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

1. 0:00 – 1:55

   Teachers, Shifu vs Oogway: formative influences and the power of one conversation

   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.

2. 1:55 – 6:02

   Tom Lehrer, wit, and the link between humor and intelligence

   1. LFLex Fridman1:55

      Tom Lehrer?

   2. EWEric Weinstein1:55

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:57

      I- in which way?

   4. 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.

   5. LFLex Fridman2:34

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

   6. 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.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:47

      Mm-hmm.

   8. EWEric Weinstein2:48

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

   9. LFLex Fridman2:52

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

   10. EWEric Weinstein2:54

       Harshly.

   11. LFLex Fridman2:55

       (laughs)

   12. EWEric Weinstein2:55

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

   13. LFLex Fridman2:57

       Okay.

   14. EWEric Weinstein2:57

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

   15. LFLex Fridman3:01

       Yes, yeah. Yep.

   16. 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.

   17. LFLex Fridman3:36

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

   18. EWEric Weinstein3:41

       Yeah. I just had dinner with him, in fact.

   19. LFLex Fridman3:44

       Huh.

   20. EWEric Weinstein3:44

       Uh, when my son turned 13, we didn't tell him, but, um, his bar mitzvah present was dinner with his hero, Tom Lehrer.

   21. LFLex Fridman3:54

       (laughs)

   22. EWEric Weinstein3:54

       And, uh, Tom Lehrer was 88 years old, sharp as a tack, irreverent and funny as hell, and just ... You know, there are very few people in this world that you have to meet while they're still here, and that was definitely one for our family.

   23. LFLex Fridman4:09

       So that wit is a reflection of intelligence in some kinda deep way, like where that would be a good test of intelligence whether you're a Tom Lehrer fan. So what do you think that is about wit, about that kind of humor, ability to see the absurdity in existence? What, do you think that's connected to intelligence or are we just two Jews on a mic, uh, that appreciate that kinda humor? (laughs)

   24. EWEric Weinstein4:34

       No, I, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence. You c- you can see it. There's a place where Tom Lehrer decides that he's going to lampoon, uh, Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever meaningless wordplay.

   25. LFLex Fridman4:49

       Mm-hmm.

   26. EWEric Weinstein4:49

       And he has, uh, f- forget the ... Well, let's see. He- he's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan wrote it, and he says, "That I missed her, depressed her, young sister named Esther this mister to pester, she tried. Pestering sisters of festering blister, 'You'd best to resist her,' say I. The sister persisted, the mister resisted, I kissed her, all loyalty slipped when he s- when she said I could have her, her sister's cadaver must surely have turned in its crypt." That's so dense, it's so insane-

   27. LFLex Fridman5:13

       Yeah.

   28. EWEric Weinstein5:13

       ... that that's clearly intelligence, um, because it's hard to construct something like that. If I look at my favorite Tom lyric, Tom Lehrer lyric, you know, there's a- a perfectly absurd one which is, "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918 and they've hardly bothered us since then." Right?

   29. LFLex Fridman5:34

       (laughs)

   30. EWEric Weinstein5:34

       That is a different kind of intelligence. You know, you're taking something that is so horrific and you're- you're sort of making it palatable and funny, and demonstrating also, um, just your humanity. I mean, I think the thing that came through as- as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible, horrible lines, was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was, who was channeling pain through humor and through grace.

3. 6:02 – 8:17

   War, suffering, and the cultural ‘selective pressures’ that shape art and humor

   1. LFLex Fridman6:02

      I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia, that same kind of humor emerge from the generation of World War II. It seemed like that humor is required to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering of, that that war created.

   2. EWEric Weinstein6:16

      Well, you do need the environment to create the broad Slavic soul. I don't think that, uh, many Americans really appreciate, um, Russian humor, how you had to joke during the time of, let's say, Article 58 under Stalin. You had to be very, very careful, you know, the, the concept of a Russian satirical magazine like Krokodil, uh, doesn't make sense. So, you have this cross-cultural problem that there are certain areas of human experience that it would be better to know nothing about, and quite unfortunately, Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them, which makes the, you know, the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky so potent, the, uh, you know, the prose of Pushkin, whatever it is, uh, you have to appreciate the depth of the Eastern European experience. And I, I would think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time of the Civil War or may- maybe, um, you know, under slavery and Jim Crow, or even the, uh, harsh tyranny of, uh, the coal and steel employers during the labor wars. Um, but in general, I would say it's hard for us to understand and imagine the collective culture unless we have the system of selective pressures that, for example, uh, Russians were subjected to.

   3. LFLex Fridman7:42

      Yeah, so if there's one good thing that comes outta war, it's literature, art, and, uh, humor and music.

   4. EWEric Weinstein7:51

      Oh, I don't think so. I think almost everything is good about war except for death and destruction.

   5. LFLex Fridman7:57

      Right. (laughs) Uh, without the death it would bring, uh, the romance of it. The whole thing is nice, but-

   6. EWEric Weinstein8:03

      Well, this is why we're always caught up in war. I mean, it was a very ambiguous relationship to it, is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful, and at an unacceptable price, and the price has never been higher.

4. 8:17 – 10:14

   AI as artificial life: bridging physical vs logical worlds

   1. LFLex Fridman8:17

      So, just jump in a l- uh, into AI a little bit. You, uh, in, in one of the conversation you had or one of the videos, you described that one of the things AI systems can't do and biological systems can, is self-replicate in the physical world.

   2. EWEric Weinstein8:34

      Oh, no, no.

   3. LFLex Fridman8:37

      In the physical world.

   4. EWEric Weinstein8:39

      Well, yes. The physical robots can't self-replicate, but if it-

   5. LFLex Fridman8:43

      Yeah.

   6. EWEric Weinstein8:43

      ... but you, th- this is a very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we've been able to create that's really complex that has an analog of our reproductive system is software.

   7. LFLex Fridman8:57

      But nevertheless, software rep- replicates itself, uh, if we're speaking strictly for the replication in this kinda digital space. So, I mean, just to begin, let me ask a question. Do you see, uh, a protective barrier or a gap between the physical world and the digital world. Do you-

   8. EWEric Weinstein9:15

      Let's not call it digital. Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world.

   9. LFLex Fridman9:20

      Why logical?

   10. EWEric Weinstein9:21

       Well, because even though we had, let's say, Einstein's brain preserved, uh, it was meaningless to us as a physical object, because we couldn't do anything with what was stored in it at a logical level. And so the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically, uh, are not necessarily, uh, we don't always benefit from synonymizing. I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis to the logical world, but that it does warrant, uh, identification with a separate layer that need not, um, invoke logic gates and zeros and ones.

   11. LFLex Fridman9:59

       And, uh, so connecting those two worlds, so the logical world and the physical world, or maybe just connecting to the logical world inside our brain, in- Einstein's brain, you, you mentioned the idea of out- outelligence.

5. 10:14 – 14:46

   Artificial outelligence: evolution without AGI (variation, heritability, differential success)

   1. EWEric Weinstein10:14

      Artificial outelligence.

   2. LFLex Fridman10:15

      Artificial outelligence.

   3. EWEric Weinstein10:16

      Yes. This is the only essay that John Brockman ever invited me to write that he refused to publish in Edge.

   4. LFLex Fridman10:24

      (laughs) Why?

   5. EWEric Weinstein10:26

      Well, maybe it wasn't, it wasn't well-written. Um, but-

   6. LFLex Fridman10:29

      Oh. Well...

   7. EWEric Weinstein10:29

      ... I don't know. Uh-

   8. LFLex Fridman10:31

      The idea is quite compelling. It's quite unique and new, and at least from my view, uh, standpoint. Maybe you can explain it.

   9. EWEric Weinstein10:38

      Sure. What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial general intelligence, when in fact artificial life, uh, is terrifying in and of itself and it's already here. So, in order to have a system of selective pressures, you need three distinct elements. You need variation within a population, you need heritability, and you need differential success. So, what's really unique, and I've made this point I think elsewhere, about software is that if you think about what humans know how to build that's impressive, so I always take a car and I say, "Does it have an analog of each of the physical, physiological systems? Does it have a skeletal structure? That's its frame. Does it have a, a neurological structure? It has an onboard computer. It has a digestive system." The one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system. But if you can call spawn on a process, effectively you do have a reproductive system. And that means that you can create something with variation, heritability, and differential success. Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was-

   10. LFLex Fridman11:56

       Mm-hmm.

   11. EWEric Weinstein11:56

       ... where do we see inanimate non-intelligent life outwitting intelligent life?And, um, I have two favorite systems, and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted. One of which is the Ophrys orchid, um, subspecies or subclade, I don't know what to call it.

   12. LFLex Fridman12:18

       Is that a type of flower?

   13. EWEric Weinstein12:19

       Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males into, uh, engaging in what is called pseudo-copulation with a fake female, which is usually represented by the lowest petal. And there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating opportunity. But the flower doesn't have to give up energ- energy in the form of nectar as a lure because it's tricking the males. The other system is a particular species, uh, of mussel, Lampisilis, in the clear streams of Missouri, and it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young, and when the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that the bass like to eat, the, uh, the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the bass and also use the bass to redistribute them as they eventually release. Both of these systems you have a highly intelligent dupe being fooled by a lower life form, and what is sculpting these, these convincing lures? It's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies. So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, uh, those weaker mimics, uh, fall off. They, they have terminal lines, and only the better ones survive. So it's an arms race between the target species, uh, that is being parasitized getting smarter and this other l- less intelligent or non-intelligent object getting as if smarter. And so what you see is, is that artificial intelli- artificial general intelligence is not needed to parasitize us. It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves. So you could have a, a program let's say, you know, one of these Nigerian scams-

   14. LFLex Fridman14:25

       Mm-hmm.

   15. EWEric Weinstein14:26

       ... um, that writes letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin, uh, to figure out which aspects of the program should be kept, which should be buried and thrown away, and you don't need it to be in any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario of being parasitized by something that has no idea what it's doing.

6. 14:46 – 23:45

   Self-modifying code, immune-system combinatorics, and the dilemma of discussing dangerous ideas

   1. LFLex Fridman14:46

      So you, you, you phrased a few concepts really eloquently, so let me try to, uh... There's a few directions this goes. So one, fir- first of all, in the way we write software today, it's not common that we allow it to self-modify.

   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.
7. 23:45 – 28:34

   Existential risk isn’t only AGI: nuclear weapons, 9/11 as R&D, and the ‘video game mode’ problem

   1. EWEric Weinstein23:45

      ... I, I don't think we've really felt where we are. You know, occasionally, we get a wake-up. 9/11 was so anomalous c- compared to everything we've e- uh, everything else we've experienced on American soil that-It came to us as a complete shock that that was even a possibility. What it really was, was a highly creative and determined R&D team, uh, deep in the bowels of A- of Afghanistan, um, showing us that we had certain exploits that we were open to, that nobody had chosen to express. I- I can think of several of these things that I don't talk about publicly, that just seem to have to do with, um, how relatively unimaginative those who wished to cause havoc and destruction have been up until now. But the- the great mystery of our time, of- of this particular little era, is how remarkably stable we've been since 1945 when we demonstrated the ability to use, uh, nuclear weapons in anger. And we don't know why things like that haven't happened since then. We've had several (laughs) close calls, we've had mistakes, we've had, uh, brinksmanship, and what's now happened is that we've settled into a sense that, "Oh, it's, it- it'll always be nothing." It's been so long since something was at that level of danger that we've got a wrong idea in our head, and that's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro show, I talked about the need to resume above ground testing of nuclear devices, because we have people whose developmental experience suggests that when, let's say Donald Trump and, uh, North Korea engage on Twitter, "Oh, it's nothing, it's just posturing. Everybody's just in it for money." There's n- there- there's an- a sense that people are in a video game mode which has been the right call since 1945. We've been mostly in video game mode. It's amazing.

   2. LFLex Fridman25:52

      So you're worried about a generation which has not seen any existential...

   3. EWEric Weinstein25:57

      We've lived under it. You see, you're younger. You- I don't know if- if, uh, and you, again, you came from- from Moscow .

   4. LFLex Fridman26:04

      Yeah.

   5. EWEric Weinstein26:05

      There was a- a TV show called The Day After that had a huge effect, uh, on a generation, uh, growing up in the US, and it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange. We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively where we've thought about this, and I think it's one of the most irresponsible things that the elders among us have done, which is to provide this beautiful garden in which the thorns are c- cut off of the- of the rose bushes, and all of the edges are- are rounded and sanded. And so people have developed this- this totally unreal (laughs) idea which is, everything's going to be just fine. And, do I think that my leading concern is AGI, or my leading concern is, uh, thermonuclear exchange or gene drives or any one of these things? I don't know. But I know that our time here in this very long experiment here is finite, because the toys that we've built are so impressive, and the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized, and I- I think it's, we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945. We had a lot of dangerous skilled players on the world stage who nevertheless, no matter how bad they were, managed to not embroil us in something that we couldn't come back from. And-

   6. LFLex Fridman27:38

      The Cold War.

   7. EWEric Weinstein27:39

      Yeah, and the distance from the Cold War, you know, I'm very mindful of, uh, there was a Russian tradition actually, of on your wedding day, going to visit, uh, a memorial to those who gave their lives. Can you imagine this? Where you- you, on the happiest day of your life you go and you pay homage to the people who fought and died in the Battle of Stalingrad?

   8. LFLex Fridman28:06

      Mm-hmm.

   9. EWEric Weinstein28:07

      Um, I'm not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say, but there were a couple of things that the Russians did that were really positive in the Soviet era, and I think trying to let people know how serious life actually is, is a- is ... the Russian model of seriousness is better than the American model.

   10. LFLex Fridman28:28

       And maybe, like you mentioned, there was a small echo of that after 9/11. But-

8. 28:34 – 34:05

   Narrative control and polarization: emergent vs deliberate forces pushing people apart

   1. EWEric Weinstein28:34

      But that we wouldn't- we wouldn't let it form. We talk about 9/11 but it's 9/12 that really moved the needle. When we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak. We had some- we- we witnessed something super serious and we didn't want to, uh, run to our computers and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings. And it- it was profound because we woke up briefly there, but- you know, and I talk about the gated institutional narrative that sort of programs our lives, and I've seen it break three times in my life. One of which was the election of Donald Trump. O- another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns wasn't that important knew that Lehman Brothers met AIG was next.

   2. LFLex Fridman29:26

      Mm-hmm.

   3. EWEric Weinstein29:27

      And the other one was 9/11. And so if- if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times that the- the global narrative was really interrupted, that tells you how much we've been on top of developing events, you know? I mean we had the Murrah Felt- Federal Building explosion but it didn't cause the narrative to break. It wasn't profound enough. Around 9/12, we started to wake up out of our slumber, and the powers that be did not want a coming together. They d- you know, the- the- the admonition was go shopping.

   4. LFLex Fridman30:03

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

   5. EWEric Weinstein30:07

      We don't know.

   6. LFLex Fridman30:08

      So whatever that-

   7. EWEric Weinstein30:10

      Whatever that force is-

   8. LFLex Fridman30:11

      ... is out-

   9. 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?"

   10. 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.

   11. 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.

   12. 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-

   13. EWEric Weinstein33:02

       I don't know the answer to that.

   14. 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-

   15. EWEric Weinstein33:07

       A mild uptick in wisdom.

   16. 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-

   17. EWEric Weinstein33:17

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

   18. LFLex Fridman33:19

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

   19. 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.

   20. LFLex Fridman33:38

       Wow, beautifully put.

   21. 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."

   22. LFLex Fridman33:46

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

   23. EWEric Weinstein33:51

       I'm not a physicist.

   24. LFLex Fridman33:52

       (laughs) Is that a dirty word?

   25. EWEric Weinstein33:55

       No, no. I wish I were a physicist.

   26. 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.

   27. EWEric Weinstein34:05

       Your dad?

9. 34:05 – 39:14

   AGI fears vs incremental infiltration: chess ‘brilliancies,’ creativity, and scaling consciousness

   1. 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-

   2. EWEric Weinstein34:16

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

   3. 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

   4. EWEric Weinstein34:38

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

   5. LFLex Fridman34:42

      When, when seen as a, a collective, you mean?

   6. EWEric Weinstein34:46

      Well, I mean, I, I, I can mean all sorts of things, but certainly many of the things that we thought were peculiar to general intelligence are, do not require general intelligence. So that's been one of the big awakenings that you can write a pretty convincing sports story from stats alone, uh, without needing to have watched the game. So, you know, is it possible to write lively prose about politics? Yeah, no, not yet. So we, we're sort of all over the map. One of the, one of the things about chess, uh, you'll, there's a question I once asked on Quora that didn't get a lot of response, which was, "What is the greatest brilliancy ever produced by a computer in a chess game?" Which was different than the question of what is the greatest com-

   7. LFLex Fridman35:33

      Mm-hmm.

   8. EWEric Weinstein35:34

      ... game ever played. So if you think about brilliancies as what really animates many of us to think of chess as an art form-

   9. LFLex Fridman35:40

      Mm-hmm.

   10. EWEric Weinstein35:42

       ... those are those moves and combinations that just show such flair, panache and, and, and then soul.

   11. LFLex Fridman35:48

       Mm-hmm.

   12. EWEric Weinstein35:48

       Um, computers weren't really great at that. They were great positional monsters. And you know, recently we, we've started seeing brilliancies.

   13. LFLex Fridman35:56

       Yeah.

   14. EWEric Weinstein35:57

       And so-

   15. LFLex Fridman35:57

       A few grandmasters have identified, uh, with, uh, with AlphaZero that things were qu- quite brilliant.

   16. EWEric Weinstein36:02

       Yeah.

   17. LFLex Fridman36:03

       Quite, quite creative.

   18. EWEric Weinstein36:03

       So that's a, that's a, you know, that's an example of something. We don't think that that's AGI, but in a very restricted set, uh, set of rules like chess, you're starting to see poetry, uh, of a high order. And-And so, I'm not, I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI. AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives, in the same way that I don't think a worm should be, you know, the C. elegans shouldn't be treated as non-conscious because it only has 300 neurons. It maybe just has a very low level of consciousness, because we don't understand what these things mean as they scale up.

   19. LFLex Fridman36:40

       Mm-hmm.

   20. EWEric Weinstein36:40

       So, am I worried about this general phenomena? Sure, but I think that one of the things that's happening is that a lot of us are fretting about this, uh, in part because of human needs. We've always been worried about the Golem. Right? (laughs)

   21. LFLex Fridman36:57

       Well, the Golem's the artificially created-

   22. EWEric Weinstein36:59

       Life, you know.

   23. LFLex Fridman37:00

       It's like Frankenstein type-

   24. EWEric Weinstein37:01

       Yeah, sure.

   25. LFLex Fridman37:02

       ... character, yeah.

   26. EWEric Weinstein37:02

       It's a, it's a Jewish version, and um ... (laughs) Frankenberg, Frankenstein.

   27. LFLex Fridman37:08

       Yeah, that makes sense. (laughs)

   28. EWEric Weinstein37:10

       Right. So, the uh ... But we've always been worried about creating something like this, and it's getting closer and closer, and there are ways in which we have to realize that the whole thing is com- the whole thing that we've experienced, or the context of our lives, is almost certainly coming to an end, and I don't mean to suggest that, uh, we won't survive. I don't know. And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow. It could be 300, 500 years. But there's no plan that I'm aware of if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit that are, uh, sensible within current, uh, technological dreams, the Earth, the Moon, and Mars, and we have a very competitive civilization that is still forced into violence to sort out disputes that cannot be arbitrated. It is not clear to me that we have a long term future until we get to the next stage, which is to figure out whether or not the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken, and that requires our source code.

   29. LFLex Fridman38:21

       Our source code, the stuff in our brains to figure out ... What, what do you mean by our source code?

   30. EWEric Weinstein38:26

       The source code of the context, whatever it is that produces the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos.
10. 39:14 – 43:08

    Geometry, higher dimensions, and ‘source code’ of reality (breaking the Einsteinian speed limit)

    1. LFLex Fridman39:14

       Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough when I realized you're just one letter away from the guy. Wow.

    2. EWEric Weinstein39:20

       Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein.

    3. LFLex Fridman39:23

       It's ... Well, you get to pick. (laughs) Okay, so unified theory. You know, you've worked, uh, you, you enjoy the beauty of geometry. Well, I don't actually know if you enjoy it. You certainly are quite good at explaining-

    4. EWEric Weinstein39:35

       I tremble before it.

    5. LFLex Fridman39:36

       ... tremble before it. Y- th- that ... If you're religious, that is one of the, the god-

    6. EWEric Weinstein39:41

       I don't have to be religious, it's just so beautiful. You will tremble anyway.

    7. LFLex Fridman39:45

       Uh, I mean, I just read, uh, Einstein's biography and w- one of the ways, uh, one of the things you've done is try to explore a, um, a unified theory, uh, talking about, uh, 14-dimensional observverse that has the 4D space time continuum embedded in, in it. I- I- I'm just curious how you think and how- philosophically, at a high level, about something more than four dimensions. Uh, how do you try to ... What does, what does it make you feel talking in the mathematical world about dimensions that are greater than the ones we can perceive? Is, is there something that you take away that's more than just the math?

    8. EWEric Weinstein40:27

       Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me. Okay.

    9. LFLex Fridman40:33

       (laughs)

    10. EWEric Weinstein40:33

        Now, on the front of that tongue-

    11. LFLex Fridman40:36

        (laughs) Yeah?

    12. EWEric Weinstein40:37

        ... there was a sweet receptor.

    13. LFLex Fridman40:39

        Mm-hmm.

    14. EWEric Weinstein40:40

        And next to that were salt receptors on two different sides. A little bit farther back, there were sour receptors, and you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue where your bitter receptor was.

    15. LFLex Fridman40:49

        No, I show the good side always.

    16. EWEric Weinstein40:51

        Okay. But that was four dimensions of taste receptors. But you also had pain receptors on that tongue and probably heat receptors on that tongue. So, let's assume that you had one of each. That would be six dimensions. So, when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza, and it's got some, some, uh, some hot pepper on it, maybe some jalapeno, you're having a six-dimensional experience, dude.

    17. LFLex Fridman41:17

        Hm. Do you think we overemphasize the value of time as one of the dimensions or space? Well, we certainly overemphasize the value of time 'cause we like things to start and end, or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to.

    18. EWEric Weinstein41:30

        Well, what if you flipped one of the, uh, spatial dimensions into being a temporal dimension, and you and I were to meet in New York City and say, "Well, where, where and when should we meet?" And say, "How about I'll meet you on, uh, 36th and Lexington at 2:00 in the afternoon and, uh, 11:00 in the morning?" That would be very confusing.

    19. LFLex Fridman41:56

        Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time, you mean?

    20. EWEric Weinstein41:59

        All right. We happen to be in a delicious situation in which, uh, we have three dimensions of space and one of time and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade off a little space for a little time, but we still only have one dimension that is picked out relative to the other three. It's very much Gladys Knight and the Pips.

    21. LFLex Fridman42:15

        So, which one developed for who? Did we develop for these dimensions or did the dimensions-... or were they always there and it doesn't, like-

    22. EWEric Weinstein42:23

        Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place where there are four temporal dimensions or two and two of space and time or three of time and one of space, and then would time not be playing the role of space? Why do you imagine that the sector you're in is all that there is?

    23. LFLex Fridman42:37

        I s- I certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise. I mean, I, I haven't, uh, done ayahuasca or any, any of those drugs. I hope to one day, but, uh-

    24. EWEric Weinstein42:46

        Instead of doing ayahuasca, you could just head over to building two.

    25. LFLex Fridman42:49

        That's where the mathematicians are?

    26. EWEric Weinstein42:50

        Yeah, it's where they hang.

    27. LFLex Fridman42:52

        Just to look at some geometry.

    28. EWEric Weinstein42:53

        Well, just ask about pseudo-Riemannian geometry if that's what you're interested in.

    29. LFLex Fridman42:56

        (laughs) Okay.

    30. EWEric Weinstein42:58

        Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru.
11. 43:08 – 48:08

    Inside vs outside academia: loyalty to consensus, ‘microscopic heresies,’ and the boomer bubble

    1. LFLex Fridman43:08

       Yeah. One of my favorite people, Edward Frankl, Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math, great title for a book, uh, said, uh, that you're quite a remarkable intellect to come up with such beautiful, original ideas in terms of the unified theory and so on. But you were working outside academia, so one question in developing ideas that are truly original, truly interesting, what's the difference between inside academia and outside academia when it comes to developing such ideas?

    2. EWEric Weinstein43:40

       Oh, it's a terrible choice. Terrible choice. So, if you do it inside of academics, you are forced to constantly show great loyalty to the consensus and you distinguish yourself with small, almost microscopic heresies, uh, to make your reputation in general.

    3. LFLex Fridman44:05

       (laughs) Mm-hmm.

    4. EWEric Weinstein44:07

       And you have very competent people and brilliant people who are working together, who are formed in very deep social networks and have a very high level of behavior at least within mathematics and at least technically within physics, theoretical physics. When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people. Mad men. And these are people who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position and almost always lose their way. And the key question is, will progress likely come from someone who has miraculously managed to stay within the system and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy that is sort of unthinkable? 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?

    5. 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?

    6. EWEric Weinstein45:40

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

    7. LFLex Fridman45:43

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

    8. EWEric Weinstein45:46

       But that's really what our-

    9. LFLex Fridman45:47

       You think-

    10. EWEric Weinstein45:48

        ... what this time is about-

    11. LFLex Fridman45:49

        Is the Baby Boomers control thought.

    12. 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.

    13. LFLex Fridman45:57

        Yes.

    14. 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-

    15. LFLex Fridman46:20

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

    16. 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.

    17. LFLex Fridman48:03

        Mm-hmm.

    18. EWEric Weinstein48:03

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

12. 48:08 – 58:12

    Theoretical physics: greatest intellectual community—and a historic collapse in honesty and progress

    1. 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-

    2. EWEric Weinstein48:21

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

    3. LFLex Fridman48:26

       Well, I ƒf y- I know.

    4. 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-

    5. LFLex Fridman48:47

       On the physics side?

    6. EWEric Weinstein48:47

       Oh, yeah.

    7. LFLex Fridman48:48

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

    8. EWEric Weinstein48:52

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

    9. LFLex Fridman48:57

       Right.

    10. 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.

    11. LFLex Fridman49:31

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

    12. EWEric Weinstein49:33

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

    13. LFLex Fridman49:38

        Were physicists?

    14. EWEric Weinstein49:39

        Yeah, I mean, you know-

    15. LFLex Fridman49:40

        So it's-

    16. EWEric Weinstein49:40

        ... Schrödinger wrote What is Life?, and that was highly inspirational. I mean, y- you have to appreciate that there is no community like the basic research community in theoretical physics, and it's not something... Uh, I'm highly critical of these guys. I think that they w- just wasted the, you know, decades, uh, of time with, um, a near religious devotion to their misconceptualization of where the problems were in physics. But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse-

    17. LFLex Fridman50:16

        Mm-hmm.

    18. EWEric Weinstein50:16

        ... ever witnessed within academics.

    19. LFLex Fridman50:20

        You see it as a collapse or just a lull?

    20. EWEric Weinstein50:22

        Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality. We can't afford to pay these people. Um, we can't afford to give them an accelerator just to play with in case they find something at the next energy level. These people created our economy. They gave us the RadLab a- and in radar. They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II. They created the semiconductor and the transistor to power our economy through Moore's law. Uh, as a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the World Wide Web, and we have the insolence to say, "Why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars?" No, the question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars?

    21. LFLex Fridman51:07

        (laughs)

    22. EWEric Weinstein51:08

        Right? We, th- these guys signed the world's worst-

    23. LFLex Fridman51:10

        Yeah.

    24. EWEric Weinstein51:10

        ... licensing agreement.

    25. LFLex Fridman51:11

        Right.

    26. EWEric Weinstein51:12

        And if, if they simply charged for every time you used a transistor or a URL, uh, or enjoyed the peace that they have provided, um, during this period of time through the terrible weapons that they developed, uh, or your communications devices. All of the things that power our economy I really think came out of physics, even to the extent that chemistry came out of physics and molecular biology came out of physics. So, first of all, you have to know that I'm very critical of this community. Second of all, it is our most important community. We have neglected it, we've abused it, we don't take it seriously. We don't even care to get them to rehab after a couple of generations of failure, right? No one... I m- I think the youngest person, uh, to have really contributed to the standard model at a theoretical level was born in 1951.

    27. LFLex Fridman52:04

        Hm.

    28. EWEric Weinstein52:05

        Right? Frank Wilczek. And almost nothing has happened, um, that, in theoretical physics after 1973, '74, that sent somebody to Stockholm for theoretical development that predicted experiment. So, we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves. Now, with that said-

    29. LFLex Fridman52:25

        Mm-hmm.

    30. EWEric Weinstein52:26

        ... these guys have behaved abysmally, in my opinion, um, because they haven't owned up to where they actually are, what problems they're really facing, how definite they can actually be. They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries which are desperately needed in other fields, like gauge theory, which at least the mathematicians can, can share, which is an upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz. And they haven't shared the importance of renormalization theory, uh, even though this should be standard operating procedure for people across the sciences dealing with different layers and different levels of phenomena. And so-
13. 58:12 – 1:04:14

    Popper, falsification, and filtering ‘currently crazy but pre-correct’ ideas

    1. LFLex Fridman58:12

       But don't you think even in theoretical physics, th- a lot of times even with theories like string theory, you could speak to this, it does eventually lead to what are the ways that this theory would be testable? And so-

    2. EWEric Weinstein58:26

       Yeah, ultimately, although, look, there's this thing about Popper and the scientific method that's a cancer and a disease-

    3. LFLex Fridman58:33

       (laughs)

    4. EWEric Weinstein58:34

       ... in the minds of very smart people. That's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out. It's how it gets checked. Right, so, and there is a dialogue between theory and experiment, but y- everybody should read Paul Dirac's 1963 American, Scientific American article where he, he, you know, it's very interesting. He talks about it as if it was about the Schrodinger equation and Schrodinger's failure to, uh, advance his own work because of his failure to account for some phenomenon. The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off, it won't agree with experiment.

    5. LFLex Fridman59:10

       Mm-hmm.

    6. EWEric Weinstein59:10

       But it doesn't mean that the theory is actually wrong. Um, but Dirac could as easily have been talking about his own equation in which he predicted that the electrons should have an anti-particle, and since the only positively charged particle that was known at the time was the proton, Heisenberg pointed out, "Well, shouldn't your anti-particle, the proton, have the same mass as the electron, and doesn't that invalidate your theory?" So I think that Dirac was actually being quite, potentially quite sneaky, um, in, uh, talking about the fact that he had been pushed off of his own theory to some extent by Heisenberg. Um, but look, w- we've fetishized the scientific method and Popper and falsification, um, because it protects us from crazy ideas entering the field. So y- you know, it's a question of balancing type one and type two error, and we're pretty, we were pretty maxed out in one direction.

    7. 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?

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:00:10

       Yeah.

    9. 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-

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:00:21

        Well, there's pre-correct currently crazy.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:00:24

        Yeah.

    12. 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.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:00:47

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

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:00:51

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

    15. LFLex Fridman1:00:53

        Oh, boy.

    16. 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?

    17. LFLex Fridman1:01:12

        It's a book?

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:01:13

        Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:01:14

        Oh, boy.

    20. 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-

    21. LFLex Fridman1:01:25

        (laughs)

    22. EWEric Weinstein1:01:25

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

    23. LFLex Fridman1:01:27

        Yeah, yeah, he is.

    24. EWEric Weinstein1:01:27

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

    25. LFLex Fridman1:01:29

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

    26. 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...

    27. LFLex Fridman1:01:44

        Yeah, it's unfortunate.

    28. 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.

    29. LFLex Fridman1:02:04

        Mm-hmm.

    30. 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.
14. 1:04:14 – 1:12:02

    Social media algorithms, surveillance-by-default hardware, and ‘fake’ public conversations about control

    1. LFLex Fridman1:04:14

       So, much of social media operates by AI algorithms, you talked about this a little bit, uh, recommending the content you see. So, on this idea of radical thought, how much should AI show you things you disagree with on Twitter and so on, in, in the Twitter world- verse in the d- about internet?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:04:33

       I hate this question.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:04:34

       Yeah?

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:04:35

       Yeah.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:04:36

       'Cause you don't know the answer?

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:04:37

       No. No, no, no. Look, we've been... Th- they've pushed out this cognitive Lego to us that will just lead to madness. It's good to be challenged with things that, that you disagree with. The answer is no. It's good to be challenged with interesting things with which you currently disagree, but that might be true. So, I don't really care about whether or not I disagree with something or don't disagree. I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing is being pushed out. Is it because it's likely to be true? Is it because...

    7. LFLex Fridman1:05:08

       Hm.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:05:08

       Is there some reason? Because I can write, I can write a computer generator, uh, to come up with an infinite number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at. So please, before you push things at me that w- are disagreeable, tell me why.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:05:22

       There is an aspect in which that question is, is quite dumb, especially because it's being used to, uh, almost, um, uh, very generically by these different networks to say, "Well, we're trying to work this out." But, you, you know, basically, uh, how much do you see the value of seeing things, uh, you don't like? Not you disagree with, because it's very difficult to know exactly what you articulated, which is, uh, the stuff that's important for you to consider that you disagree with. That's really hard to figure out. The bottom line is it's stuff you don't like. If you are a, uh, a Hillary Clinton supporter, you may not wanna s- s- it might not make you feel good to see anything about Donald Trump. That's the only thing algorithms can really optimize for currently. They really can't-

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:06:09

        No, they can do better. Th- this is, we're, we're, we're-

    11. LFLex Fridman1:06:11

        You think so?

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:06:12

        No, we're engaged in some moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people who are capable of building Google, Facebook, Twitter are having us in these incredibly low level discussions. Do they not know any smart people? Do they not have the phone numbers of people who can elevate these discussions?

    13. LFLex Fridman1:06:36

        They do, but this...They're optimizing-

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:06:39

        Please.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:06:39

        ... for a different thing-

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:06:40

        No. No. No.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:06:40

        ... and they are pushing those people out of those rooms.

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:06:42

        No. They're, they're optimizing for things we can't see. And yes, profit is there. Nobody, nobody's questioning that. But they're also optimizing for things like political control or the fact that they're doing business in Pakistan, and so they don't wanna talk about all the things that they're going to be bending to in Pakistan. So, the- th- th- w- we're, we're involved in a fake discussion.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:07:07

        You think so? You think these conversations at that depth that are happening inside Google? You don't think they have some basic metrics under user engagements?

    20. EWEric Weinstein1:07:15

        You're having a fake conversation with us, guys. We know you're having a fake conversation. I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation. You know how to cool, you know, these units. You know high availability like nobody's business. My Gmail never goes down. Almost.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:07:33

        So, you think just because they can do incredible work on the software side with infrastructure, they can also deal with some of these difficult questions about human behavior, human understanding, hu- you're not... (laughs)

    22. EWEric Weinstein1:07:47

        I mean, I've seen the, I've seen the developer's screens that people take shots of-

    23. LFLex Fridman1:07:52

        Mm-hmm.

    24. EWEric Weinstein1:07:53

        ... inside of Google.

    25. LFLex Fridman1:07:54

        Yeah.

    26. EWEric Weinstein1:07:55

        And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple. We're not... We're engaged... They're engaging us in the wrong conversations. We are not at this low level. Here's one of my favorite questions.

    27. LFLex Fridman1:08:08

        Yeah.

    28. EWEric Weinstein1:08:08

        Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase in, in, in tech space equipped as a listening device? Where, where's my physical shutter to cover my lens? We had this in the 1970s, cameras that had lens caps, you know?

    29. LFLex Fridman1:08:24

        Mm-hmm.

    30. EWEric Weinstein1:08:25

        How much would it cost to have a security model? Pay five extra bucks. Why is my indicator light k- software controlled? Why, when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on by putting it as a, uh, something that cannot be bypassed? Why have you set up my, all of my devices, at some difficulty to yourselves, as listening devices? And we don't even talk about this. This is, this, this thing is total fucking bullshit.
15. 1:12:02 – 1:17:19

    Technology vs capitalism: ‘humans have a worker’ and ‘humans have a soul,’ plus hypercapitalism + hypersocialism

    1. LFLex Fridman1:12:02

       So, I have to ask you, on the capitalism side, you mentioned that technology's killing capitalism, or it has effects that are, uh, uh, uninten- well, not unintended, but, uh, not what economists would predict or speak of capitalism creating. Uh, I just wanna talk to you about, in general, the effect of even an artificial intelligence or technology automation taking away jobs and these kinds of things, and what you think is the way to alleviate that, whether the Andrew Ang presidential candidate with universal basic income, UBI, what are your thoughts there? How do we fight off the negative effects of technology that, uh-

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:12:42

       All right, you're a software guy, right?

    3. LFLex Fridman1:12:43

       Yep.

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:12:44

       A human being-... is a worker, is an old idea.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:12:48

       Yes.

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:12:49

       A human being has a worker is a different object, right?

    7. LFLex Fridman1:12:53

       Yeah.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:12:54

       So, if you think about object-oriented programming as a paradigm, uh, a human being has a worker and a human being has a soul. We're talking about the fact that for a period of time, the worker that a human being has was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has. However, we have two separate claims on the value in society. One is as a worker and the other is as a soul, and the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity, it needs meaning, it needs purpose. As long as your s- means of support is not highly repetitive, I think you have a while to go before you need to start worrying. But if what you do is highly repetitive and it's not terribly generative, you are in the crosshairs of for w- for loops and while loops, and that's what computers excel at, repetitive behavior, and when I say repetitive, I may m- I may mean things that have never happened b- through combinatorial possibilities, but as long as it has a looped characteristic to it, you're in trouble. We are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address the fact that a worker may not be able to make claims. A- a relatively n- undistinguished median member of our society is still has needs to reproduce, needs to ha- to dignity, and when capitalism abandons the median individual or, uh, you know, the bottom tenth or whatever it- it's going to do, it's flirting with revolution. And what concerns me is that the capitalists aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand this. You really want to court, uh, authoritarian control in our society because you can't see that people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the marginal product of their labor w- is too s- too low to feed their dignity as a soul? So, it... My great concern is that our free society has to do 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.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:15:45

       Mm-hmm.

    10. 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.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:16:50

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

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:16:54

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

    13. LFLex Fridman1:16:56

        Right, hypercapitalism, yeah.

    14. 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.

16. 1:17:19 – 1:22:02

    Fame, social media pressure, and a closing ethic: struggle, compassion, and giving yourself a break

    1. 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?

    2. 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-

    3. LFLex Fridman1:17:44

       Yeah.

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:17:44

       ... to explain yourself.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:17:46

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

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:17:49

       No, there's no law.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:17:50

       Oh, okay. All right. So why-

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:17:52

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

    9. LFLex Fridman1:17:56

       Yes.

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:17:56

        Imagine if this were true.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:17:57

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

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:18:03

        Yeah, yeah.

    13. 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?

    14. 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.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:18:33

        (laughs)

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:18:33

        No, I can.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:18:33

        Yeah.

    18. 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?

    19. LFLex Fridman1:18:50

        Yeah.

    20. 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.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:21:31

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

    22. EWEric Weinstein1:21:34

        Thanks for having me, buddy.

Episode duration: 1:21:55