Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society | Lex Fridman Podcast #16

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   The following is a…

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein. He's a mathematician, economist, physicist, and the managing director of Thiel Capital. He coined the term, and you can say is the founder, of the intellectual dark web, which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast at MIT and beyond. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

   2. EWEric Weinstein0:44

      Are you nervous about this?

   3. LFLex Fridman0:46

      Scared shitless.

   4. EWEric Weinstein0:47

      Okay. ǩbɨs bu kɛs yɛ ) .

   5. LFLex Fridman0:49

      (laughs) You mentioned Kung Fu Panda as one of your favorite movies. It has the usual profound master-student dynamic going on. So, who was, who has been a teacher that significantly influenced the direction of your thinking and life's work? So, if you're the kung fu panda, who was your shifu?

   6. EWEric Weinstein1:08

      Oh, well, it's interesting because I didn't see shifu as being the teacher.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:12

      Who was the teacher?

   8. EWEric Weinstein1:13

      Oogway, Master Oogway, the turtle.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:16

      Oh, the turtle.

   10. EWEric Weinstein1:17

       Right. They only meet twice in the entire film, and the first conversation sort of doesn't count. So, the magic of the film, in fact its point, uh, is that the teaching that really matters is transferred, uh, during a single conversation.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:37

       Right.

   12. EWEric Weinstein1:38

       And it's very brief. And so, who played that role in my life? I would say, uh, either, uh, my grandfather, uh, Harry Rubin and his wife Sophie Rubin, my grandmother, or Tom Lehrer.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:55

       Tom Lehrer?

   14. EWEric Weinstein1:55

       Yeah.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:57

       I- in which way?

   16. EWEric Weinstein1:58

       If you give a child Tom Lehrer records, what you do is you destroy their ability to be taken over by later malware. And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene, that it destroys the ability to lead a normal life for many people. So if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted from any kind of neurotypical presentation, I'll often ask them, "Uh, are you a Tom Lehrer fan?" And the odds that they will respond are- are quite high.

   17. LFLex Fridman2:34

       Now, Tom Lehrer's, uh, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Tom Lehrer?

   18. EWEric Weinstein2:38

       The- That's very interesting. There are a small number of Tom Lehrer songs that broke into the general population. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Element Song, and perhaps The Vatican Rag.

   19. LFLex Fridman2:47

       Mm-hmm.

   20. EWEric Weinstein2:48

       Uh, so when you meet somebody who knows those songs but doesn't know-

   21. LFLex Fridman2:52

       Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you?

   22. EWEric Weinstein2:54

       Harshly.

   23. LFLex Fridman2:55

       (laughs)

   24. EWEric Weinstein2:55

       Uh, no, but you're Russian, so-

   25. LFLex Fridman2:57

       Okay.

   26. EWEric Weinstein2:57

       ... undoubtedly you know Nikolai Ivanovich Ljubovetsky, that song.

   27. LFLex Fridman3:01

       Yes, yeah. Yep.

   28. EWEric Weinstein3:01

       Uh, so that was a song about plagiarism that was in fact plagiarized, which most people don't know, from Danny Kaye. Uh, where Danny Kaye did a song called Stanislavski of the Musky Arts. And so Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job of plagiarizing a song about, and making it about plagiarism, and then making it about this mathematician who worked in non-Euclidean geometry. That was like, uh, giving heroin to a child. It was extremely addictive and eventually led me to a lot of different places, one of which may have been a PhD in mathematics.

   29. LFLex Fridman3:36

       And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics, I believe, at Harvard, something like that.

   30. EWEric Weinstein3:41

       Yeah. I just had dinner with him, in fact.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   But we do have…

   1. LFLex Fridman15:00

   2. EWEric Weinstein15:00

      But we do have that ability now.

   3. LFLex Fridman15:02

      We have the ability. It's-

   4. EWEric Weinstein15:04

      Just not common.

   5. LFLex Fridman15:05

      It's not just common. So, so your, your thought is that, that is a serious worry if, if there becomes a, a reason-

   6. EWEric Weinstein15:15

      But self-modifying code is, is available now.

   7. LFLex Fridman15:18

      So there's different types of self-modification, right? There's, uh, personalization, you know, your email app, your Gmail is, uh, self-modifying to you after you log in or whatever, you can think of it that way, but ultimately it's central, all the information is centralized, but you're thinking of ideas where you're completely so- this is an, uh, unique entity, uh, operating under selective pressures and it changes...

   8. EWEric Weinstein15:46

      Well, you just, if you think about the fact that our immune systems, uh, don't know what's coming at them next, but they have a small set of spanning components, and if it's, if it's a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape, uh, or binding region can be approximated-

   9. LFLex Fridman16:07

      Mm-hmm.

   10. EWEric Weinstein16:07

       ... uh, with, with the Lego that is present, um, then you can have confidence that you don't need to know what's coming at you because the combinatorics, um, are sufficient to reach any configuration needed.

   11. LFLex Fridman16:22

       Uh, so that's a beautiful thing (laughs) well, terrifying thing to worry about because it's so within our reach. Wh-

   12. EWEric Weinstein16:30

       Whenever I suggest these things, I do always have a concern as to whether or not I will bring them into being by talking about them.

   13. LFLex Fridman16:37

       So, uh, there's this thing from OpenAI, so I've, I've, uh, next, next week to talk to the founder of OpenAI, uh, this idea that their text generation, the new, um, the, the new stuff they have for generating text is, they didn't want to bring it, they didn't want to release it because they're worried about the con-

   14. EWEric Weinstein16:57

       I'm delighted to hear that, but they, they're going to end up releasing it.

   15. LFLex Fridman17:00

       Yeah, so that's the thing is I think talking about it, um, well at least from my end, I'm more a proponent of technology preventing techno- uh, so further innovation preventing the detrimental effects of innovation.

   16. EWEric Weinstein17:16

       Well, we're in a- we're sort of tumbling down a hill at accelerating speed.

   17. LFLex Fridman17:22

       Yeah.

   18. EWEric Weinstein17:22

       So whether or not we're proponents or-

   19. LFLex Fridman17:24

       It doesn't, it doesn't really matter.

   20. EWEric Weinstein17:25

       It may not matter.

   21. LFLex Fridman17:26

       Yeah, well, it may not.

   22. EWEric Weinstein17:26

       But I, I... Well, I do feel that there are people who have held things back and, uh, you know, died poorer than they might have otherwise been. We don't even know their names. I don't think that we should discount the idea that having the smartest people showing off how smart they are by what they've developed may be a terminal process. I'm, I'm very mindful in particular of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller of all people wrote to Leó Szilárd where Szilárd was trying to figure out how to control the use of atomic weaponry at the end of World War II, and Teller...... rather strangely, because many of us view him as a monster-

   23. LFLex Fridman18:09

       Hmm.

   24. EWEric Weinstein18:09

       ... um, showed some very advanced moral thinking, talking about the slim chance we have for survival and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable. I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut what it is we are playing with when we are working on technical problems. And I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it, uh, a movie called The Bridge Over the R- uh, Bridge on the River Kwai, about, I believe, captured British POWs, who, just in a desire to do a bridge well, end up over-collaborating with their Japanese captors.

   25. LFLex Fridman18:43

       Well, now you're making me, uh, question the unrestricted open discussion of ideas in AI. But, um-

   26. EWEric Weinstein18:51

       I'm not saying I know the answer. I'm just saying that I could make a decent case for either our need to talk about this and to become technologically focused on containing it, or need to stop talking about this and try to hope that the relatively small number of highly adept individuals who are looking at these problems is small enough that we should in fact be talking about how to contain them.

   27. LFLex Fridman19:14

       Well, the way ideas ... the way innovation happens, what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus, whether if, uh, he was silent, the idea would be ... would emerge elsewhere. Well, in the case of Newton, of course. But, uh, you know, in w- in the case of AI, how small is the set of individuals out of which such ideas, uh, would arise? Is, is it, is it a good question?

   28. EWEric Weinstein19:37

       Well, the, the ideas of the researchers we know and those that we don't know, who may live in countries that don't wish us to know where ... what level they're currently at, are very disciplined in keeping these, uh, things to themselves. Uh, of course, I will point out that there's a religious school in Kerala that developed something very close to the calculus, uh, certainly in terms of infinite series in, um, in, in p- I, I guess, religious, uh, prayer, uh, and, and, uh, and rhyme and prose. So, you know, it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back, and I don't really believe that we have an ability to hold it back. I do think that we could change the proportion-

   29. LFLex Fridman20:20

       Hmm.

   30. EWEric Weinstein20:20

       ... of the time we spend worrying about the effects of what if we are successful, rather than simply trying to succeed and hope that we'll be able to contain things later.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   ... the, the powers…

   1. EWEric Weinstein30:00

      They d- you know, the- the- the admonition was go shopping.

   2. LFLex Fridman30:03

      ... the, the powers that be. What is that force? As opposed to blaming individuals.

   3. EWEric Weinstein30:07

      We don't know.

   4. LFLex Fridman30:08

      So whatever that-

   5. EWEric Weinstein30:10

      Whatever that force is-

   6. LFLex Fridman30:11

      ... is out-

   7. EWEric Weinstein30:11

      ... there's a component of it that's emergent, and there's a component of it that's deliberate. So give yourself a portfolio with two components. Some amount of it is emergent, but some amount of it is also an understanding that if people come together, they become an incredible force. And what you're seeing right now, I think, is there are forces that are trying to come together, and there are tr- forces that are trying to push things apart. And you know, one of them is the globalist narrative versus the national narrative, where to the global, uh, uh, globalist perspective, uh, the nat- nations are bad things in essence. That they're temporary, they're nationalistic, they're jingoistic, it's all negative. To people in the national, more in the national idiom, they're saying, "Look, this is where I pay my taxes, this is where I do my army service, this is where I have a vote, this is where I have a passport. Who the hell are you to tell me that because you've moved into some place that you can make money globally, that you've chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special and elevated duty?" And I think that these competing narratives have been pushing towards the global perspective, uh, from the elite, and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised people are saying, "Hey, I, I actually live in a, in a place and I have laws and I speak a language, I have a culture. And who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some far away land, that my obligations to my fellow countrymen are so, so much diminished?"

   8. LFLex Fridman31:43

      So these tensions between nations and so on, ultimately you see being proud of your country and so on, which creates potentially the kind of things that led to wars and so on. They, they ultimately, it is human nature and it is good for us, uh, for wake-up calls of different kinds.

   9. EWEric Weinstein31:59

      Well, I think that these are tensions, and my point isn't, I mean, nationalism run amok is a nightmare. And internationalism run amok is a nightmare. And the problem is, we're trying to push these pendulums, uh, to some place where they're somewhat balanced, where we, we have a higher duty of care to those, uh, who share our log, our laws and our citizenship, but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system. I would think this is elementary, but the problem that we're facing concerns the ability for some to profit at the aban- uh, by abandoning their obligations, uh, to others within their system. And that's what we've had for decades.

   10. LFLex Fridman32:48

       You mentioned nuclear weapons. I was hoping to get answers from you, since one of the many things you've done is, uh, economics, and maybe you can understand human behavior and why the heck we haven't, uh, blown each other up yet. But okay, so, uh, we'll get back-

   11. EWEric Weinstein33:02

       I don't know the answer to that.

   12. LFLex Fridman33:03

       Yeah. It's a, it's a fasc- it's, it's really important to say that we really don't know and-

   13. EWEric Weinstein33:07

       A mild uptick in wisdom.

   14. LFLex Fridman33:09

       A mild uptick in wisdom. That's, well, S- Steven Pink, Pinker was, who I've talked with, has a lot of really good ideas about why, but nobody, like-

   15. EWEric Weinstein33:17

       He, I, I don't trust his optimism.

   16. LFLex Fridman33:19

       (laughs) Listen, I'm Russian, so I never trust a guy who's that optimistic either.

   17. EWEric Weinstein33:24

       No, no, no. It's just that you're talking about a guy who's looking at a system in which more and more of the kinetic energy, like war, has been turned into potential energy, like unused nuclear weapons.

   18. LFLex Fridman33:38

       Wow, beautifully put.

   19. EWEric Weinstein33:39

       And you know, now I'm looking at that system and I'm saying, "Okay, well if you don't have a potential energy term, then everything's just getting better and better."

   20. LFLex Fridman33:46

       Yep. Yeah. Wow, that's, that's beautifully put. Only a physicist could... Okay. Uh-

   21. EWEric Weinstein33:51

       I'm not a physicist.

   22. LFLex Fridman33:52

       (laughs) Is that a dirty word?

   23. EWEric Weinstein33:55

       No, no. I wish I were a physicist.

   24. LFLex Fridman33:57

       Ah, me too. My dad's a physicist. I'm trying to live up that probably for the rest of my life. He's probably gonna listen to this too. So.

   25. EWEric Weinstein34:05

       Your dad?

   26. LFLex Fridman34:05

       Yeah. (laughs) So your friend Sam Harris, uh, worries a lot about the existential threat of AI. Not in the way that you've described, but in the more-

   27. EWEric Weinstein34:16

       Well, he hangs out with Elon. I don't know Elon.

   28. LFLex Fridman34:18

       (laughs) So are you worried about that kind of, uh, uh, you know, about the, um, about r- either robotic systems or, you know, traditionally defined AI systems essentially becoming, uh, super intelligent, much more intelligent than human beings, and, uh, getting rid of

   29. EWEric Weinstein34:38

       Well, they already are. And they're not.

   30. LFLex Fridman34:42

       When, when seen as a, a collective, you mean?
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   So you've characterized in…

   1. EWEric Weinstein45:00

      Uh, in which case, that will be fascinating. Or is it more likely that somebody will maintain a level of discipline from outside of academics and be able to make use of the freedom that comes from not having to constantly affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field?

   2. LFLex Fridman45:21

      So you've characterized in ways that aca- academia in this particular sense is, uh, declining. You, uh, posted a plot, the older population of the faculty is getting larger, the younger is getting smaller and so on, so what's, which direction of the two are you more hopeful about?

   3. EWEric Weinstein45:40

      Well, the Baby Boomers can't hang on forever.

   4. LFLex Fridman45:43

      That's, first of all, in general, true, and second of all, in academia.

   5. EWEric Weinstein45:46

      But that's really what our-

   6. LFLex Fridman45:47

      You think-

   7. EWEric Weinstein45:48

      ... what this time is about-

   8. LFLex Fridman45:49

      Is the Baby Boomers control thought.

   9. EWEric Weinstein45:50

      ... is we didn't, we're, we're used to like financial bubbles that last a few years in length and then pop.

   10. LFLex Fridman45:57

       Yes.

   11. EWEric Weinstein45:57

       The Baby Boomer bubble is this really long-lived thing and all of the ideology, all of the behavior patterns, the norms, you know, for example, string theory is an almost entirely Baby Boomer phenomena. It was something that Baby Boomers were able to do because it required a very high level of mathematical ability. So it's not-

   12. LFLex Fridman46:20

       You don't, you don't think of, uh, string theory as a, an original idea?

   13. EWEric Weinstein46:24

       Oh, I mean, it was original to Veneziano who probably is older than the Baby Boomers, and there are people who are younger than the Baby Boomers who are still doing string theory, and I'm not saying that nothing discovered within the large string theoretic complex is wrong. Quite the contrary. A lot of brilliant mathematics and a lot of the structure of physics was elucidated by string theorists. What do I think of the deliverable nature of this product that will not ship called string theory? I think that it is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and geometrically talented Baby Boomer physics- physicists, so that they can say that they're working on something within the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity. Now there are other schemes, you know, there's like asymptotic safety, there are other things that you could imagine doing. I don't think much of any of the major programs, but to have inflicted this level of loyalty through a shibboleth, "Well, surely you don't question X." Well, I question almost everything in the string program and that's why I got out of physics. When you called me a physicist, it was a great honor, but the reason I didn't become a physicist wasn't that I fell in love with mathematics. It's I said, wow, in 1984, 1983, I saw the field going mad and I saw that mathematics, which has all sorts of problems, was not going insane. And so instead of studying things within physics, I thought it was much safer to study the same objects within mathematics and there's a huge price to pay for that. You lose physical intuition.

   14. LFLex Fridman48:03

       Mm-hmm.

   15. EWEric Weinstein48:03

       But the point is, is that it wasn't a North Korean reeducation camp either.

   16. LFLex Fridman48:08

       Are you hopeful about cracking open the Einstein unified theory in a way that has, I mean really, really, uh, understanding whether this, uh, uniting everything together with quantum theory and so on for-

   17. EWEric Weinstein48:21

       I mean, I'm trying to play this role.... myself, to, to do it-

   18. LFLex Fridman48:26

       Well, I ƒf y- I know.

   19. EWEric Weinstein48:26

       ... to the extent of handing it over to the more responsible, more professional, more competent community. Um, so, I think that they're wrong about a great number of their belief structures, but I do believe... I mean, I have a really profound love-hate relationship with this group of people. I think-

   20. LFLex Fridman48:47

       On the physics side?

   21. EWEric Weinstein48:47

       Oh, yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman48:48

       'Cause the mathematicians actually seem to be much more open-minded and, uh...

   23. EWEric Weinstein48:52

       Well, uh, th- they are and they aren't. They're open-minded about anything that looks like great math.

   24. LFLex Fridman48:57

       Right.

   25. EWEric Weinstein48:57

       Right? They'll study something that isn't very important physics, but if it's beautiful mathematics, then they'll have, uh... They have great intuition about these things. As good as the mathematicians are, and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level give them the edge, the theoretics, theoretical physics community is bar none the most profound intellectual community that we have ever created. It is the number one, there is nobody in second place as far as I'm concerned. Like, in their spare time, in their spare time they invented molecular biology.

   26. LFLex Fridman49:31

       Well, what was the origin of molecular biology? You're saying physics-

   27. EWEric Weinstein49:33

       Well, somebody like Francis Crick. I mean, a lot of, a lot of the early molecular biologists-

   28. LFLex Fridman49:38

       Were physicists?

   29. EWEric Weinstein49:39

       Yeah, I mean, you know-

   30. LFLex Fridman49:40

       So it's-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   The opposite of that,…

   1. EWEric Weinstein1:00:00

      out in one direction.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:00:01

      The opposite of that, l- let me say what comforts me, sort of biology or engineering, uh, at, at the end of the day, does the thing work?

   3. EWEric Weinstein1:00:10

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:00:11

      Y- you can, uh, test the crazies away. (laughs) The crazy, "Well see, now you're saying..." But some ideas are truly crazy and some are, are actually correct. (laughs) So-

   5. EWEric Weinstein1:00:21

      Well, there's pre-correct currently crazy.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:00:24

      Yeah.

   7. EWEric Weinstein1:00:24

      Right? And so, you, you don't wanna get rid of everybody who's pre-correct and currently crazy. Um, the problem is, is that we don't have...... standards in general for trying to determine who has to be put to the sword in terms of their career, and who has to be protected, uh, as some sort of giant time-suck pain in the ass, uh, who may change everything.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:00:47

      Do you think that's possible, uh, creating a mechanism of those selected-

   9. EWEric Weinstein1:00:51

      Well, you're not gonna like the answer, but here it comes.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:00:53

       Oh, boy.

   11. EWEric Weinstein1:00:55

       It has to do with very human elements. We're trying to do this at the level of like rules and fairness, it's not gonna work. 'Cause the only thing that really understands this... You ever read the, read The Double Helix?

   12. LFLex Fridman1:01:12

       It's a book?

   13. EWEric Weinstein1:01:13

       Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:01:14

       Oh, boy.

   15. EWEric Weinstein1:01:14

       You have to read this book. Not only did Jim Watson, uh, ha- half discover this three-dimensional structure of DNA, he was also one hell of a writer be- before he became an ass, uh-

   16. LFLex Fridman1:01:25

       (laughs)

   17. EWEric Weinstein1:01:25

       ... that, no, he, he's-

   18. LFLex Fridman1:01:27

       Yeah, yeah, he is.

   19. EWEric Weinstein1:01:27

       ... he's tried to destroy his own reputation 'cause he-

   20. LFLex Fridman1:01:29

       I knew about the ass, I didn't know about the good writer. So-

   21. EWEric Weinstein1:01:33

       Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living, and, uh, as I've said before, Jim Watson is too important a legacy to be left to Jim Watson. Um...

   22. LFLex Fridman1:01:44

       Yeah, it's unfortunate.

   23. EWEric Weinstein1:01:44

       That book tells you more about what actually moves the dial, right? And there's another story a- a- a- about him which I don't a- don't agree with, which is that he stole everything from Rosalind Franklin. I mean, the- the problems that he had with Rosalind Franklin are real, but we should actually honor that tension in our history by delving into it rather than having a simple solution.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:02:04

       Mm-hmm.

   25. EWEric Weinstein1:02:05

       Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick being a pain in the ass that everybody secretly knew was super brilliant, and there's an encounter between, uh, Chargaff, uh, who came up with the, the equimolar relations between the nucleotides, who should've gotten the structure of DNA, and Watson and Crick. And, you know, he talks about missing a shiver in the heartbeat of biology, and this stuff is so gorgeous, and it just makes you tremble even thinking about it. Um, look, we know very often who is to be feared, and we need to fund the people that we fear. The people who are wasting our time need to be excluded from the conversation. You see, and, and, you know, maybe we'll make some errors in both directions, but we have known our own people. We know the pains in the asses that might work out, and we know the people who are really just blowhards who really have very little to contribute most of the time. It's not 100%, but you're not gonna get there with rules.

   26. LFLex Fridman1:03:10

       Right. It's, uh, using some kinda instinct. I mean, I, to be honest, I'm gonna make you roll your eyes for a second, but, uh, and the first time I heard that there is a large community of people who believe the earth is flat actually made me pause and ask myself the question, "Well, is it-"

   27. EWEric Weinstein1:03:26

       Why would there be such a community?

   28. LFLex Fridman1:03:28

       Yeah.

   29. EWEric Weinstein1:03:28

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman1:03:28

       Is it possible the earth is flat? So, I had to like, wait a minute (laughs) . I mean, then you go through a thinking process that I think is really healthy. Uh, it ultimately ends up being a geometry thing, I think. Uh, it's an interesting, it's a, an interesting thought experiment at the very least.
6. 1:15:00 – 1:22:02

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. EWEric Weinstein1:15:00

      with the fact that we are self-organized. I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan when Lehman Brothers collapsed and thinking, "Who's gonna tell all these people that they need to show up at work when they don't have a financial system to incentivize them to show up at work?" So, my complaint is, first of all, not with the socialists but with the capitalists, which is, "You guys are being idiots." You're courting revolution by continuing to harp on the same old ideas that, well, you know, try, try harder, bootstrap yourself. Yeah, to an extent that works. To an extent. But we are clearly headed in a place that there's nothing that ties together our need to contribute and our need to consume.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:15:45

      Mm-hmm.

   3. EWEric Weinstein1:15:45

      And that may not be provided by capitalism because it may have been a temporary phenomena, so check out my article on anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy. Uh, I think people are, are late getting the wake-up call, and we would be doing a better job saving capitalism from itself, um, because I don't want this done under authoritarian control, and the more we insist that, uh, everybody who's not thriving in our society during their reproductive years in order to have a family is failing at a personal level. I mean, what a disgusting thing that we're saying. What a, what a, what horrible message. Who t- who the hell have we become that we've so bought into the Chicago model, um, that we can't see the humanity that we're destroying in that process? And it's... I hate, I hate the thought of communism. I really do. My family has flirted with it in d- decades past. It's a wrong, bad idea, but we are going to need to figure out how to make sure that those souls are nur- nourished and respected, and capitalism better have an answer. And I'm betting on capitalism, but I gotta tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with my team.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:16:50

      So you're still on the capitalism team, you just, uh... There's a theme here with-

   5. EWEric Weinstein1:16:54

      Well, radical, radical capitalism. I'm, look, I-

   6. LFLex Fridman1:16:56

      Right, hypercapitalism, yeah.

   7. EWEric Weinstein1:16:57

      Look, I want... I think hypercapitalism is gonna have to be cup- coupled to hypersocialism. You need to allow the most productive people to create wonders, and you've gotta stop bogging them down with all of these extra nice requirements, you know? Nice is dead. Good has a future. Nice doesn't have a future because nice ends up with, with gulags.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:17:19

      Damn, that's a good line. Okay, last question. You, uh, tweeted today a simple, quite insightful equation saying, uh, "Imagine that every unit F of fame you picked up has stalkers and H haters." So, I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame perhaps a little bit?

   9. EWEric Weinstein1:17:39

      Well, uh, th- it's not as simple a... I mean, people always take these things literally when you have like 280 characters-

   10. LFLex Fridman1:17:44

       Yeah.

   11. EWEric Weinstein1:17:44

       ... to explain yourself.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:17:46

       (laughs) Oh, so you mean that that's not a mathematical, uh...

   13. EWEric Weinstein1:17:49

       No, there's no law.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:17:50

       Oh, okay. All right. So why-

   15. EWEric Weinstein1:17:52

       I just said ima- I put the word imagine because I still have a mathematician's desire for precision.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:17:56

       Yes.

   17. EWEric Weinstein1:17:56

       Imagine if this were true.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:17:57

       But i- it was a beautiful way to imagine that there is a law that has those variables in it.

   19. EWEric Weinstein1:18:03

       Yeah, yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:18:03

       And, uh, you've become quite famous these days. So, how do you yourself optimize that equation with the peculiar kinda fame that you have gathered along the way?

   21. EWEric Weinstein1:18:13

       I wanna be kinder. I wanna be kinder to myself, I wanna be kinder to others, I wanna be able to have heart. Compassion and these things are really important, and, uh, I have a pretty spectrum-y kind of approach to analysis. I'm quite literal. I can go full Rain Man on you at any given moment.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:18:33

       (laughs)

   23. EWEric Weinstein1:18:33

       No, I can.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:18:33

       Yeah.

   25. EWEric Weinstein1:18:34

       I can. Uh, it's a facultative of autism if you like, and people are gonna get angry because they want autism to be respected, but when you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics, I'm... You know, I speak with speech apnea. "Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, be right down for dinner." You know?

   26. LFLex Fridman1:18:50

       Yeah.

   27. EWEric Weinstein1:18:52

       We have to try to integrate ourselves and those tensions between, you know, it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul. Many of us are optimizing one to the-- at the expense of the other. And I struggle with social media and I struggle with people making threats against our families, and I struggle with just how much pain people are in. And if there's one message I would like to push out there, you're responsible, everybody, all of us, myself included, for struggling. Struggle mightily because you-- It's nobody else's job to do your struggle for you. Now, with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure out how to better yourself and where you've failed and where you've let down your family, your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break, you know? If it's not working out-- I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success. There's been no period of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another. And I do wish to say that a lot of times people think this is glamorous. I'm about to go, you know, do a show with Sam Harris. People are gonna listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage. It's completely crazy. I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum value, and that's why I'm doing this podcast, you know? Just give yourself a break. You owe us your struggle. You don't owe your family or your coworkers or your lovers or your family members success. As long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up, recognize that this new situation with the economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions has caused the people who've risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel. Everybody is lying at the moment. Nobody's really a truth teller. Try to keep your humanity about you. Try to recognize that if you're failing, if things aren't where you want them to be and you're struggling and you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, what you could do, it's not necessarily all your fault. We are in a global situation. I have not met the people who are honest, kind, good, successful. Nobody that I've met is checking all the boxes. Nobody's getting all tens. So, I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough. Either people wanna hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable. You have to struggle, you have to try. Or they wanna say you're a hundred percent responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense.

   28. LFLex Fridman1:21:31

       Beautifully put. Eric, thank you so much for talking today.

   29. EWEric Weinstein1:21:34

       Thanks for having me, buddy.

Episode duration: 1:21:55