      Very little.

    26. EW

      Okay, think about proteins as tiny machines.

    27. SB

      Yeah.

    28. EW

      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-

    29. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    30. EW

      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?

  10. 41:45 – 43:44

    Chess Proves the Human Brain Is Already Outdated

    1. EW

      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.

    2. SB

      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...

    3. EW

      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.

    4. SB

      How did it fall?

    5. EW

      Through Deep Blue and IBM and Gary Kasparov.

    6. SB

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

    7. EW

      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.

    8. SB

      Two humans.

    9. EW

      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

  11. 43:44 – 1:00:32

    What Every Young Person Needs to Know About the Future

    1. EW

      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."

    2. SB

      You've got two children.

    3. EW

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      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?

    5. EW

      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?

    6. SB

      Now what?

    7. EW

      I don't know.

    8. SB

      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."

    9. EW

      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.

    10. SB

      (laughs) .

    11. EW

      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.

    12. SB

      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?

    13. EW

      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?

    14. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    15. EW

      I, I could listen to Joe talk about MMA for days.

    16. SB

      Yeah.

    17. EW

      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?

    18. SB

      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.

    19. EW

      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?

    20. SB

      Yeah.

    21. EW

      Do you remember when Obama had a fly?

    22. SB

      Yeah, and he caught it and... (snaps fingers)

    23. EW

      Pow! (snaps fingers)

    24. SB

      Yeah.

    25. EW

      The confidence of that man.

    26. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    27. EW

      See, I try that and I'd miss, and I'd screw it up in front of millions of pe-

    28. SB

      (laughs) .

    29. EW

      You know? It's like I, I, I took so much meaning away from that fly.

    30. SB

      Were you trying to, or is that just a sort of predisposed-

  12. 1:00:32 – 1:05:41

    AD BREAK

    1. SB

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    2. A second ago, you said you can't believe it doesn't go on forever.

    3. EW

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      You, or the universe, or...

    5. EW

      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.

    6. SB

      Hmm.

    7. EW

      And e- you'll see.

    8. SB

      Hmm.

    9. EW

      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?

    10. SB

      Well-

    11. EW

      I don't know if I want to have kids. I don't wanna bring anyone into this horrible world.

    12. SB

      Why do you think-

    13. EW

      Have kids.

    14. SB

      ... it bothers y- I c- I can see it personally it bothers you?

    15. EW

      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?

    16. SB

      No.

    17. EW

      Can I give you another assignment?

    18. SB

      Yeah.

    19. EW

      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.

    20. SB

      When you say that your, your people are under attack, who, who are you referencing as your people?

    21. EW

      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

  13. 1:05:41 – 1:17:47

    Did America Engineer the Two-State Solution?

    1. EW

      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?

    2. SB

      No.

    3. EW

      So you're British.

    4. SB

      (laughs)

    5. EW

      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.

    6. SB

      Who, who is Sinwar? Sinwar's the person who f-

    7. EW

      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-

    8. SB

      So you think Sinwar committed suicide to then cause the people of Gaza to invade Israel on the-

    9. EW

      No, no, no, no.

    10. SB

      Oh, sorry.

    11. EW

      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.

    12. SB

      Why?

    13. EW

      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.

    14. SB

      Is-

    15. EW

      'Cause it's-

    16. SB

      ... is there any way back from here? 'Cause you said this is World War III.

    17. EW

      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.

    18. SB

      Who are the mullahs in this scene?

    19. EW

      The Ayatollahs, the-

    20. SB

      The government of Iran?

    21. EW

      ... Khomeini... Yeah, the, the theocratic government of Iran.

    22. SB

      So the rulers of Iran basically, the people that are... Okay.

    23. EW

      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.

    24. SB

      Mm. And so you're saying that if they rise up-

    25. EW

      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-

    26. SB

      He's the ruler of Saudi Arabia, right?

    27. EW

      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...

    28. SB

      No.

    29. EW

      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

  14. 1:17:47 – 1:26:23

    Intelligence Is Broken — Who's Really in Charge?

    1. EW

      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.

    2. SB

      Tulsi Gabbard, the-

    3. EW

      Yeah. Tulsi's amazing.

    4. SB

      She's the head of the intelligence program for the United States.

    5. EW

      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.

    6. SB

      And what does that look like, taking ownership?

    7. EW

      Recognizing that we created the mullahs.

    8. SB

      And doing what about it?

    9. EW

      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.

    10. SB

      And how do you do that?

    11. EW

      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.

    12. SB

      And is figuring it out peace in the region?

    13. EW

      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.

    14. SB

      Do we need to go to... Are y- are you suggesting that we focus on regime change in Iran?

    15. EW

      That is really the responsibility of the Persians.

    16. SB

      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.

    17. EW

      I'm saying that a bunch of things need to happen if we're to have a long-term solution.

    18. SB

      I make you president tomorrow...

    19. EW

      I hate when people do this.

    20. SB

      But I... It's the clearest way of understanding the actions you would, you would take-

    21. EW

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

    22. SB

      Trump does it.

    23. EW

      Yeah, but I decline to answer all sorts of questions on camera.

    24. SB

      Fair.

    25. EW

      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."

    26. SB

      Do you think anyone has a good answers?

    27. EW

      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-

  15. 1:26:23 – 1:29:57

    Collapse Doesn’t Warn You — It Just Happens

    1. EW

      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.

    2. SB

      Because I talked about ketosis on this podcast in ketones, a brand called Ketone IQ sent me their little product here and it was on my desk when I got to the office. I picked it up, it sat on my desk for a couple of weeks then one day, I tried it

  16. 1:29:57 – 1:31:52

    AD BREAK

    1. SB

      and honestly, I have not looked back ever since. I now have this everywhere I go. When I travel all around the world it's in my hotel room, my team will put it there. Before I did the podcast recording today that I've just finished, I had a shot of Ketone IQ and as is always the case when I fall in love with a product, I called the CEO and asked if I could invest a couple of million quid into their company, so I'm now an investor in the company as well as them being a brand sponsor. I find it so easy to drop into deep focused work when I've had one of these. I would love you to try one and see the impact it has on you, your focus, your productivity and your endurance. So if you want to try it today visit ketone.com/stephen for 30% off your subscription. Plus, you'll receive a free gift with your second shipment. That's ketone.com/stephen. I'm excited for you, I am. Every single one of you watching this right now has something to offer, whether it's knowledge or skills or experience and that means you have value. Stan Store, the platform I co-own who are one of the sponsors of this podcast turns your knowledge into a business through one single click. You can sell digital products, coaching communities and you don't need any coding experience either, just the drive to start. This is a business I really believe in and already $300 million has been earned by creators, coaches and entrepreneurs just like you have the potential to be on Stan Store. These are people who didn't wait, who heard me saying things like this and instead of procrastinating started building then launched something and now they're getting paid to do it. Stan is incredibly simple and incredibly easy and you can link it with a Shopify store that you're already using if you want to. I'm on it and so is my girlfriend and many of my team. So if you want to join, start by launching your own business with a free 30-day trial. Visit stephenbartlett.stan.store and get yours set up within minutes. I've got this, uh-This picture that I came across.

    2. EW

      Tell me.

    3. SB

      Um, well, I, I'd love you to tell me. This is the flower of life geometric model. And I was, I was reading

  17. 1:31:52 – 2:00:11

    Are We Living in the Wrong Version of Reality?

    1. SB

      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-

    2. EW

      Do me a favor. Put that in a triangle pattern here. Okay, so we have three mugs. Think of those as vertices of a tetrahedron, and think of this coaster floating here as the fourth vertex.

Episode duration: 2:29:54

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