Eric Weinstein Interview (Full Episode) | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

1. 0:00 – 5:23

   Start

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      Optimal minimal At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

   2. EWEric Weinstein0:06

      Can I ask you a personal question? Now we're receiving a perfect timing

   3. TFTim Ferriss0:10

      What if I give you all of it?

   4. EWEric Weinstein0:12

      I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

   5. TFTim Ferriss0:16

      The Tim Ferriss Show This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than two and a half billion dollars under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, et cetera. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim, take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just wanna take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it, and here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything they charge, .25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, uh, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast. It's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there's the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure. So check it out, guys. This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley, and they're killing it. They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I used 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. And I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out. Greetings, lads and lasses. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm sitting at my kitchen table with Mr. Eric. Now, I've always... This is embarrassing to say, and I've done this with a number of friends now. Is it Weinstein, Weinstein? How do you say your last name?

   6. EWEric Weinstein4:42

      I think it's Weinstein.

   7. TFTim Ferriss4:43

      Weinstein. I agree. That's the more Germanic way to go about it. Now, I'm going to read a short bio. I'm sure I'm gonna bastardize this because I realized that we have so many wide-ranging conversations, and I was wondering and asking myself where to start, and I realized there's no real good place or no particular place to start. So you can start anywhere. So I'll start with your bio. Eric Weinstein, Managing Director of Thiel Capital, Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Harvard, research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. But as you and I have discussed, that does not quite capture the eclectic combination of life experiences that is Eric. So [laughs] what, what are some

2. 5:23 – 8:03

   An accidental economist

   1. TFTim Ferriss5:23

      other sort of colorful aspects of this, uh, this collage-

   2. EWEric Weinstein5:27

      Oh

   3. TFTim Ferriss5:27

      ... that is yourself?

   4. EWEric Weinstein5:28

      All right. Um, so sometimes I, I, uh, pretend to be an immigration expert, uh, particularly with respect to skilled labor. Um, I'm also, uh, a member of, uh, the advisory board for a group called Drugs Over Dinner, trying to get a rational and healthy drug policy for the US. I was pretty early, uh, on sounding the alarm over mortgage-backed securities And, uh, failed to alert the world, um, with a bunch of other people who also failed, but we, we gave it a good old college try. Um-

   5. TFTim Ferriss6:09

      Guess that makes it uncrowded trade [laughs]

   6. EWEric Weinstein6:10

      It was... Well, the problem is, is that early is another name for wrong.

   7. TFTim Ferriss6:14

      Yeah. Right [laughs]

   8. EWEric Weinstein6:14

      And also, when you can't quite believe what you're saying, that Goldman Sachs and the rest of the world is gonna blow up, uh, it's hard to have, have the courage of your convictions. But, um, oh gosh, I mean, I think, um-

   9. TFTim Ferriss6:28

      Have you taken a lot of economics classes to inform all of these insights?

   10. EWEric Weinstein6:32

       I've dated, uh, women and married them who've taken a lot of economics classes. So I just... I, I haven't taken any. Um, but, uh, in order to, to get some attention for the work we'd done in economics, I decided to start referring to myself as an economist. I figured if I got called out, um, then I would get to push the work in front of a, a world that was a- asking for my credentials. And so strangely, economists don't call you out when you call yourself an economist.

   11. TFTim Ferriss7:00

       [laughs]

   12. EWEric Weinstein7:01

       And so I ended up as an economist rather than having the attention, uh, that I was hoping to drag to, to this new theory of gauge-theoretic and geometric economics.

   13. TFTim Ferriss7:11

       And to, to provide just a little bit of context, which I think is fairly normal for our interactions, so I'm just gonna read one line [chuckles] from an email exchange. And this was from Eric to me: "Do you want to try a podcast on this," and we'll get into maybe what this is, "psychedelics, theories of everything, and the need to destroy education in order to save it?" How did we first meet? Was it Summit Series, or was it somewhere else?

   14. EWEric Weinstein7:38

       I think it was Summit Series. I think, uh, you were talking about, uh, the potential of the human mind and how to unlock it, and I think I became very curious as to what the domain of applicability was, and whether some of these techniques that would help you shoot baskets or learn tango could be applied to, let's say, quantum field theory, which seemed like kind of the next logical place to go after tango dancing.

3. 8:03 – 13:28

   The mathematician at Thiel Capital

   1. TFTim Ferriss8:03

      [laughs] And how... I think many people would ask themselves, managing director of Thiel Capital, so how does someone who, from a layperson's perspective, is a mathematician, uh, pretending to be an economist very effectively end up-

   2. EWEric Weinstein8:18

      Or pretending to be a mathematician

   3. TFTim Ferriss8:19

      ... Or pretending to be a mathematician, uh, get recruited and end up working with Peter Thiel at Thiel Capital?

   4. EWEric Weinstein8:27

      It's a really good question. Um, I, I, I knew Peter slightly before, um... Geez, we are gonna to be just entering at a random point. So-

   5. TFTim Ferriss8:36

      Oh, okay. [laughs]

   6. EWEric Weinstein8:38

      No, it's, it's quite good. It's quite good.

   7. TFTim Ferriss8:40

      The best I attempt I can make-

   8. EWEric Weinstein8:41

      All right

   9. TFTim Ferriss8:41

      ... in trying to be quantum.

   10. EWEric Weinstein8:42

       So I, I had, uh, I had met, uh, Peter when I... I had been sort of living in New York and playing in the Bay Area a little bit with the tech crowd, and I, uh, was told by some friends, "You have to come out, uh, for this crazy Being Human conference." And so any conference named Being Human seemed too Californian to be a good idea, but I was forced into coming out, and there was a sort of a circle of people, um, which Peter was in and I was in, um, talking about what it, what it means, uh, to really look at the human condition from a rational but also open-hearted perspective. And Peter and I started talking, and I told him that I, I was thinking that I might have a theory of everything that I should debut, and I think he probably, you know, haircut the possibility that what I, I was saying was true. But then I was invited to give these lectures, uh, at Oxford, the Simonyi Special Lectures. Um, and-

   11. TFTim Ferriss9:43

       And it was Simonyi that... named after the Simonyi who went to space, also created Microsoft Office?

   12. EWEric Weinstein9:48

       Charles Simonyi, yeah. I think he was like the original engineer at Microsoft.

   13. TFTim Ferriss9:52

       Mm-hmm.

   14. EWEric Weinstein9:53

       And, um, and he had endowed a professorship in, at Oxford where, which was held, is held now by Marcus du Sautoy after Richard Dawkins held it, which has so- some lectures attached, and I was invited to give lectures under this program. And it, uh... You know, I was giving technical talks, but a story or two came out about how, um, a potential theory of everything, uh, was being debuted, and I guess, um, Peter probably saw that, and he invited me to a quiet conference he was holding in the South of France, uh, shortly afterwards, and then he invited me to a breakfast after that. And at the breakfast, um, I think I was midway through, uh, some breakfast sausage, and he just blurts out, he says, "You have to leave New York." And I didn't understand why, and I said, "Really? And, and go where?" He says, "You could come here." And I said, "And, and do what?" And he said, "You could work for me." So I didn't know whether he was like suffering from too much sleep, but, uh, turned out he was quite serious, and, uh, it's been one of the most, uh, rewarding intellectual relationships of my life. He's just a, a stunning, uh, sparkling mind and somebody who has not only the courage of his convictions, but has been right so many times and over enough things that he has had the freedom to, uh, break with all tradition when he thinks the world is wrong and one or two people may have it right, which is... That's exactly my cup of tea.

   15. TFTim Ferriss11:32

       Did he have a clear idea of what you would be doing when he hired you or made the offer?

   16. EWEric Weinstein11:39

       Um, probably less important to him is my guess, is, is that, uh, the first issue is, is that there are s- it's so difficult to think for yourself. I mean, I find it very difficult to think for myself. I have all sorts of ideas in my head that aren't mine. I'm subjected to all sorts of pressures I find difficult to resist. And so I think Peter is looking for the tiny universe of people who are attempting to think things through from first principles. And that's, you know, it's become very tough because social, socially constructed reality is so much a part of our lives. So I think first you His feeling would be find the people who are capable of, uh, seeing something really new and then figure out what to do with them later

   17. TFTim Ferriss12:21

       Escaping the, or averting the consensus reality-

   18. EWEric Weinstein12:25

       Yep

   19. TFTim Ferriss12:25

       ... as you've mentioned.

   20. EWEric Weinstein12:26

       When- whenever possible.

   21. TFTim Ferriss12:27

       Whenever possible. What outside pressures do you find tempting or difficult to mitigate?

   22. EWEric Weinstein12:35

       Oh, well, I mean, everybody wants to, uh, to be loved, to fit in. The, the, the fear that happens when you start swimming away from the shore, um, that you're not going to find a, a next island, um, before your strength gives out. I think it's very rational to be afraid of thinking for yourself because you may very, very easily find yourself at odds with the community on which you depend. And I think, um, for some of us it's just a compulsive behavior. It's not even necessarily the smartest evolutionary strategy. It's just, it's hard to do it any other way.

   23. TFTim Ferriss13:08

       Hugging the shore.

   24. EWEric Weinstein13:10

       Well, uh, or, or not. I mean, if you, if you, if you keep trying to screw your eyes up so you can see the world the way other peoples are rep- uh, uh, people are reporting that they see it and it just doesn't work, um, you realize at some point that, uh, it's a losing battle. You might try... You might as well try being yourself.

4. 13:28 – 17:18

   First-principle thinking and facing criticism

   1. TFTim Ferriss13:28

      What, uh, is the first example that comes to mind of a time when you had that fear of swimming away from the-

   2. EWEric Weinstein13:36

      Ah

   3. TFTim Ferriss13:36

      ... consensus and facing the, the scrutiny or, uh, criticism of people in a given community?

   4. EWEric Weinstein13:46

      Well, sometimes it happens by accident. So I remember, for example, being in a guitar store in Philadelphia and having a crowd of people gather around as I played something badly, and I couldn't figure out why they would want to listen to somebody who is not very good at classical guitar. And this isn't like bragging that I'm great at classical. I was really not that good. And it turned out that, uh, I had taught myself from sheet music, and I believed that the notation for using your thumb is to use the letter P, which I interpreted as pinky. So I was using my weakest finger for everything that needed to be done by my strongest finger. And so my guitar was completely, completely wrong. And that was a, you know, a clear example of, um... Well, this didn't come from a guitar teacher. It didn't come from a, a normal experience with music. It came from teaching yourself something and, uh, having the scars, uh, to prove it. Um, so I think in that case, uh, you also learn how much power there is, that you, you can shortcut all sorts of things. So as you know, you've, you've showed us with the Pareto principles and, uh, trying to eschew, um, the work of the 10,000 hours. Um, you start to l- realize that the world c- is meant to be jailbroken. And, and then you get into really scary stuff where you come up with political conclusions that aren't shared by others.

   5. TFTim Ferriss15:13

      Mm.

   6. EWEric Weinstein15:13

      So for example, um, I don't have the usual convictions of my groups about immigration. Um, I am of the opinion that what most people think of as progressive immigration is actually regressive. And so, uh, you, you know, at some point I came out with a free market model to open borders, but without adversely affecting American workers. And-

   7. TFTim Ferriss15:39

      Have you written about that?

   8. EWEric Weinstein15:40

      Oh, yeah. I, I-

   9. TFTim Ferriss15:41

      What was-

   10. EWEric Weinstein15:41

       ... published a peer-reviewed, uh, model for how to do it.

   11. TFTim Ferriss15:45

       For a layperson interested in exploring your opinion on that, uh, or your perspective on that, is that... Would you point them to a given paper or-

   12. EWEric Weinstein15:52

       Sure. There's one called Migration for the Benefit of All in the International Labor Review, I think of 2002. And the funny thing about this paper is, is that it takes what, uh, US corporations always claim they want, which is access to any workers anywhere in the world, and it achieves it through a market, uh, mechanism. But unfortunately, what they were really interested in wasn't the small gain in efficiency that comes from being able to hire on a global market. They were really much more interested in the wealth transferred from American workers to American, uh, business owners. And so, um, it was a great example that they thought they'd make a free market argument, um, but in fact, they weren't interested in the free market advantage. They were interested in transfer payments. And so when you give them a free market model, they lose all interest- [laughs]

   13. TFTim Ferriss16:48

       [laughs]

   14. EWEric Weinstein16:48

       ... uh, in the free market, which is I think just really funny.

   15. TFTim Ferriss16:51

       You, you mentioned guitar. I, I can recall we had dinner at your house, which was not drugs over dinner. It was death over dinner, where we talked about-

   16. EWEric Weinstein17:00

       Oh, yes

   17. TFTim Ferriss17:01

       ... death. And, uh, I think that was somehow related to... Was it NPR or, uh, some radio station that was-

   18. EWEric Weinstein17:08

       Yeah, Capital, Capital Radio. Some NPR affiliate.

   19. TFTim Ferriss17:11

       Capital Radio. That's right. And we discussed death over dinner. But one thing I noticed at your home was that you have a lot of musical instruments.

5. 17:18 – 21:58

   On playing music

   1. TFTim Ferriss17:19

      When did you start experimenting with music?

   2. EWEric Weinstein17:23

      Um-

   3. TFTim Ferriss17:23

      And how many musical instruments have you experimented with?

   4. EWEric Weinstein17:26

      Uh, am I right that the federal government hasn't made musical instruments illegal? So I've been experimenting-

   5. TFTim Ferriss17:32

      [laughs]

   6. EWEric Weinstein17:32

      ... with musical instruments for some time. The... Uh, I, I think at some point you learn that music is an abstraction, and that each particular instrument is just a, a way to instantiate the same common abstraction. And so th- this was extremely powerful for me because I-

   7. TFTim Ferriss17:49

      Could you explain what that... what you mean by that?

   8. EWEric Weinstein17:51

      Well, I don't really hear music very well. Um, I don't have a lot of intuitive feel for it. To me, it looks like systems. And the idea that music was so highly systematized and that this was covered up by the standard relationship that we pick up where we take music lessons, we learn to read music in this country. Um, lots of people are bad at reading music, and lots of people [chuckles] are bad at following instructions. But you find that in other p- areas of the world in which notation isn't a big part of musical education, people very casually pick up an instrument and start playing. And I think it's because the, the systems, if you will, the math behind the music is so powerful That it allows you to improvise. It allows you to compose, and to understand that there are canonical songs. At some point, for example, I wrote a tiny computer program, uh, in Python and put it in a tweet, and its only purpose was to reproduce the p- chord progression for Pachelbel's Canon as an algorithm.

   9. TFTim Ferriss18:52

      Did you say Taco Bell?

   10. EWEric Weinstein18:54

       No. [laughs]

   11. TFTim Ferriss18:55

       [laughs] I c- I can't believe that I heard that correctly.

   12. EWEric Weinstein18:58

       Okay. I thought I said Pachelbel's Canon.

   13. TFTim Ferriss19:00

       Oh, there we go. All right.

   14. EWEric Weinstein19:01

       Yeah. [laughs]

   15. TFTim Ferriss19:03

       [laughs] Now, when you're talking about the ability to improvise, pick up an instrument, and start playing, I mean, Paul McCartney, I believe, is, is one example of that. I, I, I heard at some-

   16. EWEric Weinstein19:12

       Well, he's such a gifted, intuitive musician. I'm not in-

   17. TFTim Ferriss19:14

       But I heard, and this could be, uh, completely off base, that he, at least for a period of time, couldn't read music.

   18. EWEric Weinstein19:19

       Right.

   19. TFTim Ferriss19:20

       And is, is that because humans have potentially some type of innate grammar that they are for music, uh, in the same way they might have some type of, um, innate lang- uh, innate language grammar, like, along the lines of a Chomsky, uh, and his, and his theories? Or is it something else?

   20. EWEric Weinstein19:43

       I, I think you're right. I mean, I think that it, it, it comes down, a lot of it, to the physics of a vibrating string or air column. So if you look at the harmonics, um, the patterns of vibration that are encoded into simply taking a catgut and stretching it, um, between, uh, a wall and the, and the ground and then twanging it, um-

   21. TFTim Ferriss20:06

       They're seeing my spa room, in other words. [laughs]

   22. EWEric Weinstein20:09

       [laughs] Um, that so much of our musical system is in the math and in the physics of a vibrating string. Um, there's really... You know, there's one crazy, uh, innovation, which is even temperament, um, which the West figured out, which has to do with a strange math fact that if you raise the number two, uh, for twice the frequency, which gives us the octave, to the 19th power, and then take the 12th root thereof, that's almost exactly equal to three. And that weird numerical accident is what makes it possible to both have, um, extremely beautiful intervals, but have them also so regular that you can do harmony and, and, and make chords. And I don't think most musicians probably even know why we use a 12-tone system. It's r-

   23. TFTim Ferriss21:02

       And that's, uh... So th- what you just described before, the 12-tone system, that's even temperament?

   24. EWEric Weinstein21:07

       Yeah.

   25. TFTim Ferriss21:07

       Is that what it's called? So, so I've always been, uh, somewhat insecure as it relates to music.

   26. EWEric Weinstein21:14

       How interesting.

   27. TFTim Ferriss21:15

       I've never thought I was innately capable of being good with musical instruments, and I grew up trying a lot of musical instruments and quitting them, uh, whether it was piano, trumpet, et cetera. The drums is, i- are, are one example, or exception, rather, where I've... I have so much fun playing even poorly that I will continue to practice. Uh, on the flip side, though, y- so how many... If you had to just take a stab, how many, uh, how many different instruments would you say you've toyed around with in one capacity or another?

   28. EWEric Weinstein21:45

       I would say that the, the ones that I regularly check in with would be mandolin, harmonica, guitar, piano, and occasionally some funkier stuff

6. 21:58 – 29:58

   On learning languages

   1. EWEric Weinstein21:58

      than that.

   2. TFTim Ferriss21:59

      And you've... But you've also dug into natural human languages.

   3. EWEric Weinstein22:03

      Yeah.

   4. TFTim Ferriss22:03

      What languages have you-

   5. EWEric Weinstein22:05

      In the past, I've tried-

   6. TFTim Ferriss22:06

      ... given a go?

   7. EWEric Weinstein22:07

      Well, oh gosh. Um, I mean, the ones I love-

   8. TFTim Ferriss22:10

      Sure

   9. EWEric Weinstein22:10

      ... Turkish and Indonesian, um, were great fun to learn about and learn some of. Uh, R- Russian is extremely emotional but grammatically un- fairly unforgiving. Uh-

   10. TFTim Ferriss22:25

       [laughs]

   11. EWEric Weinstein22:27

       Uh, I enjoyed the little bit of Thai that I started trying to learn, um, because tones are not a big part of any of the other languages that I've tried. But when I tried a little bit of Vietnamese, the tones were so hard that there was no satisfaction. I spent three weeks, and I couldn't say my first word convincingly.

   12. TFTim Ferriss22:47

       Right. Why do you... And I promise this is going somewhere.

   13. EWEric Weinstein22:48

       [laughs]

   14. TFTim Ferriss22:49

       Uh, not that it has to, but why... Well, so a question I get o- asked oftentimes is why do you study these languages that don't seem to have any practical application in your life? How would you answer that?

   15. EWEric Weinstein23:01

       Um-

   16. TFTim Ferriss23:02

       Like Turkish, for example.

   17. EWEric Weinstein23:05

       There was a girl. [laughs]

   18. TFTim Ferriss23:06

       All right. Let's try another one. Indonesian, same answer?

   19. EWEric Weinstein23:09

       Well, Indonesian is, uh, is just brilliant. Um, it's... Everything that can go right with a language for a, a US language learner has happened to Indonesian. So for example, it's not inflected for tense. If you want to say, "I came," you would say, "I already come."

   20. TFTim Ferriss23:30

       Right.

   21. EWEric Weinstein23:31

       Right? So you'd... Uh, if you wanted to s- t- it's not injected for, uh, inflected for number. So if the word for child is anak, the word for children is anak squared, or anak-anak.

   22. TFTim Ferriss23:44

       Anak-anak.

   23. EWEric Weinstein23:44

       Yeah, yeah.

   24. TFTim Ferriss23:45

       Orang-orang.

   25. EWEric Weinstein23:46

       Orang-orang.

   26. TFTim Ferriss23:47

       Person, people.

   27. EWEric Weinstein23:48

       Person. Yeah.

   28. TFTim Ferriss23:49

       Um, for those people wondering, orang hutan, man of the-

   29. EWEric Weinstein23:52

       Forest

   30. TFTim Ferriss23:52

       ... forest.
7. 29:58 – 36:33

   Explaining the Overton Window

   1. TFTim Ferriss29:59

      navigating from first principles, uh, because I think this is a really important concept to understand. What, what does that mean?

   2. EWEric Weinstein30:07

      I think that-

   3. TFTim Ferriss30:09

      And why is it important?

   4. EWEric Weinstein30:10

      Well, very often we, uh, have some spectrum of difference that we're allowed. Uh, frequently in politics or news, somebody will talk about the Overton window. What can we discuss? What can't we discuss? Yeah.

   5. TFTim Ferriss30:27

      Overton window.

   6. EWEric Weinstein30:28

      The Overton window.

   7. TFTim Ferriss30:28

      You mean in the context of, say, a debate or a newsflash? What-

   8. EWEric Weinstein30:32

      So for example, when Donald Trump said that he wanted to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the US, that was considered outside the Overton window. It was not something that was discussable.

   9. TFTim Ferriss30:44

      Mm-hmm.

   10. EWEric Weinstein30:46

       And I think that a lot of us, uh, may benefit from the Overton Window, this idea that we're going to make certain ideas, uh, too hot, too dangerous, um, for people to express in polite company. But on the other hand, what we've started to do is to, uh, hamstring all the, uh, cognitive power, um, in our contrarian thinkers, where they don't feel comfortable or safe thinking aloud. Uh, if somebody tells you, for example, uh, or asks you the question, "Do you believe intelligence is perfectly ev- evenly distributed, uh, between genders or among ethnic groups?" Statistically, it would be crazy to say, "Yes, I believe it's perfectly, uh, distributed." Uh, on the other hand, socially, it would be crazy to suggest that it isn't perfectly distributed. And so we have all of these, um, really funny situations where the top-down thinking tells us, uh, what's acceptable and what isn't, but the bottom-up leads us to ask all sorts of questions that are framed out, if you will, um, by the usual terms of discussion. And I think that th- this is, uh, you know, this is really animating a lot of people who feel that, um, social justice, which they always thought was a positive, is starting to metastasize into kind of a thought police where-

   11. TFTim Ferriss32:16

       Yeah, well, it s- it seems to have turned into this, uh, sort of internet lynch mob version of McCarthyism in a way.

   12. EWEric Weinstein32:22

       There you go.

   13. TFTim Ferriss32:23

       And actually, I'm gonna put this out there, because I was, I was thinking about writing a blog post about this, but blog posts take a long time to write. So I'm just gonna... There's a term that I... There currently isn't much of a penalty for labeling people, uh, whatever it might be, fill-in-the-blank-ist. Right? So you can be accused and guilty until proven innocent of being sexist, racist, fill in the blank, misogynist, whatever it might be. Uh, classist, you name it.

   14. EWEric Weinstein32:49

       Right.

   15. TFTim Ferriss32:50

       And that can be really damaging to people who are accused of such things, often with no evidence or very questionable evidence, uh, or even contrary evidence. Uh, and so what I was hoping is there should be a term that you can apply to people who go on these witch hunts and apply these labels, and I was thinking that bigoteer could be a good one.

   16. EWEric Weinstein33:10

       That's good.

   17. TFTim Ferriss33:10

       What do you think? So that therefore, like if, if a journalist, let's just say, is taking the lazy route for cheap applause, i.e. ch- cheap page views-

   18. EWEric Weinstein33:20

       Right

   19. TFTim Ferriss33:20

       ... and they're just accusing people of being, uh, these, uh, really career-damaging things like sexist or racist, whatever, that they themselves could then be labeled a well-known bigoteer, for instance. And then there would be some type of social consequence, which I don't see currently, to acting in such a haphazard and damaging way.

   20. EWEric Weinstein33:41

       So currently we have this other weird term, SJW, for social justice warrior.

   21. TFTim Ferriss33:45

       Justice warrior. [laughs]

   22. EWEric Weinstein33:47

       Um, so I, I like bigoteer. Uh, why don't we try it in the wild and see what happens?

   23. TFTim Ferriss33:51

       Yeah, I'd love, uh, to, to hear anyone's thoughts on this, but bigoteer. And the, and I thought a lot about this because I, I figured you needed a term that was sort of, uh, phonetically similar enough, we're just talking about phonemes, like phonetically similar enough to an already loaded term-

   24. EWEric Weinstein34:07

       Yeah

   25. TFTim Ferriss34:07

       ... so that people would immediately get the negative connotation. Like you can't... Being called a bigoteer, even though I, as far as I know, it d- hasn't existed, can't really be a good thing. I mean, you have like bigot and then you have the teer of, in most people's minds, associated with racketeering or something else. Uh, but does a decent job of kinda describing the, uh, the sin against intellectual honesty that is, you know, what we're talking about, this type of out of control so- social justice, uh, warriorship. Um, but I agree with you that it's... I, I think that, uh, even more than top-down, this, the phenomenon is, is so puzzling in a way because it, it seems like people are creating prisons of their own making. Uh, and in creating these lynch mobs or participating in them, uh, you're creating this momentum for this type of activity that ultimately has to come back and bite you in the ass or it, it'll just create these barriers to honest communication. And it, and it... Sorry, I'm like up on my soapbox now that we've brought up this stuff. It, it also seems like, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this, but the, oftentimes the most important conversations to have are the most uncomfortable that would fall outside of this Overton Window-

   26. EWEric Weinstein35:23

       Well, it, it-

   27. TFTim Ferriss35:23

       ... by definition

   28. EWEric Weinstein35:24

       ... and, and even the, the conversation that you most wanna have to try to remediate the, uh, long-term problem is prevented, um, by the evident relish that some bigoteers, if you will, uh-

   29. TFTim Ferriss35:41

       [laughs]

   30. EWEric Weinstein35:42

       ... uh, i- the, the relish that they obviously en- enjoy and take for themselves in sort of taking, settling for the short ride rather than really trying to get some kind of structural change. And I think that because the level of distrust is so high, uh, i- in the US at the moment, um, we have a problem that people are trying to shut down conversation because they just don't know where it's going to go, and so as soon as anyone starts talking about something sensitive, um, you, you know, you can always trot out, "Check your privilege," or something, uh, that doesn't even have to be, uh... It can be completely content independent because, you know, everybody's enjoying some privilege at the moment, and so if you're spending all of your time checking it, you're probably not going to be able to say much of anything.
8. 36:33 – 40:43

   When an innovator leaves a successor

   1. TFTim Ferriss36:33

      I wanna shift to a, a very serious topic, and that is, uh, Kung Fu Panda.

   2. EWEric Weinstein36:40

      Oh, boy. It's getting weighty.

   3. TFTim Ferriss36:41

      It's getting weighty. Now, I recall visiting, uh, the offices of Thiel Capital, and we had a, a fun lunch chat with, with a whole group of folks. And, uh, I remember going to your office and seeing ... all sorts of toys of various types, and then a, uh, I guess a figurine of Kung Fu Panda. What is your relationship to Kung Fu Panda?

   4. EWEric Weinstein37:05

      Uh, this is, this is emotional, embarrassing, and rather weighty. But I, I, I went reluctantly. I d- I, I can't say that I relished going to a, a children's film, uh, even though I had two kids who were excited to see it. Um, but my wife said it would be a good idea. And as I sat there in the theater, I got deeper and deeper into the story, and when the film was finally over, I found myself weeping. And-

   5. TFTim Ferriss37:33

      Were your kids okay with that? [laughs]

   6. EWEric Weinstein37:35

      I don't think anybody was okay with that. It was, it was a little weird. And what I realized was that it was the only film that I'd ever seen that struggled with the issue that I felt almost defines my, my quest, which is, w- why can't a self-teacher leave pupils? And if you think about that for a second, you realize that Einstein wasn't successful in leaving any Einsteins, and Francis Crick didn't leave Francis Cricks, and Winston Churchill didn't leave any Winston Churchills. If there was some way for a Newton to leave a Newton dependably, the world would be a completely different place. And what Kung Fu Panda was trying to do, uh, in my opinion, was to struggle with this question of how would an innovator leave a successor when it's his time to go? And, um, at some point, somebody on Quora asked a question, w- you know, «This sort of story doesn't make any sense to me. How does a, a panda slob become the ultimate kung fu warrior?» And I wrote up my explanation, and the thing is probably the most viral thing I've ever-

   7. TFTim Ferriss38:53

      [laughs]

   8. EWEric Weinstein38:54

      ... written. Um-

   9. TFTim Ferriss38:55

      What is the, what is the title for people who... And we'll link to this in the show notes for everybody, just 4hourworkweek.com/.

   10. EWEric Weinstein39:01

       I think it's How Does Po Become an Awesome Kung Fu Warrior in the Film Kung Fu Panda, something like that.

   11. TFTim Ferriss39:08

       Yeah, I'm sure if we look up your name and Kung Fu Panda, it'll pop right up.

   12. EWEric Weinstein39:12

       And so my, my claim was that the original innovator in the film is a, is a turtle, which is an even more inappropriate kung fu archetype than a panda, because they're obviously slow-moving. And the turtle works out the secrets of harmony and focus at the pool of sacred tears. But when the kingdom is threatened by a kung fu student, uh, of great ability who's gone wrong, um, all that the kingdom can muster is the usual collection of h- over-trained students. So think, uh, aspirants to Princeton and Stanford and Harvard. Um, and so these are all the kids who would get like perfect SATs and have amazing extracurricular activities. But fundamentally, what we don't realize is that they've all been rendered, um, incomplete in a way because they can't tap into the self-teaching modality because they have been so thoroughly over-taught. And so the turtle recognizes that the panda is the only one who can save the day. And all the turtle has to go on in choosing a successor is that the panda has innovated one silly thing, which is to turn a fireworks cart into a makeshift rocket to jump a wall. And so from this humble beginning, um, the magic unfolds. And it's, it's really about the magic of how a one

9. 40:43 – 44:28

   How autodidacts can pave a path for successors

   1. EWEric Weinstein40:43

      self-teacher leaves a successor and solves the problem.

   2. TFTim Ferriss40:46

      H- Have you come to any conclusions or beliefs, uh, outside of that essay, uh, related to how autodidacts or Newtons can leave Newtons when they travel on from this world?

   3. EWEric Weinstein41:03

      I think so. And I, I can't prove it, but I think where I'm headed with this is that most of us who wind up using these sort of strange high-agency hacks to negotiate the world have some kind of a traumatic birth, that we, we may flatter ourselves that we're in touch with reality, but in fact, reality is a second-best strategy. If you're lucky, your family works pretty well and you never leave social reality. It's only when something goes wrong that you discover, «Okay, the world doesn't work in any way the way I was told. Here's the underlying structure.» And what you then have to realize is if you want to do this at scale, you've got to stop relying on these traumatic births. It's like you're waiting for somebody to get bit by a spider to become Spider-Man. Now, you have to do this in a [chuckles] more controlled fashion.

   4. TFTim Ferriss41:55

      You have to harvest spiders.

   5. EWEric Weinstein41:56

      That's right. You've got to, you've got to regularize it. So I think what we need to do is we need to create a completely second, uh, secondary, um, parallel educational structure for people who are going to be in the high-agency creativity discovery idiom, idiom and realize that we know how to ex- uh, impart expertise, but we don't know how to impart creativity and genius.

   6. TFTim Ferriss42:21

      What do you-- Could you define high agency?

   7. EWEric Weinstein42:24

      Um, sure. Uh, high agency-

   8. TFTim Ferriss42:28

      Or just explain what you mean by it.

   9. EWEric Weinstein42:29

      Well, I think what I mean is, uh, are you constantly... When you're told that someb- something is impossible, i- is that the end of the conversation or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, uh, how to get around whoever it is that's just told you that you can't do something? Um, so how am I going to get past, uh, this bouncer who told me that I can't come into this nightclub? How am I, um, going to start a business, uh, when my credit is terrible and I have no experience? You're, you're constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyver-ish sort of a way, um, and that's your approach to the world.

   10. TFTim Ferriss43:16

       Uh, I'm not gonna take us off the rails here. Have you seen The Martian?

   11. EWEric Weinstein43:19

       Yes.

   12. TFTim Ferriss43:20

       Did you love it?

   13. EWEric Weinstein43:21

       The ultimate high-agency film.

   14. TFTim Ferriss43:23

       I, I just saw it last night, man. It was just like two hours of MacGyver on steroids. I loved it.

   15. EWEric Weinstein43:27

       Yeah. It, and, and it, it... I'm glad you brought it up. I think it heralds, uh, a return, at least, uh, among Americans, to our previous way of being. I think there was some terrible thing that happened starting around 1970 that is just cracking now. So really about 45 years of, uh, a low-agency, super safe, timid, frightened, um, kind of societal aspiration. Can... If you just stay on track, can we keep the American prosperity machine going? I think we now realize that you can't do it without, uh, a bunch of really marginal characters, people who have... might be described as disruptive, have bad attitudes. Um, these are my people, and they're tough to deal with, and I don't always enjoy them, but I do think that without them, uh, it, it's not

10. 44:28 – 47:18

    How to see the world like a high-agency person

    1. EWEric Weinstein44:28

       much of a football team.

    2. TFTim Ferriss44:30

       What can someone do who, who's listening to this, let's say, and they're... They live in a community where, uh, that is clearly low agency, and they want to train themselves to be able to look at options C, D, E, and F when people say, "Do you want A or B?" Right? Uh, or if they're given, let's say, the, the no from the bouncer, from the admissions officer, from the fill-in-the-blank, they look for a way around it instead of just being stopped in their tracks. How can someone... Are, are there any recommendations or tools or resources, exercises that they could use to cultivate that higher agency?

    3. EWEric Weinstein45:13

       Well, there's... I don't think there's a community on Earth where somebody, uh, isn't modifying their car beyond what's street legal. I don't think that there's any community in which nobody is cooking something up, uh, in, in the basement, uh, that probably is proscribed by law. I don't think that there's a community on Earth where somebody isn't trying to, um, break into their own computer in order to see how it works from the inside. So there are high-agency people everywhere. What there isn't necessarily is critical mass, and I think that... You know, sometimes I refer to the Bay Area, uh, as the innovation ghetto. So, uh, you have all of the people who are too high agency to, uh, to behave properly and wait their turn in the rest of the country. And so they've been given, like, the nicest piece of real estate, an ungodly amount of cash, and, um, you know, the, the pleasure of each other's company, but they've been told, you know, "Okay, you have to stay... Uh, the, the terms of your probation is that you have to stay within the Bay Area." And so, uh, what I'd love to see is I'd love to see more of us violating our parole and going into the rest of the country and, um, trying to bring that, uh, irreverent spirit because I think one of the things that the US still has over, let's say, a competitor, uh, uh, like China, is that we tolerate the middle finger. Um, it is perfectly acceptable to be disruptive, uh, here in San Francisco where you and I are conducting this interview, whereas, uh, if I'm told that my child is disruptive, uh, in Kansas, uh, or South Carolina, I'm probably being told that, uh, he's being sent home for bad behavior. So I think it's really important to start respecting, um, our marginal citizens of greatest ability, um, and looking for the unusual personality types that are, uh, irreverent and, uh, committed enough

11. 47:18 – 49:58

    Most gifted books

    1. EWEric Weinstein47:18

       to making things happen and, and to really do things.

    2. TFTim Ferriss47:21

       What... This is gonna seem like a detour, but it might be related. What book or books have you gifted most to other people?

    3. EWEric Weinstein47:29

       Oh, there's... So for my science friends, I tell them to read The Emperor of Scent, um, by Chandler Burr about, uh, my friend Luca Turin, and it talks about a renegade scientist being, um, stymied by, uh, the journal Nature, by various conferences, by the, uh, established research centers, and it's just a wonderful introduction to how, um, the dissident voice is marginalized. And because Luca's such a, uh, a genius of olfaction and chemistry, he's able to, uh, take a perspective which may or may not be true, um, but keep pushing it forward and, and battling it through. So that's one of my favorites. Uh, I have a- another weird recommendation, which is this book, uh, Heraclitian Fire [laughs] by-

    4. TFTim Ferriss48:23

       See if I can spell this

    5. EWEric Weinstein48:24

       ... by-

    6. TFTim Ferriss48:24

       All right. Heraclitian Fire

    7. EWEric Weinstein48:26

       ... by, uh, by, uh, Chagraf, um, who is the guy who effectively shorted Watson and Crick. He told Watson and Crick that he didn't think that they were very good, very smart, uh, they were sort of... They didn't know their chemistry. They, they weren't qualified to work on, on DNA, and it turned out that they got it right and he got it wrong. And when I heard that there was somebody who bet against Watson and Crick, I thought, "Well, this is just gonna be the laugh of the century." But it turned out just to short those guys required another genius. And, uh, and it... he writes about trying to suppress, uh, these guys And failing because they were right and he was wrong, and he has enough presence of mind, uh, to struggle with it. So th- these are books that I think are, uh, incredibly powerful because they talk about, um, what it's like to be one against the many.

    8. TFTim Ferriss49:23

       If you were advising, say, a... You might hate this question. [laughs] If you were advising, say, uh, a senior in high school, non-technical... No, I'm sorry, senior in college, non-technical who had-

    9. EWEric Weinstein49:39

       Probably too late

    10. TFTim Ferriss49:40

        ... Probably too late. Well, well, let's just say that, I mean, that was me, right? So-

    11. EWEric Weinstein49:44

        Okay

    12. TFTim Ferriss49:44

        ... all right. Uh, and I had, you know, fairies and sugar plums in my head about Silicon Valley-

    13. EWEric Weinstein49:51

        Mm

    14. TFTim Ferriss49:51

        ... and wanted to come here and, and attempt to build something amazing. Uh, what,

12. 49:58 – 51:33

    Contemplating a move to the Bay Area?

    1. TFTim Ferriss49:59

       what books, resources would you suggest or what advice would you give?

    2. EWEric Weinstein50:05

       Um, well, first of all, if you can do anything else with your life, uh, other than innovate, other than create, go do that. Don't come. Um, if you're still here and listening and saying, "Okay, I can't really do anything else," uh, for-

    3. TFTim Ferriss50:23

       Meaning you have a compulsion that you-

    4. EWEric Weinstein50:25

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss50:25

       ... cannot resist.

    6. EWEric Weinstein50:26

       Yeah. That fundamentally y- you are zagging when other people are zigging. You're not even thinking outside the box. You haven't seen the box for years. If that's who you are, my feeling is just get here, and I can't promise that your first week or your first month and a half is gonna be the greatest week or month and a half of your life, but you will fall in with people. There, there's enough, um, open-hearted, uh, assistance that's given. There's enough money that there's a different culture of abundance. Now, that may not last this par- uh, more than this particular cycle. Um, but even if this is a bubble, uh, I think it'll re-inflate in the same place because fundamentally we've g- we've run out of all other options other than innovation. If we don't create and we don't think our way out of this, uh, I don't think we have a great plan for steady state. So it, it's grow or die, and, uh, that means that w- we'll have another bubble, and, uh, bubbles aren't terrible things. A lot of wonderful things happen during them.

13. 51:33 – 54:23

    Understanding Peter Thiel’s Zero to One

    1. TFTim Ferriss51:33

       Uh, what to you is the most powerful idea or few ideas, uh, in Zero to One or the material that helped generate that from-

    2. EWEric Weinstein51:46

       Mm

    3. TFTim Ferriss51:46

       ... the class that Peter taught, which was transcribed by Blake Masters?

    4. EWEric Weinstein51:53

       Yeah. Well, there's... So the entire book is about what to do if you think you have a secret. If you really understand something the rest of the world is confused about and it's an important truth, Zero to One says, "H- here are the all the ways you might wanna make that work." I think the problem is the average person has never had an idea, a really powerful, personal idea. Um, and so most people don't have a single secret. And so the real reason most people shouldn't start a company is that they don't know or believe anything that the rest of the world, um, knows, uh, thinks of as being nonsense, right? And so this is, this is the engine behind the book, and what's disturbing is to watch people reading this book not realizing that it's... The whole thing is predicated on you ha- you must have a secret, and it's, uh, try to imagine somebody building a car with no engine. It doesn't really matter how nice you get the upholstery, it's not going to work.

    5. TFTim Ferriss53:10

       Now, I, there, I, I suppose there are different schools of thought here as with many different domains. Some people would say, well, you either have the hardwiring to come up with these secrets or spot these, uh, unpopular opinions or, uh, unpropagated opinions that very few people or no other people hold. Uh, then there are the folks, and I tend to lean this way, uh, who think that that can be facilitated, right?

    6. EWEric Weinstein53:38

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss53:38

       By forcing people to ask, for instance, absurd questions, right? So if you had to 10X, not just 10% increase, but, like, 10X your output in whatever it might be, how would you do it? And forcing people to break whatever systems they might have in place, right? The current incremental approach to what they're doing, these minute optimizations won't answer the question, right? They ha- they have to delve into this kind of terra incognita, things they haven't explored. Uh, do you think this can be... Do you think it can be taught or you can help people to get better at spotting or, or coming up with these, these secrets, seeing things that other people don't see?

    8. EWEric Weinstein54:21

       Well,

14. 54:23 – 59:18

    Seeing what others can’ see

    1. EWEric Weinstein54:23

       yeah, I, I do, and I think that, um, in part this is why it's so difficult, coming back to the sort of Kung Fu Panda pedagogy question. Um, assume that I hit one or two of these, uh, secrets and, and I am successful at them. Doesn't have to be in business. Could be in science, could be in literature, anywhere. The problem is, is that you want to lead someone through the process of succeeding at something and seeing what blocked, what blocked the path. And-

    2. TFTim Ferriss54:56

       What do you mean by that?

    3. EWEric Weinstein54:58

       Well, here's a problem I give people. Um-

    4. TFTim Ferriss55:04

       Uh-oh. [laughs]

    5. EWEric Weinstein55:05

       Well, no, I haven't solved it.

    6. TFTim Ferriss55:06

       Oh, oh, okay. [laughs]

    7. EWEric Weinstein55:07

       If I'd solved it, then... In fact, nobody's solved it yet.

    8. TFTim Ferriss55:11

       I was getting sort of pre-McKinsey interview jitters.

    9. EWEric Weinstein55:13

       Oh, no.

    10. TFTim Ferriss55:13

        Okay. How many golf balls can you fit in a 747?

    11. EWEric Weinstein55:15

        No, no, no. So this is exactly what I ha- hate about those problems is if the, if there are answers in the back of the book, it's not a good problem.

    12. TFTim Ferriss55:22

        Hmm.

    13. EWEric Weinstein55:23

        It has to be an actual problem that the, the asker doesn't know. So I don't know how to solve the problem of the umbrella. There's nothing I like about umbrellas.

    14. TFTim Ferriss55:34

        [laughs]

    15. EWEric Weinstein55:35

        They... Seriously, Tim. They blow up in wind so that they're easily wrecked under the conditions that they're supposed to be, in which they're supposed to be used. They, uh, have these long metal spikes at about eye level, so they're clearly a safety hazard.

    16. TFTim Ferriss55:50

        Your legs always get drenched.

    17. EWEric Weinstein55:52

        There you go. Everything about the umbrella strikes me as wrong. Now, what I believe is, is that there are... A- and I've seen people try to innovate in the umbrella situation. Uh, there are ones that have air blowers that blow the water away from you. There are funky, um, folding designs. But I am almost positive that there exists some very simple mechanical design that would, uh, improve the umbrella. On the other hand, I don't have that same confidence about the coffee mug. Yes, you could put some electronics in it. You could make it smarter than it is. But fundamentally, it seems to be in such a simple state that I wouldn't think that I should innovate there. So if I can give the example where there is a solution known, luggage before 1989-

    18. TFTim Ferriss56:47

        I was just going to ask you about this.

    19. EWEric Weinstein56:48

        All right. So, um, it turns out that nobody really knew how to do wheeled luggage before 1989 until-

    20. TFTim Ferriss56:56

        [laughs] It's just mind-blowing.

    21. EWEric Weinstein56:58

        Yeah.

    22. TFTim Ferriss56:58

        Anyway, yeah.

    23. EWEric Weinstein56:59

        It's... Well, it's hard to imagine that, like, w- the whole world had their wed- their heads wedged so far up there that they couldn't think to put in these large, uh, recessed wheels with a telescoping handle, and this was the invention of a guy named Robert Plath, who was a pilot for Northwest, I think. And in one fell swoop, uh, he convinced everyone that their old luggage was terrible. So even though there wasn't a lot of growth, he created the growth because nobody wanted their old luggage. And you kn- you could compare these discrete brainwave innovations, um, across fields. So for example, in, uh, in table tennis in the early '50s, the worst player on the Japanese team at the Bombay Table Tennis Championships was this guy, uh, Hi- Hiroji Satoj, who... And he, um, glued two foam, uh, expanses to both sides of a sandpaper, uh, table tennis bat, and nobody, um, could cue off of the sounds because it changed the sound of the ball.

    24. TFTim Ferriss58:04

        Oh, it's like having a silencer on a gun.

    25. EWEric Weinstein58:05

        Exactly. It's like if... So if you put a suppressor on your paddle, um-

    26. TFTim Ferriss58:09

        [laughs] Suppressor. Just the fact that you use that word makes me think that you have a bunch of firearms hiding in your basement. But anyway-

    27. EWEric Weinstein58:14

        I can neither confirm nor deny

    28. TFTim Ferriss58:15

        ... I digress. All right. [laughs]

    29. EWEric Weinstein58:16

        But, but the, the, uh, the idea that the worst player on one of the lower-rated teams would be the undisputed champion simply through an innovation that was that profound shows you what the power of one of the i- these ideas is, that the power laws are just so unbelievably in your favor if you win that, uh, it makes it worthwhile.

    30. TFTim Ferriss58:40

        Or Dick Fosbury, who went, uh, backwards over the high jump.
15. 59:18 – 1:01:58

    How Thiel Capital approaches problems

    1. TFTim Ferriss59:18

       in a market? Are there any particular questions, I guess is what I'm asking, that you find very useful when trying to spot these, these breakthrough ideas?

    2. EWEric Weinstein59:29

       Well, it depends in, um, situation by situation. So for example, in science, I try to use various intellectual arbitrage techniques where if you have a bunch of smart people who've been focused on a problem, I try to look at what the, as a group, their weaknesses are, where, how, how, how, how is, uh, their bread buttered? What is it that they can't afford to say or think? Um-

    3. TFTim Ferriss59:53

       What, what might be an example?

    4. EWEric Weinstein59:55

       Well, so for example, in, in, uh, i- i- in theoretical physics, uh, there are all sorts of shibboleths where if you can't, um, say that you believe, uh, that quantum mechanics is intrinsically probabilistic, you're not a member of the club because it's assumed that you sort of can't accept a difficult reality. Um, or if you can't, um, sign up for one of the major schools, uh, you have no way to get funding because you, there's no one who will support your grant applications. So you start to look at what causes what should be a diverse portfolio of ideas to collapse in terms of the diversity where everybody starts representing the same point of view with tiny variations. If you're looking at a problem that's never been attempted, you don't want to use intellectual arbitrage because it's just blue sky. There's no reason that the first attempts, um, to think through the problem won't yield, uh, fruit. But, you know, in the case of the umbrella, um, I would start to think about, well, what, what made, what made me think or what made one think that this was a problematic object? So count the number of moving parts that in general as things reach final form, they, they tend to get radically simple. So if there's too many moving parts, if, um, there's some innovation that's happened since the problem was originally considered... So for example, in the case of Oculus Rift and virtual reality, m- maybe virtual reality was considered Years before Oculus, but nobody had rethought it in the presence of economies of scale that bring the screens and smartphones down in price. And so suddenly you have the high-quality screens that are affordable that way back when would've cost a prohibitive amount. So ask yourself, well, what's changed recently? Where is the

16. 1:01:58 – 1:06:38

    Canonical design and commonplace solutions

    1. EWEric Weinstein1:01:58

       object that currently inhabits the space violating some sort of aspect of canonical design?

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:02:03

       What do you mean by canonical design?

    3. EWEric Weinstein1:02:05

       Well, you know, let's look at nature. Um, if I look at the... There's a great bacter- a, a great virus, um, called T4 bacteriophage, and if you look it up, it looks like a, a lunar lander. It's really cool. And, um, the genetic material is held in a capsule called a capsid that has the form of an icosahedron. And so you wonder-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:02:34

       Something with some sides.

    5. EWEric Weinstein1:02:36

       20 sides.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:02:37

       There we go. [laughs]

    7. EWEric Weinstein1:02:38

       20-sided platonic solid. And-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:02:40

       Wait a second. What's a dodecahedron?

    9. EWEric Weinstein1:02:42

       12.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:02:43

        Goddammit. All right.

    11. EWEric Weinstein1:02:44

        They're dual to each other.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:02:45

        I might need to brush up on my Dungeons & Dragons-

    13. EWEric Weinstein1:02:47

        [laughs]

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:02:48

        ... die references. Okay. So please continue.

    15. EWEric Weinstein1:02:52

        So it's a little crazy to think that, um, before Plato ever existed, nature had figured out this complicated 20-sided object, but because it was so natural at a mathematical level, even if it was complex, uh, nature found the canonical design even though there was no canonical designer. There was no God-given... It, it... Because it was a God-given form, it didn't need to be thunk up, if you will-

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:03:22

        Mm-hmm

    17. EWEric Weinstein1:03:22

        ... by any individual. Or the recent discovery of grasshoppers that use gear mechanisms for jumping. Um, you would think we'd invented gears, but in fact, gears are such a natural idea that natural selection found it long before we did.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:03:37

        So is n- is this natural idea then roughly synonymous with canonical, or is that-

    19. EWEric Weinstein1:03:44

        Yeah

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:03:44

        ... does that have a different connotation?

    21. EWEric Weinstein1:03:46

        I mean, I, I sort of think about it, if we get visited by aliens from another planet who are pretty advanced, um, they're gonna know about platonic solids. They're not gonna call them platonic solids because they didn't have Plato, and in fact, they were known before Plato. But these forms that really don't have a, an inventor so much as a discoverer-

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:04:10

        Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it

    23. EWEric Weinstein1:04:10

        ... these are things that just sort of have to be.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:04:13

        Mm-hmm. Okay. I took, I took us down the rabbit hole a little bit, but we're talking about umbrellas.

    25. EWEric Weinstein1:04:17

        Yeah.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:04:18

        Uh, and the number of elements or moving pieces is, uh... Maybe I'm-

    27. EWEric Weinstein1:04:24

        That is a clue that something is wrong.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:04:26

        Right. Right.

    29. EWEric Weinstein1:04:27

        Right.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:04:27

        It's, it's not as elegant as it should be.
17. 1:06:38 – 1:14:43

    And ideal high school class

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:06:38

       any grade level from ninth grade to the end of college, what would the class be and when would you teach it?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:06:46

       Well, let me-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:06:46

       And I'm gonna go grab a, I'm gonna go grab a copy of this quote because it's gonna bug me, but I'm listening.

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:06:49

       Okay. So it's a really interesting question. Part of the problem surrounds where would I be allowed to teach this class? So first-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:06:58

       Anywhere you like.

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:06:59

       [laughs] Um, well, the first question is, are you really allowed to deeply question your teacher or your school? Um-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:07:11

       Yeah

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:07:11

       ... so I would, I would look to, for example, the Milgram experiment and the Asch conformity experiment. So in the Asch conformity experiment, um, one person was led into a room and asked simple questions, which a bunch of confederates of the experimenter-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:07:29

       Confederates, those people cooperating with the experimenter

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:07:32

        ... right, agreed to answer the, the question in an obv-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:07:35

        Actors, in fact.

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:07:36

        Yes. The actors, uh, answer the question in an obviously wrong way, and then when it comes time for the only real ... uh, participant to answer the question, they often falsify their answer just to fit in. So you should be able to pass the Asch conformity test. Um, and then there's the Milgram obedience experiment, where a, uh, an experimenter appeared to ask the only participant, um, to administer a series of increasing electric shocks. And it's really important that most people continued to administer the shocks even when they heard screaming from the actor in that case, um, if they were assured that it was expected of them and that they would not be held responsible. And so I think what you're always looking for is you're looking to, for an education which makes students unteachable by standard methods, and this is where we get into the trouble, which is we don't talk about teaching disabilities. We talk about learning disabilities. And a lot of the kids that I want-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:08:47

        That's so true

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:08:48

        ... I think-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:08:48

        Such a good way to put it

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:08:49

        ... are, are kids who have been labeled learning disabled, but they're actually super learners. They're like learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower. And when teachers can't deal with this, we label those kids learning disabled to cover up from the fact that the economics of teaching require that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more people in lockstep. Well, that's not a good, that's not a good model. And so what I want is I want to get as many of my dangerous, uh, kids out of that idiom, whether it, it requires dropping out of high school, dropping out of college, but not for, for no purpose. Drop into something. Start creating, building. Join a lab. Skip college. Don't-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:09:40

        So this would be, uh... What was the ter- what was the program? Was it the... Um, it's not 20 Under 20. Uh, the scholarship program that Peter Thiel-

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:09:50

        The Thiel Fellowship.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:09:50

        The Thiel Fellowship. Could you describe that for people who are... And, and how... Can you describe that in brief, and then does that... Is that an example of what you're describing, or is it different?

    20. EWEric Weinstein1:10:00

        Well, so a lot of, um, there's a lot of confluence between how Peter, uh, thinks and, and w- how I think even though we start from radically different places. The Thiel Fellowship preexisted m- my coming on, and it's a program that, uh, will pay kids $100,000 over two years to leave college to try something, um, like start a company or a nonprofit or, or do something of high agency. And roughly, um, speaking, a lot of the kids drop out of the Stanfords and Princetons and Harvards. They're incredibly impressive, and we're not r- that worried that in life they're gonna be set back because they're gonna do just fine under any circumstances.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:10:50

        And they can... Now, in fairness too, the, most of those schools will allow them to come back.

    22. EWEric Weinstein1:10:53

        That's true, but two years is a little bit longer than is comfortable. A lot of people understand that there's a gap year.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:11:00

        Mm-hmm.

    24. EWEric Weinstein1:11:00

        But one of the things that we hope is is that if they do go back, they will go back m- maybe as graduate students.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:11:08

        Mm.

    26. EWEric Weinstein1:11:08

        That maybe the undergraduate degree is unnecessary. In fact, we at some point did a little study, and we found that for every advanced professional degree we could think of, there was somebody who held that degree who had never gotten a BA or a BS. And so the idea of skipping college, um, is now quite appealing to me, and, uh, with the idea being that a master's degree or a PhD or a JD or an MD has an embedded assumption of a BA or a BS, but in fact you'll never be asked about that lower degree, um, because the, the leading degree, uh, the professional degree credential is usually the one that matters.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:11:49

        Now, what would you say to those out there who might look at your credentials and say, "Well, how would you have been able to obtain these very helpful, uh, degrees from places like Harvard and Oxford if you hadn't had the prerequisites set by going to undergrad?"

    28. EWEric Weinstein1:12:06

        Well, I-

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:12:06

        Because I would imagine there are critics who would say there's a, there's a, a survivorship bias.

    30. EWEric Weinstein1:12:12

        Sure.
18. 1:14:43 – 1:18:33

    Embodiments of success

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:14:43

       Uh, let's switch gears a little bit because, uh, for this part one, uh, I have to get to the airport shortly. So I want to ask a couple of my favorite questions that are short questions that you don't have to give short answers to, but we'll, we'll see what we can knock off. When you think of the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind, and why?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:15:04

       Uh, Paul Dirac because he found what must be the strangest and most bizarre, uh, piece of physics I ever hope to encounter.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:15:16

       How do you spell his last name?

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:15:17

       D-I-R-A-C.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:15:21

       Dirac. I don't know why I put a weird Turkish-

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:15:25

       [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:15:26

       ... diacritical mark on his name.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:15:27

       There you go.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:15:27

       I just really wanted to. Uh, what else can you say about him that leads you to call him successful? Is it, is it just that discovery, or is it the way he went about it?

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:15:38

        You know, there were... Uh, so I, I'm very focused on, uh, physics in the 20s... in, in, in physics in the 20th century. There were really three guys who were the main forces behind the three major equations, and what I noticed about all three of them, Einstein, Dirac, and a guy named C.N. Yang, is that they all followed the same weird path, which was to use aesthetics rather than experiment as their guide. So the entire rest of the field has had to use experiment and be in a regular science idiom, and these are the three guys who more than anyone just sort of closed their eyes and tried to figure out, okay, how should this game go, and then prove that the world more or less, uh, went the way they said it should.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:16:27

        Now, by aesthetics, do you mean looking for what they perceived as beautiful or elegant?

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:16:33

        Yeah.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:16:33

        Or...

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:16:35

        Right. So the, uh, this is like the, um... You know, I often make this joke that the scientific method is the radio edit of great science. Great science doesn't look much like the story you've been told about people diligently trying to falsify things and, you know, all sorts of statistical significance. Great science looks like breaking into graveyards and digging up bodies when you know you shouldn't or trusting your aesthetic sense when the data tells you otherwise. And, uh, and, and I've always loved this aspect of science is it's that you may wanna tame this thing, and it, it won't be tamed. It will always be the case that the leaders of the field, uh, are the, uh, misfits in the back throwing spitballs rather than the good kids who are always there on time raising their hands.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:17:23

        [laughs] We asked about books earlier, so we won't hit that. Do you have a favorite documentary or movie besides Kung Fu Panda, um, or any that come to mind?

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:17:36

        Well, there was a brilliant one, uh, that I haven't heard, ever heard of since I saw it called Rate It X, which had the great idea-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:17:45

        Rate It X.

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:17:46

        Yes. And it was about, um, pornographers, and it was an anti-pornography movie. And it- its, its gambit was to just let pornographers talk at length without interruption or editing. And so, uh, it made its point by just giving these people a mic when they really shouldn't have said anything.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:18:07

        [laughs]

    20. EWEric Weinstein1:18:08

        I thought that was absolutely ingenious.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:18:10

        [laughs] Uh, I really want to watch that. Yeah, sometimes the, the best sort of refutation and debating tactic is just letting somebody talk. [laughs] Just let them bury themselves. Uh, what $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life in recent memory,

19. 1:18:33 – 1:20:33

    A favorite purchase under $100

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:18:33

       last six months, a year, whatever?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:18:34

       I just bought my punk 10-year-old kid a mandolin, and, uh, suddenly that's all we hear in the house. And I just think what a completely bizarre instrument to fall in love with. And, uh, I think I got it for 98 bucks.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:18:53

       Ooh, just on the... It's a hair's breadth away. And why the mandolin as opposed to a different instrument?

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:18:59

       You know, I think it's really important, like we were talking about, uh, with old- with, with, uh, languages that are less commonly studied. I think that, uh, the mandolin is the loser of an old battle between the mandolin and the guitar. It was very popular at the end of the, uh, 19th century when a bunch of, I think they were called like the Italian students or the Spanish students came through, and everyone went crazy for mandolins, but they weren't quite as versatile. It's the same, um, fingering patterns as a violin so that, uh, everything that you learn to pluck, you can then learn to bow later, but it's also compact and, uh, it's highly melodic in its nature, so you can alternate between chords. It's like a little bit of a ukulele on steroids.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:19:46

       Do you have any favorite mandolin player?

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:19:50

       Oh gosh. Well, there's this, this guy who just got the MacArthur Fellowship that I can't think of his name. Um, of course

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:19:55

       I'm imagining [laughs] there can't be that many mandolin-playing MacArthur winners. Maybe I'm wrong. But I guess if you search-

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:20:01

       You know, Mark O- M- Mark O'Connor, um, who was the great bluegrass prodigy, first of violin. I think he won the fiddle championship three years in a row. They outlawed him ever winning again, so he became the flatpicking champion on guitar. Uh, I think he's pretty terrific. They-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:20:20

       What was his name again?

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:20:21

        Uh, Mark, uh, O'Connor.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:20:23

        Mark O'Connor. So the MacArthur Award, this is the-

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:20:27

        Well, th- this is another, this-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:20:28

        This is a different person.

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:20:29

        Yes.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:20:29

        The MacArthur Award, for those people not familiar, it's actually a cool award worth looking

20. 1:20:33 – 1:25:18

    Morning rituals and work cycles

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:20:33

       into. That's called the Genius Grant, right?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:20:34

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:20:34

       Is that the nickname? Uh, do you have any particular morning rituals that are important to you?

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:20:41

       Um, okay, each morning is basically a struggle against a new day, which I view as a series of opponents who must be defeated. Man, I'm not a morning person.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:20:51

       [laughs]

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:20:52

       So every morning I get out of bed, I'm just astounded that I've done, um-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:20:56

       That you've gotten on your feet [laughs]

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:20:57

       Well, you know, there was a... Was it Julian Schwinger, the great Harvard physicist, I think, was asked if he would teach, uh, the 9:00 AM quantum mechanics course, and he, he stopped for a second. And the person who was asking said, "What, what's the problem, Professor Schwinger?" He says, "I don't know if I can stay up that late."

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:21:14

       [laughs] So what... If you are trying to do deep creative work that requires a lot of synthesis or just, uh, as, as Naval might, Ravikant might say, [laughs] orthogonal thinking-

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:21:27

        Right

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:21:27

        ... and so on, uh, what would your, what would your kind of work cycle look like?

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:21:31

        Oh.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:21:31

        When do you do that type of work?

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:21:32

        So I, I use a weird technique. I use coprolalia-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:21:36

        [laughs]

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:21:36

        ... um, where I say-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:21:37

        Sounds, sounds pornographic.

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:21:39

        A little bit.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:21:39

        I-

    20. EWEric Weinstein1:21:40

        Um, it's... You, you know those strings of, uh, obscenities that Tourette's patients involuntarily utter?

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:21:46

        Sure.

    22. EWEric Weinstein1:21:47

        So I find-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:21:47

        What was the term?

    24. EWEric Weinstein1:21:48

        I think it's coprolalia.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:21:49

        Coprolalia [laughs] . Coprolalia. Okay, got it.

    26. EWEric Weinstein1:21:52

        Like, just talking streams of shit.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:21:54

        Yeah.

    28. EWEric Weinstein1:21:54

        Um, so I find that when we use words that are prohibited to us, it tells our brain that we are inhabiting unsafe space, and it's, it's a bit of a sign, um, that you're going into a different mode. So I tend to become sort of facultatively autistic. That is, I think I can be social and personable if I'm trying to do that, but when I... When I'm going to do deep work, um, very often, um, it's got a very powerful, aggressive energy to it. It's not easy to be around. Um, it's very exacting, and I think I would probably look very autistic to people who know me to be social, uh, were they ever to see me in work mode.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:22:41

        So how do you, how do you incite that? How do you invoke that? So do you just [laughs] going back to the expression that I still, or the term I still can't say. Do you just start l- trying to string together as many asce- obscenities as possible as like a-

    30. EWEric Weinstein1:22:57

        I have my, I have my same sequence
21. 1:25:18 – 1:26:43

    Eric’s billboard

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:25:18

       the funny how-to stuff that I write to complex physics. Uh, if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:25:26

       One billboard, anything on it. Um, just because a large number of well-credentialed experts believe something in common doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong. But if they've reached consensus, that's the way to bet. Some- somehow people have to learn that Consensus is a huge problem. If there's no arithmetic consensus because it doesn't require a consensus, but there is a Washington consensus. There is a, uh, climate consensus. In general, consensus is how we bully people into pretending that, uh, there's nothing to see, you know, move along everyone. And so I think that in part you should start to learn that when people are... People don't naturally come to high levels agree- of agreement unless something is either absolutely clear, in which case consensus isn't, um, present or there's an implied threat of violence to livelihood or

22. 1:26:43 – 1:28:28

    Advice to Eric’s 30-year-old self

    1. EWEric Weinstein1:26:43

       self.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:26:47

       What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self? And if you could just place us in time, what were you doing at that age?

    3. EWEric Weinstein1:26:55

       Um, so when I was, uh, 30, I guess I was still struggling to stay in or get out of academics. And I think what I didn't realize is that the structure of the universities was that they were either hitting steady state or growing very s- very little or shrinking, and that was not a healthy place to be because most of the good seats in the musical chairs competition had already been found in the '60s, and they had occupants, and we were in some sort of a game where we were doing work for the system, but we weren't set to inherit it. And I think what I needed to do was to decamp and to realize that technology was gonna be a boom area. And even though I wanted to do science rather than technology, it's better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field than to be in a contracting world where people's worst behavior comes out and, uh, your mind is grooved in defensive and, uh, rent-seeking types of ways that I... Just life is too short to be petty and defensive and, and cruel to other people who are seeking to innovate alongside you.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:28:18

       And the last question, maybe the last of one or two, uh, that doesn't make any sense, but, uh, here we go. Uh, do you have any ask or requests for my audience,

23. 1:28:28 – 1:31:33

    A request of the audience

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:28:28

       for people listening? Anything they should think on, do, or otherwise?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:28:33

       Um, well, first of all, I would really [chuckles] like a high-quality umbrella from one of you-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:28:37

       [laughs]

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:28:37

       ... just to prove the point that that was actually a reasonable problem to set. Um, I guess what I would, uh, really like is for those of you who've been told that you're learning disabled or you're not good at math or that you're terrible, uh, at music or something like that, um, seek out unconventional ways of, of proving that wrong. Believe, uh, not only in yourselves but that there are structures that are ca- powerful enough to make things that look very difficult much easier than you ever imagined.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:29:17

       That is great advice. And for those people there who particularly have this music insecurity as I do, uh, one thing that has, has, has seemed to me like a life raft in this sea of complexity is the, uh, the three chord song by The Axis of Awesome.

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:29:35

       Four chords.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:29:35

       Oh, god. I knew I was gonna do that. Four chord song, there we go. So you can look that up on YouTube or elsewhere for, uh, a real hilarious but also, um, sort of potential, uh, potential... What the hell am I trying to say here? I just ran out of caffeine. This is the moment that I ran out of caffeine.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:29:53

       No, no, no, no, no.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:29:53

       It's sort of like-

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:29:54

        It's, it's a, it's an am- amazing

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:29:55

        ... potential displaying, uh, act that they put together which shows you how complexity can be created through simplicity or per- or, or pot- perceived complexity.

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:30:08

        Well, it, and it shows you that your mind has stored over 100 songs that you think of as being completely different, uh, in different places even though there was a simple fact, uh, draw... bringing them all together. You know, I, I, I liken it to the moment that people realize that in almost every, uh, advertisement for wristwatches, the watches are set to 10:10. Um, and before you realize that, uh, y- you can't really believe that it's true, but afterwards you realize that the world has just, uh, pulled one over on you-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:30:46

        [laughs]

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:30:47

        ... because 10:10 looks like a smile to watch advertisers.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:30:51

        Ah. I guess it's very symmetrical, isn't it?

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:30:53

        Yeah.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:30:54

        Uh-

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:30:55

        But what's funny is, is that, is that the wisdom has crept into the f- to the point that sometimes you'll see digital watch ads, and they'll still be set to 10:10-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:31:04

        [laughs]

    20. EWEric Weinstein1:31:04

        ... even though it doesn't look like a smile.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:31:07

        So I'm gonna... I'm just gonna throw out a teaser here because we don't have time to get into it today, but you and I have privately spoken quite a bit about psychedelics. Uh, I am, uh, either by the time people hear this or very shortly going to be, uh, helping to raise funds for a very interesting study that Johns Hopkins is putting together. Um, you said to me not too long ago, uh, something along the lines of you'd be amazed

24. 1:31:33 – 1:40:24

    Eric’s first experience with psychedelic drugs

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:31:33

       or you wouldn't believe how straight and narrow I was for so long. When was the first time that you tried psychedelics?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:31:40

       Um, relatively recently. Uh, and it was because I was... I had been propagandized so thoroughly that even to this day, uh, I don't like the association. I don't like the word cloud around them. Um- There were all sorts of confusions that the power, uh, of one of these substances must, uh, come from killing brain cells, like pouring acid on your brain and leaving it as Swiss cheese. Uh, it wasn't until I started meeting, um, some of the most intellectually gifted people, uh, in the sciences and beyond, and I realized that, uh, this was sort of the open secret, uh, of what I call the hallucinogenic elite, uh, whether it's billionaires or Nobel laureates or, um, inventors and, and coders, that a lot of these people, uh, were using these agents, uh, either for creativity or to gain access to the things that are so difficult to get access to through therapy and other conventional means. So, um-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:32:52

       Tune in next time when you'll hear Tim say [laughs] I will dig into this, into this font of knowledge, this goldmine. And, uh, give a Google, guys. Search, uh, my name and Johns Hopkins. By the time you hear this, uh, you might see some very interesting stuff up about this, and you could actually get involved and learn a lot more about it. But before that, and in closing, I suppose I should ask, where can people find you on the internet? Where can they ping you if they want to share with you their incredible origami umbrella solution?

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:33:28

       [laughs] Um, that's a good question. I'm, I'm-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:33:31

       On, on Twitter or wherever you might be more-

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:33:34

       Sure

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:33:34

       ... active than less.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:33:35

       Yes. Uh, I'm on Twitter at EricRWeinstein. Um, and you can find some of my essays at edge.org, um, particularly one on professional wrestling as a metaphor for living in a constructed and false reality.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:33:56

       [laughs] Well, uh, Eric, I love hanging out. This is always so much fun, and I appreciate you taking the time to join us and to brainstorm and share your wisdom with, uh, me and with everybody listening.

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:34:12

        Same.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:34:12

        Thank you so much.

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:34:13

        Tim, thanks for inviting me into your world and, uh, and allowing me to talk to your base.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:34:19

        All right, folks. So let us know what you think. Definitely say hi to Eric @EricRWeinstein. Say hi to me also. Uh, if you have any feedback, if you'd like to hear a round two @TFerriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S on Twitter. And until next time, thank you for listening. [upbeat music] Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up [laughs] in the, uh, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email, and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I used 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. And I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy, or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out. [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, et cetera, and I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just wanna take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it, and here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, uh, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account, but just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure. So check it out, guys. This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley and they're killing it. They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening. [outro jingle]

Episode duration: 1:40:24