American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Eric Weinstein: “We Need to Leave Earth Now”

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, cultural commentator and Managing Director of Thiel Capital. He has a theory in physics, called Geometric Unity, which attempts to reconcile quantum field theory and relativity. He's a walking anomaly and a complete polymath; genius doesn't do him justice. In this episode, we grab in n' out, talk about intergenerational theft, malaise among young people, artificial general intelligence, UFO's and the "theoretical" media company of the future. *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. But here's the thing, Jesse. I don't really care about the inner person. Buckle up and brace for impact because our next guest is cultural commentator, mathematician, and brain masseuse, Eric Weinstein. Hello? You're ready to get some burgers?

How you doing? If the ideas in GU are wrong, then they're just wrong. When I first met Eric, it was three years ago, and he had just started a movement called the intellectual dark web. The movement is not as ominous as it sounds. In fact, it's just a bunch of pro-reason, pro-demonial. centrist intellectuals. Other members of the group included Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and last but not least, Eric's brother, Brett Weinstein, badass evolutionary biologist perennially on YouTube's most wanted list. So I thought more people should be aware of Eric and his

ideas. Thus began a year and a half of me hounding him to start a podcast, an effort that eventually became the portal. Hello and welcome. You found the portal. I brought my producer, Jesse Michaels here. I was a pain in the ass to this guy. I did not return his phone calls. I'd get messages from you that would be like, well, it's three days later and you still don't have a podcast. The way I'd describe Eric to people who might not know who he is is if Stephen Hawking and Christopher Hitchens had a baby while listening to a whole lot of love by Led Zeppelin. Unicool. Eric is a complete polymath. He knows multiple languages. He plays multiple instruments. He can go toe to toe with the top physicists in the country. His brain is a rare mutation. What is an American tradition? What is it? Something a baby boomer did twice.

We discuss Eric's theory of everything in physics, the institutional and economic headwinds facing young people in this country, artificial general intelligence, and even UFOs. What was that? Please enjoy this special long-form interview with the love of my work life, the bane of my existence, and this week's American alchemist, Eric Weinstein. So let's just get right into it.

It's a very strange time that we're looking at. I was just trying to measure that actually, how strange this morning. Let's give people a little history. So gain of function research is basically creating, trying to look around the corner on maybe what the next pathogen or virus will be creating it in an artificial lab setting so that you can then come up with the cure. Obama actually sunsets it because he thinks that it's too dangerous. Fauci kind of takes advantage of the chaos of the Trump administration.

and restarts the gain of function funding that the NIH is doing in 2017. And we're now giving money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is a lab with a poor safety record. A lot of what this has to do with is bio-warfare being something that we're uncomfortable with about, you know, just the way it's like doing chemical weapons research. You have to do the research in a defensive capacity. Everything has a dual role.

My point is that you're listening to Colonel Jessup. You snotty little. bastard. You may find my existence repugnant, but you want me on that wall. You want me on that post. Right. And the fact that you can't stomach what it is, like, you may have an idea that's really important that we be good, uh, kind stewards of the planet, but you want your burger, don't you? And somebody's got to kill that cow and, uh, and take the organs out and serve it up so you can pretend that that little piece of protein, uh, you know, came from a protein factory, which it didn't. Yeah. Well, that's what Anthony Fauci thinks. It's like,

For whatever reason, I'm the guy that you've put in this position to handle this really terrible portfolio of things we're not supposed to be doing, but we have to be doing. Not gain of function. But if you think about it, we do this with our military. We tell the military what it can and cannot do, and then we find out that it uses contractors because they may not be covered under what you can ask the military to do. For example, you might put your secrets inside of an aerospace company because you don't want to hold them inside of government because inside of government they're very much.

vulnerable. Lawyer requests and... Likewise, tyranny of censorship. You want that done through private corporations because the government is under all sorts of requirements not to do that. So when people say things like, well, it's a private company, it can do whatever it wants. Well, not really. You know, you ever tried to produce food and not say what the ingredient list is? It's pretty tough to sell food. Right. Right. Okay. Why don't I know what the ingredient list is and the algorithms that mutate my conversations. I can't see a thing. And at some level, we farmed out tyranny to private companies.

Let's talk about what COVID exposed as far as the dynamic between the U.S. and China for a second. So very broadly and crudely speaking, we've moved away from a manufacturing economy towards more of a kind of service-based economy. And we've become dependent on supply chains abroad for all sorts of essential goods and services, we basically outsourced our sort of self-sufficiency.

And so what do we do? It feels like we've done nothing as far as... We don't exist. I think you're thinking too small. Okay. I don't think when you say the U.S. and China that you're talking about two countries. You're talking about a country that exists, which is China,

and a country that has existed in the past that does not exist now. And that what happened in World War II is that we had such a coherence that it took a very long time for the decay function to eradicate the ability of that country to do things. And now we've gotten to that point where we're looking for a disaster to call us into being a country again. That's right. And our elites are inherently transnational.

Sorry, we don't have any. Okay. So the elites aren't. Yep. Sitting in an elite chair does not make you elite any more than sitting in a pilot seat in a plane gives you the ability to fly. Somebody once asked George Burns

do you play the violin? He says, I don't know, I never tried. You want an elite surgeon for your child's heart operation. Sure. You want elite commandos to go in and take the bad guys out without hurting anybody else. But we don't want an elite anywhere else because we keep hearing about the elite, the elite, the elite. Well, they aren't. Is it safe to say that Wall Street, consulting, and big tech are all good examples where the incentives around protecting America, those Those are after self-enrichment. You've picked three really interesting, weird examples, because these are like the only places where smart college graduates can reliably go to earn six figures if they're willing to work

themselves to a crisp. And that's the only way to not have debt, basically, is to do one of those three things. Well, you didn't mention porn or cannabis. I was also possible new creative. Well, look, I did this program with Sugar Baby University. And I tried to shock the boomers and say, you do realize that you're selling your daughters into gray area prostitution through sugar dating. And they don't even hear it. You ask your kids going to college campuses.

How many people, you know, are sugaring in order to make sure that they graduate without debt? And it's an open secret among the kids. It's just there's not much of anything left, Jesse. What we're doing is we're watching the decay of things that were built by previous generations, and we're not excited to get up off the couch. Is there any way to reboot any of these institutions? Sure, sure, sure, sure. How do we do that?

Well, first of all, you have to pick one. We don't know which one. We don't know how. But assume that you could take back one, and you gave it the ability to say no. It would be very easy, for example, to endow a university, to just insulate it. We're going to take the most dangerous, safe thinkers who actually have new ideas that are reasonable

and not mean-spirited. And we're going to make sure that they are not subject to market forces so they can do whatever they want and protect them. But you have individuals who are still not dead. That's a great segue into, you've attempted to almost do the impossible, which is to coalesce these sort of atomized truth-teller gadflies.

where sometimes small disagreements between them make it hard to kind of create a coherent unit. And I think if I were to create one sort of pin for all of it, you might be it. How do you do that? We try it. It works vaguely. But you need brick and mortar and you need people who are empowered. And you need people with stakes in the game. I mean, it's just, I get very bored of saying this because it doesn't do good things.

things for me. Yes, I am trying to coalesce people. But let's be honest, nobody wants to put FU money into people who actually say FU. You're not comfortable with actual heroes. I think that's right. I mean, your line on it is Charles Lindbergh was our last hero. Well, he was a scoundrel. He was a scoundrel. He was a scoundrel. Didn't like our people. He did not. But the point was he was a national hero who had the power to lead the country out of a war orientation and say this is a Jewish-British problem, America first. And the idea that an individual would amass that kind of power was something I think that the government, we officialdom, learned we can't have anymore.

And it feels like there's a general malaise among my generation and Gen Z to some extent. Millennials owned 4.8% of the wealth in this country. Look at a city like L.A., real wages have basically stacked. Maybe risen slightly and then cost of living has 20 to 30 x if you just look at you know take like real estate or something like that Yeah doesn't fucking make any sense anymore and you guys need to fall in love with each other and get each other pregnant And deal with the responsibility of the consequences of those actions and you're not equipped Yeah, and as I'm fond of saying I love you guys not as much as I love Gen Z. Gen Z is my children Right? Yeah, yeah

So you guys are my audience, but Gen Z is my kids. So I love you, but not as much as Gen Z. Your parents don't love you as much as I love you guys. And that's what kills me. All of that is basically algorithmic, and it's the algorithms that break your heart. You don't realize that Pachlbell is emotional because it's not even music.

It's math. So the reason that it's your parents' wedding song is that your parents' wedding song is that your parents' wanted people to feel. So they chose an algorithm. Talk about Boomer neglect. Who understands these people? No one.

You had to go through what they went through to understand their crazy mindset. And I don't mean to say that individually, we don't have lovely relationships with them. We do. But they went through something. What did they go? Because it, I mean, it feels like

in some sense they went through nothing. They benefited from massive growth post-World War II. You know, 46 through 64 is the rough sort of range. And so that, I feel, it creates all sorts of weird psychological dynamics where you're given, if you were to buy real estate between the, you know, 50s and the 80s and like on the coasts, the amount of wealth you accrue just through that. Right. Our whole story is off.

One, the greatest generation, which supposedly won World War II by fight, and the Germans hand-to-hand and blah, blah, blah, always ignores that the Soviets did a ton and the physicists finished and off in Japan, you know? So, yeah, we took casualties and people went through things and they saw things, but we didn't go through Stalingrad, you know? So first of all, you have this problem

that a lot of GIs came back home as the conquering heroes who didn't see the kind of action, let's say, that the Soviets saw. Then you have the silent generation, that follows the greatest generation, which actually, you know, Joe Biden comes from that generation. We've gone backwards from boomers into the silence now. And they sort of grow up with this post-World War II prosperity that they can't get to work. So Joe Biden begins as a 29-year-old senator in 1972.

Right? And then the boomers are like after this, and they're set to be the first generation that can't get the American dream to work. And because of the culture of personal responsibility, the idea of just failing at the American dream doesn't, it's like not an option. So China becomes the source of the American dream. It's really the Chinese dream of getting wealthy Americans to sell things off to China so that they can pretend to live better than their parents in a weird way. So then what's Gen X? We're the jet wash generation. We follow the boomers and the silence.

We get a chance to see the world that they sort of saw. Or the last ones who have any vision of functional, like, journalism. I remember functional journalism from when I was five in Vietnam. And we grow up in a 75-year peace bubble, you know, so we don't know reality. Yeah. you guys know less about reality because you didn't even see the tail end of functional society. And Gen Z is looking at all of us and saying, are you all just effing crazy? Yeah.

So if something close to 40% of the wealth that millennials hold is in one set of hands of a guy who's on a hydrofoil with an American flag for July 4th saying, hey, we've got a terrible labor shortage, please give me all the visas so I don't actually have to pay. my workers. No. Right. You can't do that. Right. Because that's an advertisement for redistribution of wealth.

If you want an unequal society as I do, where different levels of ability and different levels of drive and risk management are rewarded at different levels, it can't be this dumb. This is an argument for communism. Our current capitalism is an argument for communism. We need a capitalism that is an argument for capitalism. Is there a point at which if you're a burgeoning tech entrepreneur and you start to scale and you start to make money and you start to connect with people at high levels of society, you just sort of become co-opted and all of your ideas go out the window?

Nobody plans for what success is going to do to them. We talked about this earlier on the car ride over. It's sort of a CILA and Carybdis a young person has to face. And on the one hand, it's work on scholarly academic things, but don't get any support. You can't really do too many interesting things. Or it's, you know, go into commercial activity, try to make as much money as possible, but lose the plot. But what are you doing?

I'm attempting to marry the two. Yeah, I know. And it's a very, it's a tightrope act. And I don't know if I'm going to pull it off. That's why I'm here. Thank you, Eric. No, because this is an amazing idea. If you can not get sucked in to doing cool stuff that gets you clicks and keep in mind,

you're going to get captured by your audience, if you confuse these two things, then you can potentially do something financial that creates the monetary input to allow you to do something scholarly that allows you to gain insight to inform your ability to make more money. If you can get that figure eight thing going. That's the Holy Grail. Let's talk about another example of this in Elon Musk. I think you both have the same premise, but then come to almost vastly different conclusions as to what to do about that premise.

He seems to think that we need to get off this earth with physical rockets. No, no, no. He thinks that we need to get off this earth. Let's start there. Yes. Same premise. That same premise. We don't know if he thinks that it's with rockets.

or rockets is the best he can do. If you believe that humans have to diversify because a single planetary surface effectively creates one synchronized experiment, you'd have to ask how many different ways are there of getting off of this planet. And there's getting off with the chemistry and physics that we know, which is rockets, and we know that that's good enough for the moon, and marginally, it may be good enough for Mars. It's super tough to imagine that working, but okay.

You can imagine a space station. imagine a space station or two. You can even go crazy and imagine Titan around Saturn. But Elon's a physics guy. He's got a physics background. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate. with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com

slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.S. slash college PC. The other great option is to say Einstein recovered Newton in a limit. You may be able to evade faster than light problems

because faster than light is about space time. That's an Einsteinian concept. GU is intended to say, here are some extra parameters that you've never had access to that can recover relativity theory. Relativity might live within something broader. Right. And in GU, you can say exactly where it lives. Now, that's an insanely exciting prospect.

And you went on Joe Rogan and presented this to the world. This is all very hard for the average person. to follow, but I think it's not about the average person. I understand that. But I'm saying, I think it would be incredibly valuable to just release it for the average. I'm starting to everybody. Yeah. And this is my cursory understanding, but it's like, it feels like there are what, like five people on earth or something who can even try to like read this stuff. Maybe there are no people on earth. I don't know. How do you get this stuff out? People don't understand what I did or why I did it because it's different enough and it was weird enough that they didn't grab.

But it wasn't about teaching Joe Rogan physics inside of a show. It's about the fact that there is no way now to go back and take that theory away because there's a record of when it happened. And the reason that Joe Rogan's program is so important is it has so many eyeballs on it. So I think that there's a famous scene in one of the Mission Impossible movies where Tom Cruise has to, to meet with people who want him dead. And he chooses to meet in a public square and he's got the only copy of the information inside of his head so that killing him will destroy

the information. Right? In essence, that's the sort of a problem. Academics has become so poisonous, so focused on enforcing the rules that nobody can afford to think. In order to get things right, you have to get things wrong.

And we won't allow people to get things wrong unless it's part of a program that's been blessed. So that was a time-stamped, ubiquitously seen? That was the point of it. People didn't understand it. The other thing is that there are no protections inside of science for taking somebody else's work and putting another person's name on it. And this was a good protection.

Well, and I put something saying that I choose to be an entertainer rather than a scientist, and therefore it has copyright protection. Where do we go from here on GEU in terms of... Somebody is going to have to actually grasp the ideas inside of GU. But here's the thing, Jesse. I don't really care about the inner person. I want a nice life. I want my family left alone.

And I want to be insulated so I don't need to worry every day. But it's the ideas. If the ideas in GU are wrong, then they're just wrong. If the GU ideas are right, but there are small errors as there have been every time anybody's accomplished anything in this kind of a way, fine. Not a big deal. Let's fix some errors. But people have these weird things that they want to do. They want to turn this into drama. So, for example, Einstein and Hilbert.

supposedly, Hilbert almost scooped Einstein, but Einstein pulled it out of the... No, nothing like this remotely happened. Einstein and Grossman were on general relativity. Hilbert did some thing. Even if Hilbert had gotten there first, it wouldn't have mattered. The ideas were from Einstein. We want to create moronic horse races because it's exciting. You have like eight different frames.

Like you can go... Yeah, you could talk to a biologist. You can talk to a physicist. You can talk math. You're a cultural commentator. And so, you know, I might have annoyed the shit out of you in the process of trying to get you to start the portal. No, come on.

The issue was I didn't want to become famous. Yeah. I wanted my ideas to become famous, and I wanted to be the owner of those ideas. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't know that the problem isn't getting the ideas out there. You can get the ideas out there. The problem now is that the ideas are like seeds that need to find soil and rain and the proper temperature. We don't have that at the moment.

We have a world in which you can teach a person to fish. You're not even giving them fish. You can teach them to fish and they will starve for lack of, like they won't understand that when you're gone they have to go fish. We don't have culture that's proper. It's really important to understand how counterintuitive the U.S. where we live is as an intellectual system. We expect you to not take advantage of all of the freedoms that we give you. The purpose of freedom is not understood by people. I often compare it to things like freedom, potential, and sperm. You're not supposed to use all of it.

Yeah. Right? So you have potential you could do anything in your life. But you're not going to both become an opera singer and a Formula One driver and a nutrient company CEO and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You're not going to get to do everything. Every life is about the foregoing of opportunity. There's something about the hard choice thing that seems lost on my generation.

We seem to all have an illusion of omnip possibility. And that's all you've been given. You've been given your future because you're not being. given your present and the future that you're being given is largely illusory. Right. And that thing is making me crazy because I would rather deal you guys in on a future that's real. My favorite tweet that I let off recently was something about for all of you who decided

to have a kid during coming, I have to be careful not to tear up on camera, but people started sending me ultrasound. Like we've got two in the oven and you know we have to thank you for telling us to have kids. And I realized nobody's yelling at you guys, get married, have the babies. Yes, it all sucks. You don't have the money. Don't waste your fertility windows. Don't waste your ability to form families.

Yes, it's tough. And there is divorce and things go wrong and people come to hate each other. But you know what? A lot of those dysfunctional families are still families. Family is barely doable, but it is barely doable. And quite honestly, I want to see you guys dealt in. And for me, the, I think the thing I like the least about being famous is having a

family. Because you can't protect your, there's so many psychopaths in the world. And it doesn't mean that there's like tens of thousands of psychopaths. But it just takes a small amount of psychopathy to get you to really come to look at this fame question differently. I think it's very interesting to think about. media as sort of not a loss leader maybe it's a loss leader maybe it's it's break-even but you're creating a lighthouse for really young high

agency people and then you invest in them and venture economics might be riskier but they're a whole lot better than ads and the Buzzfeed model and so is the media company of the future actually media as kind of the the front and then the back end is investing? Well, that's the funnel theory. And, you know, my belief about this was there's clearly a roll-up play where you take the people that people want to listen to and you put them inside a container and then you let the rest of the system hate on it.

And it's not Fox News because it's not conservative. It's an easy play. I don't know why it doesn't happen. I don't understand where we are. I just don't know the people who want to do it. We should do it. Let's do it. Okay.

I want to talk about UFOs, a subject which, if I brought this up with you three years ago, you probably would have said Jesse shut the hell up. Well, you did try to bring it up. What did happen? You said Jesse shut the hell up. Yeah, I didn't use the word hell. No, you didn't. But you, you know, I think reasonably you were like this is wacky and crazy.

It's dumb. It's dumb. It's incredibly dumb. The idea that you would have phenomena that can only be seen by specials, people and that there's no good video of it and we have a world full of smartphones. We've got a video of absolutely everything is completely stupid and insane. And I was wrong. What's changed since? Nine pages came out from the Pentagon, six of which are relevant. Three, I think, you know, it's like a cover and a back pay. I don't know what it is. And it's very

clear in that report that that report was meant to be as dull as as humanly possible about the most exciting thing that you could possibly imagine, which is that either we're engaged in an incredible psychological operation coming out of the Pentagon, or some people inside the Pentagon believe, with near certainty that we've been contacted and observed by extraterrestrials visiting Earth. That's pretty insane. And what's really crazy is that the data is locked up. You just said, We talked about the government is not attracting our best and brightest scientists. Why are the top physicists in the country? Why are the top astronomers in the country not looking at this problem?

Nobody that I know who's very good at physics or astrophysics or astronomy or anything knows what the hell's going on. And I've never seen anything remotely like this, Jesse. I thought you were completely wrong. This is a situation where you would not come off of this point. And I was convinced that you were brain damaged on this one issue. No, I really was. It's fair. And you were right.

I was wrong. I appreciate that. I don't understand it. It doesn't really. The key thing is whatever's going on is non-Copernican. We're not in a situation. We all have equal access to the same thing. Either it's a sci-op and almost nobody has information about it.

it or there's something out there that fits this paradigm that is not trying to be noticed. And I've given the example of North Sentinel Island where India manages North Sentinel Island but doesn't land there. And in such a circumstance, there would be a Fermi paradox among the natives of North Sentinel Island. Why don't we see anybody almost ever? Right. And the answer is, well, you're sort of owned and you're being protected from anybody

landing on your shores. Now, if that's what's going on, that's astounding. That's astounding. On the other hand, if humanity has a future, and I'm right, so I'm happy to give you your due, but give me mine, we have a future because we got off this planet and we diversified. Now, if we got off this planet and diversified, and that's how we survive, then it means anyone else out there could come here, and not with rockets. We're pretty sure that They're not on the moon and they're not on Mars in secret colony, I would imagine. Do you have a sense on the genetic stuff? It feels like a lot of people are just waiting for the data to come in.

And they talk a lot about bioinformatics. And as long as we, it's just a big sort of pattern matching issue. And as long as we have, you know, genetic sequences and we're matching them with phenotypes. And we get this big harmonized database. Right now it's a, it exists in a bunch of silos. You know, you have BGI, UK Biobank, whatever. We just put them all together, and then we know exactly the genetic code. I tend to think that's not the case.

It's not just a data collection problem. Do you have sort of an opinion on that? It's very interesting what's going on with machine learning on something like protein folding, where if you manage to attack something with machine learning, you don't always understand why you were able to solve what your machine was able to solve. It's very hard to interpret a successful neural net. right? What did it find?

What did it understand? The black box. Somewhat. Maybe we'll get to the point where you can inspect the black box. I don't know. But one thing you can say is that, okay, if you can get better at protein folding using some sort of a deep learning system, then there's probably something there that can be understood analytically. So I'm excited about some of the data science, but people are really looking for data science.

to replace thinking. Totally. And it's very interesting because the old issue with artificial intelligence was trying to get something to be intelligent. The dirty little secret is intelligence was needed for almost nothing. So with mere deep learning, you were able to do all sorts of things that we previously thought may have required intelligence.

Yes. I think a line I have on AI is, it's like the Daff Puck song, harder, better, faster, stronger. And that's all it can do. It can do what humans can do, and sometimes it's harder, better, faster, stronger. Sometimes it's not even as good as humans.

But that is different than innovation. Brute force is different than innovation. Whenever I see a startup that says we're resting on some data set or AI to create innovation, I'm always fairly skeptical of it just being sort of a data collection problem. I think real innovation is introduction. domain knowledge and consilience. G.U.

For you, is interdomain knowledge. And so I don't think AI is very good at that right now. You know, it's not a morality play. You see, we'd like, I love the romance of science where Jim Watson and Francis Crick are able to figure this thing out that Linus Pauling cannot. That's one thing. But sometimes you can easily.

imagine that the problem wasn't what you thought it was. It was much easier. Or you could prove that it's undecidable or something like this. So you have to sort of not overlay what is true with what is meaningful. It would be great if human intelligence had a place going forward for the rest of eternity. But I think that you'll get to the point where the songs that you love are written by computers. And it's going to flip you out. And then that you'll question is going to be, well, do you start caring less and less about music, the way we care less and less about chess? You know, what does it really mean if two chess machines go at it?

Do we really want to play through this as if this is speaking to the human soul? I don't know about that. I do think that none of this really matters. We have a very brief window to save ourselves. And the way out is super romantic. It's beautiful. but we're not motivated. It's like nobody wants to follow David Gagins.

Nobody wants to follow Jocko Willink. Those guys want to get up at 4 in the morning and start training. And I don't see that on behalf of our scientific community. And I don't think the machines at least can search while everybody else pops in edible and watches Netflix. Maybe AI, which is one of the things. the few areas where people say things are accelerating is actually just a form of learned helplessness and outsourcing our agency.

I think it is. I think that at some level we're going to find that it's not good enough to know whether things are true or that something can do them. We're going to want to know why things are true. And I think that that's part of the game. What if we can actually predict protein folding fairly well, but nobody has any idea of how we're able to do that, how much is that going to actually hold us back? And so I do think that we're going to get to a point where we've learned some things

and we're now angry that we don't know why the things that we know how to do. We just don't know why we know how. And I think that that kind of ruthless pragmatism eventually will cause itself its own problem. We'll be too powerful with too little wisdom. We're going to have all sorts of things that we know how to do that we're going to have unintended consequences of because we don't know how it's working. We don't understand the bedrock foundation. I agree with you, sir. Okay, let's go eat.

Let's go eat. What kind of cheese for your cheeseburger? It's American cheese. Can I get a hamburger with lettuce only? You're going paleo. You got lettuce wrap. Here's something I've been thinking about recently. an ironic effect of Snowden is there are all these revelations you had prism,

blow run, heartbeat, the NSA has a backdoor into everything was the revelation and then we can't we didn't do anything about it and think about the Panopticon effect that that ends up having on an individual where it's like we know that they can hear and listen to everything that we do and say and it's indexed and searchable and then then you also, we're not really doing anything about it. The half-silvered mirror only works if the people behind the half-silvered mirror rarely, if ever, intrude into your life in a distinct, identifiable fashion. So I think that the new thing that we believe is different.

I think that the new thing that we believe is, yes, they're watching us, but for some reason they can't afford to let us know what they know. So most of the information that they have is useless. Because you'd be crazy to sacrifice the whole program to go after somebody with an unpaid library fine. What are you excited about, like crazily excited about that doesn't involve money? I think there are certain anomalies, and I'm not excited about those things in their current form,

but I want to do them a more rigorous way. So like the UFO thing, like stuff, stuff like that. Take 12 figures just to be safe. 12 figures. Yeah. We can put that back there. First of all. Lechayem, my friend.

Lechayem. Yeah. There's a way in which growing up in Los Angeles, the primary association is that home is alienation. In some sense, I don't feel like I'm home unless I'm, in a place of alienation. It's sort of like I've likened it to growing up in a DeKirico painting, some industrial

landscape where you've abandoned everything. There's a child with a hoop running down the street. There's nothing. And for me, in a weird way, the doors are maybe the quintessential LA band. Of course, you had the birds and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Speaking of the doors and great music, you know I live in Laurel Canyon.

Yeah. It's a pretty amazing music history there. Are you aware of it? Some of it. I mean, I definitely go to the store where the creatures meet, and I'm familiar with the romance of Wonderland Avenue, and Carol King's tapestry has been a place of pilgrimage for myself and my daughter, where she wrote it. Laurel Canyon and Topanga Canyon are, to the extent that L.A. has spiritual energy,

probably the two places that have the strongest spiritual energy. It was such a weird place, too. You know Jim Morrison's dad, rear admiral Stephen Morrison, was in the Navy and in charge of the Gulf of Tonkin. Yeah. Really crazy. That's a very strange one. And as you point out, Lookout Mountain is a CIA facility in Laurel Canyon. And the whole history of drugs and the government and Vietnam and espionage and all this kind of stuff.

Very hard to sort out. It's hard to sort out. Very weird. There are all these sort of anomalous, bizarre. facts. It feels like LA was a crazy place in the 80s. It was dangerous. It was exciting. Now it feels like a weird Instagram hologram thing. You go to Boa Steakhouse and there are TikTokers everywhere, saddle ranch. It feels like a weird place. Every place is over. Okay. And I mean that. You can't move to New York and say it's happening in New York. It's going down in Austin.

No, you're not getting it, man. We're going to move to the Black Rock Desert. Brimman's, Britting Man's going to be 365. No, that's true. No place is happening. There are things that are happening, but they're happening between people. Sometimes they're happening between people who have never actually met in person. But I've always thought that secretly this was an incredibly intellectual town. Yeah, I think it's both.

I think there are many L.A.s. And that lack of identity, as frustrating as it can be to deal with, makes me hopeful. towards creating a Laurel Canyon of tech, science, out there ideas, and cool shit. I detect a spark of inspiration. I think in a weird way, I've come back after 37 years away. I was conceived in Laurel Canyon. I was born in what is now the Church of Scientology. It used to be Cedars of Lebanon.

That's amazing. And I ran away from this place at 16. so hard and so fast, I never thought I would be back. And I explored the world, and I lived in places that I needed to. I went back to Philadelphia, which was my family's ancestral seat to the extent that you can claim something as immigrants in the U.S. went to Boston, which I thought was the center of academics and science, moved to New York, which was hot for hedge funds, at least it could support creativity and rule breaking, moved out to San Francisco, to do tech, went to Jerusalem, and for two years, because it's the belly button of the universe.

And I think I came back to L.A. I'm not quite sure why I was here anymore. What I think I've put together is it's not happening anywhere. It's happening wherever you happen to be and wherever you can make it happen. And there's no point in city chasing, right? Like, you know, something is pulling me towards Austin. And somebody else is saying, come to Montana, come to Miami. And I think at this late stage in the game, I'm actually back home. I'm from this place.

My son is the fifth generation now of Los Angeles and our family, which effectively never happens. And, you know, whether it's the flood from the dam that burst in Baldwin Hills, or whether it's the 71 earthquake or the Bel Air Fire. You know, in some sense, there was somebody from my family here for all of those things. And, you know, what I said to Red East and Ellis is L.A. is this weird town where everybody has lived here. Because if you've consumed media, so much of it is shot in Los Angeles. Do you actually have a feel for this place whether you live here or not? Yeah.

And even though it sort of feels vapid and random and pointless at times, I think about maybe it's magic is that it's several different things. It's an oil field. We live on an oil field. It's an aerospace place, like the home of the rain corporation. It's not really clear that it's just entertainment. Entertainment, yeah, once upon a time, maybe that was really, really dominant. But in a certain sense, it's just a big canvas.

And maybe a Laurel Canyon of heterodoxy for different things, for science, for future-pointed culture that isn't necessarily so easy to pin down to popular music. Maybe it's time, and maybe it can be done here. But I think I'm home. Thank you for doing this, man. That was beautiful. Let's an end on that note. Thanks for a great day.

I love you, man. You too, love you. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.