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

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

Are you nervous about this?

Scared shitless.

Okay. ǩbɨs bu kɛs yɛ ) .

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

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

Who was the teacher?

Oogway, Master Oogway, the turtle.

Oh, the turtle.

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

Right.

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

Tom Lehrer?

Yeah.

I- in which way?

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

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

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

Harshly.

(laughs)

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

Okay.

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

Yes, yeah. Yep.

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