Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #163

The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein. His fourth time on the podcast. Both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind, and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being who I am fortunate to call a friend. Quick mention of our sponsors. Indeed hiring site, Theragun muscle recovery device, Wine Access online wine store, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me ask that whenever we touch difficult topics in this or other conversations, that you listen with an open mind and forgive me or the guest for a misstep in an imperfectly thought out statement. To have any chance of truth, I think we have to take risks and make mistakes in conversation, and then learn from those mistakes. Please try not to close your mind and heart to others because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea. Try to assume that the people in this conversation, or just people in general, are good but not perfect and far from it, but always striving to add a bit more love into the world in whatever way we know how. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @lexfriedman. And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. You often talk about getting off this planet, and I think you don't often talk about extraterrestrial life, intelligent life out there. Do you wonder about this kind of thing, about intelligent civilizations out there?

I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way. Um, in a- in a certain sense I do find that speculating about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens is kind of a recreation for when things aren't going very well. Uh, at least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives. So I worry about, you know, for example, the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion. You can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend, so then you just take up an interest in, uh, in simulation theory because that's something like what you do for your job coding. I do think that in some sense the issue of aliens is a really interesting one but has been spoiled by too much sort of recreational escapism. The key question that I find is let's assume that it is possible to look out at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds and then go visit them. If that is possible, it's almost certainly possible through some, uh, as yet un- unknown or not accepted theory of physics beyond Einstein. And I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, but probably is. If that theory exists, there would be a percentage of the worlds that have life in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way that would have encountered the ability to escape, uh, soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom at a minimum and whatever they have that is probably analogous to the cell, uh, o- on that world. So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing that arises, uh, probably not carbon based, probably doesn't have DNA, but that something that fits the pattern of, uh, Darwinian theory which is descent with variation, um, differential success.