Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein Part 2: Parenting, Peak Prosperity, & Weinstein University (#052)

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

   Part 2 of Brian Keating’s conversation with Eric Weinstein on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast pivots from faith & family to the course catalog at “Weinstein University” (fictional, for now!) which would combine scholarship with wonder. We also contemplate the notion of legacies, not just for our actual children, but for our ideological children as well. Show notes and, by popular demand, Eric’s slides from his famous 2013 “Geometric Unity” lecture at Oxford are available when you join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Highlights: 00:12:18 A place for the rituals of religion in an atheist’s life. 00:19:26 Crisis of faith versus crisis of reason. 00:25:20 Eric Weinstein’s parenting philosophy. 00:33:05 Resolving dualities in human lives and behaviors. 00:36:05 Rapid fire questions about God and aliens. 00:40:26 Eric’s legacies in space and time. Eric Weinstein has a Ph.D. from Harvard in mathematical physics. He is the managing director of Thiel Capital. Weinstein hosts the podcast The Portal  Watch part 1 of this interview with Eric Weinstein here.  Buy your own Klein bottle: here https://amzn.to/3e2apWP Find Eric Weinstein on the web: https://ericweinstein.org and Twitter: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein ‍♂️ Find Brian Keating on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Find Brian Keating on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy Brian’s book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php ️Please subscribe, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hello, everyone. This is Brian Keating, your fearful host of the Into the Impossible podcast, the production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. It's a pleasure to welcome back our guest, Eric Weinstein. This is actually part two of an interview we recorded back in May of 2020, early May of 2020. and it's just impossible to overstate how much has happened in the past few weeks since part one was released. And now in June of 2020, I had originally hoped to release this episode segment part two on Father's Day because of all the very interesting advice and insights and wisdom that Eric shares in this episode as you're about to hear. But Eric kind of beat me to it in that he actually interviewed his son.

an earlier episode on the Portal podcast, which I am a religious subscriber to, and I recommend that you do as well. And speaking of religion, this podcast will cover some of his insights into rituals and our shared religious practices in some sense, and where we differ in religion, along with such notables as Sam Harris and folks like Sasha Sagan, who we've had on the show. and I want to encourage people to continue giving Eric's work. It's fair share, its attention that it's due, whether or not you think it is ultimately correct. He's certainly an extremely deep thinker, and he has a tremendous amount of wisdom, which is a rare commodity to offer.

Time will tell if he's correct. And I think it's fascinating always to spend time with him. I encourage you to check him out. Of course, his podcast needs no introduction from me to you, but I do recommend it with my highest recommendation. So with that, I will ask you to sit back, enjoy this episode of Into the Impossible. If you would do us a big favor and leave a rating and review on iTunes

and leave a comment and a thumbs up, subscribe, notification bell, whatever else YouTube allows you to do, watch it in three dimensions maybe that will be very much appreciated as always that's sort of the secret sauce of this podcasting world and lastly i ask you to subscribe to my newsletter to get show notes from this episode and others we've had on some really spectacular guests and we're going to have on some even more guests even more spectacular guests not that they're more spectacular but there's going to be an increased number of spectacular guests including none other than Jim Simons in his very first and maybe only podcast that he's ever done.

I'm quite proud to say that he sat down with me for over an hour and a half, and we talked a lot about life. And that will be our Father's Day episode for 2020. We had a Mother's Day episode with Sasha Sagan. I've also interviewed her mother, Andrewian, and look for those episodes to be coming out. So please subscribe, like, rate, comment, do everything you can do. I don't know. I don't know what else there is to do.

But we really appreciate you out there. Give me some recommendations for people you'd like to have in the show and conversation. And now I turn it over to none other than Dr. Eric Weinstein and myself in part two of a very fascinating and wide-ranging conversation on life, the universe, religion, God, extraterrestrials, and everything else in between. What do you believe Eric Weinstein University would look like? How would you redo it? But what I meant before by the thousand-year-old tradition, it's certainly not peer review. It's certainly not, you know, the department structure that we have.

But basically, education is more or less unchanged since the time of the University of Bologna in 1080, sage on a stage, except back then I always point out that students could go on strike and the professors wouldn't get paid. We don't have any of that nowadays. But at Weinstein-U, how would things be different? And what kinds of novelty or injection into the academy would you provide? because I believe we're in peril, especially due to COVID. I think our current model, I think people at university are blissfully unaware of how

the short our days are going to be if we don't embrace new modalities, not just a cultural and the very punishing vindictiveness that you've experienced perhaps, but how would you run it? How would you run as the Provost Chancellor of Weinstein University? Well, first of all, look over your right shoulder. Right shoulders over here, yes. Well, down. Okay.

Wait, wait. I thought it was your other shoulder. This is right. Okay, so look over your left shoulder. Okay. The Klein bottle. Oh, yes. Bought by an advertiser.

Well, actually, you gave free advertising to these Klein bottles. Yep. And I bought about 10 of them. Your friend of the last. I would have people in direct contact with wonder. and I would have a curriculum based on wonder and transcendence because even if you're a physicist, you need to know about C. Elegance. You know, you need to know about the protein folding problem.

You need to know how the international phonemic alphabet is generated from the vocal apparatus in the human vocal tract. all of these things that we don't teach because we don't have a modern concept of what our greatest hits are. So you should be able to take the grand tour. Somebody who isn't a physicist needs to know that a weight going up an inclined plane is not fundamental to physics, but a weight on a spring, you can tell the world from a weight on the spring. Although I had a wonderful conversation with Mario Livio, who's the author of many books, including his God a mathematician, but his latest book is about Galileo and how Galileo faced the science deniers. It's called that Galileo and the

science deniers. And in it, I had a conversation with him about curiosity, which was the subject of his previous book called Why, and exactly what you're saying, teaching wonder, teaching, but I actually said we should teach the inclined plane, even though I've never used it once in my entire life as a physicist. But the reason we should teach it is we should teach the controversy that emerged from the, the the outcome of him being imprisoned for heresy and why that came about, why ideas are dangerous and threatened institutions, gates of institutional narratives that you talk about. And I think actually it does have value,

but it has value in a way that we wouldn't think, but we don't teach our physics majors. I understand what you're saying. I'm just trying to say that life is short. Yeah. And the key problem that I'm having is that taste is not being weapon. properly as a mode of instruction. So for example, the Anticthera mechanism

is really, really important. Cephalopods are really important. And then somebody will say, well, I don't understand. Why not nudibrox? And the answer is, no, cephalpods are much more important because it's an incredible level of intelligence that's developed very far away on the pilot genetic tree. So you're asking about Eric Weinstein University,

which doesn't exist, for how probably this probably thank God. But the key point is that it would be extolling, you know, everybody would learn the rudiments of Hamiltonian dynamics, the Hamiltonian recipe and the fiberbundles. Spring. Because that particular example, because of its oscillatory nature, sort of globalizes to everything. You would be trying to give people the highest impact knowledge that they could possibly

possibly carry around in their heads and then unpack it will rather than the sort of you know has to do with sort of the political economy of teaching whatever the field knows to be the right way of thinking it usually reserves for very late in the game you see this with children's education this year we're going to do ponska and the next year we're going to do plants and then the next year we're going to do animals and ecologists like for God's sakes start with natural and sexual selection and then apply it everywhere you know talk about you know the molecular basis of the genetic code the central dogma and the history you know use the eighth day of creation by judson as your text or something like it there's all sorts of genius level stuff to do to make the world come alive

and be vivid that doesn't involve boring people and making them sit through a million lessons until they finally get to the good stuff. Yeah. Would there be tenure at Weinstein University? Hell yes. Okay, great. Well, not only tenure. Yeah.

There would be luxury. Because luxury is actually, like, if you consume luxury, you're in act. Glutton. Sort of. But the purpose of luxury is to, it has an evolutionary purpose. I'm convinced, which is it tells your brain that it is safe to think, to dream, to experiment. But if what you do is just use it to show off, then, you know, you're basically popping platinum foil bonbons in your mouth and you're useless to everyone. There's a reason, for

example, that a place like MIT or Harvard might have a cottage for retreats. You know, I remember visiting Raoul Bott in his home in Martha's Vineyard and, you know, sunbathing and skinny dipping with him as we discussed the mysteries of the universe. It's very important that professors in reasonable subjects go send their kids to the same schools as the movers and shakers of business. And nobody likes to hear this. The mismanagement of our academics so that we've become lesser members of society. And the thing that really struck me at some point was when I was in finance in New York, somebody said, you know, get me two PhDs.

And I thought, what? Okay, so that's like a commodity? Like eggheads. you know, on my count. They're fungible too. Right. And my feeling is go fuck yourself. So keeping in a slightly different vein, yesterday, as I said, I talked to Carl Sagan's

daughter, Sasha Sagan. She has a book called For Small Creatures Such as We, and it's a book about rituals, ironically. And the last three conversations I've had with other intellectuals like Sasha have been about rituals in some form or another. Dave Rubin was on the podcast not too long ago, Michael Schumer before that. And in all cases, we talked about various rituals. Maybe it's the academic ritual in the case of Michael Schumer or with Dave Rubin. It's sort of this notion of the Sabbath and he takes this digital detox. I mean, he's Jewish, but he's not observant in any way,

but he takes a digital detox. Sasha, it's literally, you know, finding rituals that are secular to answer the question that has plagued, you know, many people, can you be spiritual without religion? And I wonder, you know, you're obviously Israel and Judaism is an important, you know, component of your life. You lived in Israel. You were post-talk in Israel. Can you talk a little bit about rituals that you observe, where they fit in importance? Do they have a place at the intellectual table? Are they a byproduct of a bygone error?

Where do they fit in in your life, rituals, maybe even in your work habits and how you do what you do? So more or less, maybe we screw up five times a year. We've had Shabbat dinner every Friday night in my family since my daughter was born 17 years ago. So that's incredibly powerful. And I don't think we should shy away from religion. Yeah. I don't think that means that we should believe in God necessarily. I'm perfectly happy with being religious and being material.

I think you go ahead. No, so yeah, I always say, you know, at least at most believe in one God, you know, because I do feel like there is, even in Sasha's book, and I kind of, I didn't, I don't want to say I called it out, but I, but I basically saying, you know, is there a danger, you know, because her book's about the seasons and that revolving from the axial tilt of the earth and how human beings have tracked things throughout the years and everyone can make up their own holidays. But I said, well, what if that dies with you? In other words, to what do we owe past generations? I'm against this.

Okay, yeah. So go where you fall over backwards. Say, no, no, I'm not religious in any way. Okay. I understand the impulse. I say that I still identify atheistically. But I don't believe that my mind knows that I'm an atheist. I believe that my mom. is religious and it was meant to be religious and it has to do with possibly, you know, the evolutionary basis of what do you do with the parental reverence once you're dispensed with parental distance? You have to invest it and shunt it somewhere. Maybe it has to do with overlapping generation so you don't become a sociopath. You have to watch then that you don't become a religious sociopath. It's very complicated, of course. What I guess I'm trying to get at is rationalists and people in the sort of less wrong community

will get rid of all of the structure and then they'll spend their time trying to reinvent it and they'll go to Burning Man or they'll invent Sunday assembly right whatever and my feeling is cut it out you know you're being ridiculous um my favorite challenge is if I told you that you could be part of an ethnic group that with one quarter of one percent of the world's population would win 25 percent of the Nobel Prizes in physics, but it's a religious ethnic group. Would you want to get rid of the religion if it had been such an incredible factor in terms of a Bayesian prior as to who's likely to succeed? Is that correlation? I mean, I do believe that. I don't know. But my point is that you would certainly not casually say, oh, to hell with that nonsense. I know. Yeah, you did talk about this on your podcast, which I love with Rabbi Wolpe. And you guys, sure did mention Nobel Prize a lot. And you know the thesis of my book is the Nobel Prize is sort of a worship, idol worship of Odazara, as we say in Hebrew. But the notion of, you know, everybody

serves a God. I mean, even if you're, and I had this debate with Lord Martin Rees and with, and with Freeman Dyson, the late great Freeman Dyson. And he said, you know, I'm basically agnostic. And I said, well, Freeman, that's interesting, but do you go to church? And he's like, no, not really. I stuck on. And I'm like, well, so how would an alien looking at Freeman Dyson know that you're not an atheist? You go to the same, you go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. You know, in other words, how do you differentiate yourself? And, you know, he couldn't really answer. It was sort of this a little bit mumbled thing. And I do believe I'm agnostic in the sense that I'm open. I do feel a tradition. I'm not Orthodox. I always point that out because I don't want Orthodox people to get. you know, the wrong impression that I'm speaking on their behalf in any way. But I think you and I do things that at least differentiate ourselves from true atheists. And so I think we can say we're atheist or agnostic or however. But I think that's sort of a natural place for a scientist to be and that you're, the one thing Freeman did say that I did agree with on the show that we did together was, you know, that God is a great mystery and science is a great mystery. And what's more

delicious than solving mysteries and playing with puzzles. And I think he was a ponderer of the highest order. And I would say, you know, it was good enough for Freeman Dyson. It's good enough for me. One, two, a one, two, three, four. Give me a break. Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar. Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar. Have a break. Give me a break. Give me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar. Have a break. Have a Kit Kat. I think it's an interesting issue. I think that they, you know, what I would say is that I'm of a divided mind, is almost all religious people are of a divided mind. The component that I identify with most strongly is probably my atheistic component.

But I think it would be irrational to deny the other components. Like I find faith everywhere in science. It has to do with probably an evolutionary adaptation. Given that I believe that my brain's architecture is predisposed towards faith, even though I may disagree with that somewhere else, you know, it's a little bit like weakness of will problems where I know I don't want to see that candy bar on the scale, but boy, it sure looks tempting. I don't understand why people can't talk about the fact that their mind is doing things that they don't understand.

We can't easily locate your pancreas. Your body is kind of a mystery. You're its owner, but you don't really know how it works. Like programs between your ears that have never run, that if you've suddenly found yourself in the life and death situation, like you've probably never gone seven days without food. You probably don't know what a real thing is like. Right.

I've never seen the back of my head in real time. You've never seen the back of your head. And so I think that partially the problem is that the atheist community and the rational is a trauma community. And just the way I've tried to own my trauma so people can say, okay, I understand he had some bad experiences in academics, and in part he's reacting to things that he's actually been through. Maybe he's carrying over things that aren't always there,

but maybe the ideas that we don't see the problem. I think that a lot of the rationalists and the less wrong people are traumatized. Very often, you know, I grew up in Jehovah's Witness home, and we were never allowed to question. Well, no kidding, now I understand a lot more of where you are. But any time you see bi-directional traffic, like you see people who've had too much religion

flee towards atheism, and you've had people like me who grew up in a completely atheistic setting move more towards tradition and ritual. And things like time shares, in general, people fall into them, but once they get out, they don't come back. So my feeling about this has to do with, or predatory timeshares, if there's any good timeshare community, I don't want to do.

I think that in essence, there's a dialogue about faith and reason. And if you, you should know where, which one of those places home is, you don't invite the other one in. You're missing the experience of being a human. And my friends in the atheist world freak out about this. My friends in the religious world know what it means to have crisis of faith. It's interesting that Christ, of faith occurs as a reasonable thing in the world of the religious.

Crisis of reason does not have a name so much in the atheist world. And I don't know why that is. Yeah, you see that. There's a famous quote by a rabbi, I believe it is, and he says something to the effect, you know, to the believer. The believer has to explain the odyssey, you know, the existence of evil with a good God. but the non-believer has to explain everything else. It's pithy. It's kind of cute.

But there is some truth to that. I look at Sam Harris, a friend of yours. I've never met him, but I've read all his books. And he goes to great pains to basically delineate what he's doing is not a religion. He doesn't believe the Buddha had a complete enlightenment. And yet at the end, he's using all these terms and he's using, you know, Prima Vata, whatever. He's using all the terms of Buddhism, all the catechism,

that are inherent and without. And I think, you know, I just see him, and I see, like, he's so conflicted. And he has, he has just brilliant ideas. And one of them I want to get your opinion on, you've probably heard him say this. It's from a, he's quoting in waking up, his book waking up, he's quoting this philosopher Derek Parfit. And I want to talk to you in relative to your philosophy and being a parent, because I don't think you've ever talked about this on your podcast, at least.

And I can't resist the indulgence of the host, if you'll indulge me, to ask you about parenting, but I want to get your take on this quote first. So Sam Harris quotes this philosopher, Derek Parfit. He says, imagine a spaceship. Do you have a few minutes, Eric? Okay. Okay, great. Imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars. Rather than travel for many months on a spaceship, you need only enter a small chamber close to home and push a little green button and all the information in your brain and body will be sent to a similar station on Mars. There you'll be reassembled down to the last Adam. Imagine all your friends have done it. All of them seem fine and they describe the experience as instantaneous relocation. You push the green button and you

find yourself standing on Mars. That's wonderful. Your most recent memory is of punching the green button and everything happens fine. So you decide to go to Mars. However, in the process of arranging your trip, you learn a troubling fact about the mechanics. It turns out that the technicians wait for your replica to be built on Mars before obliterating his or her original body. This has the benefit of leaving nothing to chance. If something goes wrong in the replication process, no harm has been done. However, it raises the following concern. While your double is beginning his day or her day on Mars, with all your memories, goals, and prejudices intact,

you'll be standing in the teleportation chamber on Earth. Just staring at a green button. Imagine a voice coming over the intercom to congratulate you for arriving safely at Mars. In a few moments, you'll be obliterated. How would this differ from simply being killed? And he relates us to suicide. But what I want to relate it to is, isn't that what kids are in some sense?

Like, you're not going to be around. I mean, you want to be around for as long as possible. some of my friends Dave Asprey wants to live to be 180 you know in the biblical age that Moses lived to is held to be the highest standard 120 years but the reality is death stocks us all I viewed that quote you know in Sam Harris's book from this philosopher Derek Peters

I view it as kind of a metaphor about parenting like you are going to transmit into the future you're not going to teleport in space perhaps unless you know geometric unity has that lying within it But in fact, we are teleporting our memes, if you will, our ideas into the future. And I wonder, what is your philosophy? First of all, how do you react to that vignette, that thought experiment? Would you take that chance?

Would you push that button? And two, what are you? Yeah, that's right. Well, yeah, you're still conscious, though, right? I don't know. Unconsciously conscious. I wake up a new person. They call it the little death, right?

The green button is the decision to close my eyes. and if I could avoid it, I think I wouldn't go to sleep ever. Really? Okay. What is your workday like, by the way? What is your workflow like? Is it the same every day? Do you eat the same food like Steve Jobs and wear the same outfit? No, I'm incredibly dysfunctional.

I'm incredibly dysfunctional. So it's chaos? Every day is different? It's every day. I tried to get more chaos into my life, but there are people who insist that it be less chaotic than I would shoot. I don't know why I'm amusing to you, but that's, I'm answering honestly. I know, I believe you are.

So tell me about your theory of parenting. You've spoken about, you know, your, your relationship, I guess, with your in-laws. And obviously, you've mentioned your daughter, although she has a private personality. I don't want to talk anything personal. But what, how do you view being a father and the relationship you have with Pia and how do you, do you have a philosophy? Or is that every day like your daily life sounds like is a new beginning? Um, an interesting question. Uh, so are you a Tom Lara fan? Yeah. You still there?

Now, that stuff was so over that, um, sorry, Eric, I dropped that for about 30 seconds. You said, am I a Tom Lehrer fan? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Let me start again. Okay. Um, when you're exposed to Tom Lairer as a child, uh, all of the naughtiness of the world is brought to your feet and laid there. And I guess what I felt was that my grandfather was part of this, where he showed me that the world wasn't the way it was claimed to be. And maybe it's an intrinsically very Jewish thing to constantly question the frame. Most people had questions inside of a frame and they answer the question to the best of their ability.

and Jews tend to question the frame. They spot the argument. What is my philosophy that you should let your kid drive well before the age of 16? You should make sure that your children know what alcohol tastes like and trace amounts to rob it of its mystery and appeal. What?

What about drugs? It is a drug. What about a hard schedule one drugs? You obviously don't want them to dabble in it or psychedelics like Sam Harris. Somebody else could decide that that was a good, I mean, I have a friend who's very well known, who I think was given trace amounts of Schedule I substances.

You could make an argument that Schedule I substances are safer, a certain physiological sense. I personally do not favor getting inebriated on drugs, at least until your brain is pretty, well developed. So I very much worry the purpose of getting a trace amount of alcohol is to say oh that's what scotch tastes like. It's no longer something I need to sneak to know. You know, so the point isn't that you should get drunk when you're a kid or you should get high when you're a kid. The point is you should

try to prevent your children from becoming alcoholics. And In essence, another piece of my philosophy, I guess, is don't push your children because you can, any person can turn their child into a prodigy. There's an emergency program in the mind of a child that says if your parents die, grow up super fast. And it's, you know, it's like a backup parachute if your first parachute fails. So don't push your children, but put everything in front of them in case they're ready for something super early. I had a situation with my son where my son was without question the worst musician of all time, bar none. He could not do anything. He was musically hopeless. And then right before he turned 13, in six weeks, he taught himself four instruments while he was procrastinating for his Torah portion.

And that told me a lot that even though I had been dutifully putting it in front of him and taking it away, putting it in front of taking away, the brain wasn't ready. So don't get into a thing where somebody else's kid is, you know, one of my kids walked and talked and talked pretty young and the other one didn't. Get involved in competition about your child's brain is developing according to its own path and neither your child nor you will understand it well enough. Do not become your child's best friend ever. Yep. You have plenty of best friends, right? You are something far more important than a best friend. A best friend would be a demotion if you're a parent.

So leave that spot open in your child's life. And teach your children to break the rules and teach them how to take responsibility for the breaking of the rules. When you break the rules, it's not cheap. So you should teach them. Like if you're going to break the rules, you bought it. You broke it, you bought it. you have ownership and you better put more in the till by the end of the day than you then you

took out and you have to think about can i afford to take this money out of the till and am i public spirit and what if something goes wrong um high agency you know there was just this kid who apparently took the family sedan from utah to california he was five years old and was uh pulled over on the interstate because his parents forbid him from buying a Lamborghini with with the lunch money. And, you know, this five-year-old kid is driving to California successfully in the family car. And I just thought, I hope that kid listens to the portal.

That's my, that's the future of America people. Right. Well, it's funny. As you're talking, it reminds me of a couple of dichotomies that I've taken in my approach to Jewish parenting. Although I'd say it applies to anyone. I mean, what our tradition is known for at most or at best, maybe, is our, our commitment to books and to really treasuring the wisdom of the elders not to say,

oh, don't trust anyone over 30. I mean, we trust people that are 30 centuries old. And one of those is a statement in the Talmud, which is the dichotomy of raising kids, and the dual side of, on one hand, planting and building. And the Talmud speaks about planting versus building. And there's a book by probably a relative of Rabbi Wolpey named Shlomo Wolbe. And he has a book called Planting and Building, Raising a Jewish Child. but I think it applies to any child whatsoever, non-Jewish.

I always love it, by the way, that we talk about. When the Jew talks, they'll say the goyam, you know, it just means nations. But like, as you said, we're 0.2% of the world's population. Like, what other group has, you know, there's a name for non-Scanadian? No, it's just non-Scanonavians. Like, there's no other word for it. So I always think that's kind of cute. But anyway, these rules apply, I believe, to any child.

And it's this dichotomy between planting, which is like you fertilize the soil and the kid has a natural propensity, her to grow and develop in a certain way. On the other hand, you have to build and program into this child, a certain framework and structure to fall back on. But to that, I'd add a trichotomy, Weinstein, you know, Rabbi Weinstein would be breaking. So it's planting, building, and breaking. I think, I agree. Those are fundamentally, you know, I think it's not like abusive parent if you don't do it, but nevertheless, I think that's really wonderful. And I think also, too, another, just speaking of dualities, I want to get your impression, Rabbi Solovec, a famous 19th century rabbi into the 20th century, had a statement about the two

different descriptions in Genesis of Adam, of the character, Adam, if you believe, I don't care if people out there believe it or don't. I'll take it literally, I don't, but, you know, metaphorically, there's two descriptions of the same human being, at least. And one is sort of, you know, what he was capable of doing. And, you know, he calls those sort of the, the resume virtues, but then it speaks of his intrinsic qualities and his nature to be in the image of God or some transcendent being if God is too loaded a word. And he calls that the eulogy virtues, you know, so to speak, or David Brooks ended up calling it that. And I wonder, I mean, do you feel like there are those two sides? And do you feel like there's any conflict between these, we have all these

dualistic natures, like you said, breaking versus building, or I said building, and then resume versus eulogy. I wonder, is one more important or should we strive to strike a balance between the two in your opinion as parents? It's an interesting question. I guess I think a lot about the pajama experiment and the discovery of the operon. So the DNA discovery had a very clear visual, but unfortunately, Operon was not as well known in biology. It had to do. with regulated expression. So in some sense you have is you have wisdom, but sometimes you need to repress some wisdom because it's not the right wisdom for right now and sometimes you need to promote some other wisdom that hasn't run in a long time. So

very often what you have to understand is that the code is wrapped and it's like run this part of the code under these circumstances, suppress this part of the code under these other circumstances. This is why there's an oral Torah as well as a written Torah, why there's a Supreme Court to interpret the oral constitution. It is not found in the written constitution. And this is why there is development is different from genetics. So it's kind of a through line that nobody notices.

And then people try to resolve all this textually. And this is what confuses me about my friend Sam Harris more than the usual confusion, which is, yes, there's a lot of code. and what you need to do is bind repressor on the stuff that says, you know, throw gaze off of cliffs, which, you know, might be found in the hadiths or something like that, but in the Jewish text in Deuteronomy, it tells us to set upon apostates with the stones. It's very important that that code not run, even though it's in Deuteronomy. You don't have to remove it.

It's there for a caution to describe the magnitude of the transgression. Well, or maybe it's antiquated code that now, you know, there's no evidence that it was ever run. Yeah, that's right. Same with the stoning the kid, the rebellious son, right. So in part, I think the problem is that the paradigm of regulated expression never made it to prime time. And everyone in biology knows how important it is and nobody outside of biology thinks enough about it. I would say that that's really kind of the issue that you have to express, and this is the the issue of Ecclesiastes, where there's time,

every purpose under heaven, when to run the right code and when to think about the potential and when to think about the in forensics and what was and what could have been. And I think you need a richer language of paradigm in order to capture it. Otherwise, when you don't have a sufficiently rich vocabulary, of paradigm, you spend your life as a pendulum oscillating between contradictory directives,

not understanding that regulated expression and superposition resolve most of the dialect. Very interesting. Well, I want to turn to some lighter topics just to finish up in the last few minutes, things I ask all my guests. But before I do that, because I rarely have this chance, I'm going to ask you to say, you know, true or false. and only say true or false. And if you can't answer, you can say true false or pass, okay?

Okay. I'm going to take silence as agreement as the Talmud says. Are there extraterrestrial intelligences capable of interstellar space travel? Yes or no? Or pass? Are they extraterrestrial? I think they're terrestrial intelligence.

Okay. Fair enough. But yes, yes. Okay. Is there at least one God that exists? Not necessarily sentient, but it might be a design constraint. Good. Are you familiar with the simulation hypothesis? I am. Do you think it's... I'm not the simulator. Okay. Let's see.

What are we going to ask about it? Oh, does it... Is it... Are we in a simulation? Are we in the matrix? Are you... I know you're not Neo, but... We are working about both being the simulators, it will give rise to AGI and the simulated. We do not realize that if we put the two together, our story is really, should God fear us, becoming emergently, intelligently within the world. Okay. Because we are both the simulated and simulator, and we haven't connected the two stories.

Do you think the lifespan or health span of a human being can be extended beyond, 120. Well, we've had one person live to 122, 123, so that's trivially. True. Okay, 180. Potentially, but you might not, as the Gershwin said, who calls that living when no gal would give in to no man, what, 900 years? That's right. And let's see, I think that wraps up the, Oh, what's just wrapping up with extraterrestrials. If you wanted to signal to an extraterrestrial species that we are worthy of peaceful visitation, what would you put on your interstellar billboard

to notify them of humanity's presence and capabilities? Well, I really like ACDCs you shook me all night long, but in part because it uses the same four notes that magically animate the schmach. That's right. Very good. Okay. Yes, you shook me home.

Yes, sir. Okay, we're gonna have a minion going soon. Okay, now the last five questions, and then I will let you go, sir. So I think about people interacting with our work that we do either, usually I have authors on. I do want you to let you. Actually, you know what?

I might put the ceiling of Lissa Grada familiar. Okay, very well. I've heard worse choices. So usually I have authors on. I do want to encourage you for many reasons, not the least of which, you know, we never know when our time is up and we have an obligation as Jews, as human beings, I believe, to write what's called the Sava A, an ethical will. If you were to write a book or write an ethical will,

summarizing your gestalt, who you are for your children's children's children's children. The reason I want you to write a book is this question, you mentioned your great-grandfather. Let's go one step further. If you found out your great-great-great-great-grandmother wrote a thrilling autobiography in Eastern Europe, presumably, and you could have it, you know, is there any price you wouldn't pay for such a document? I think your great-great-great-grandchildren, you don't know who they are by definition. So I encourage you to write a book. I do. I think it would be, even without writing a paper. I think that would be the ultimate if you wrote a book on your theory and didn't write a paper. But anyway, because then you can't, up your H index, then your H index stays constant. Anyway, who would you rather engage with your book that I'm going to keep pestering and you to write or your theories and your thoughts?

People that are kind of accepting of your work or people that are nemesis, haters, skeptics. Exema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with ebbgless, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four and seven people taking ebbglis, achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Ebglis, Librikizumab, LBKZ. A 250 milligram per 2-millimeter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies.

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My work will work its course. So my feeling about it is I'm not worried. I think I will have said what I needed to say, and if people want to fight it in my lifetime or they want to accept it, there will be a certain amount of whatever. What I am very

focused upon is let's assume that it's right in the moment. If it's right, I would like people to listen to all the other crazy things I have to say after they've piled on with their vitriol, their nonsense, they're animus,

because nothing would give me greater joy than to have people get me completely wrong the first time and then realized that what I was trying to say about saving ourselves and being better stewards was a was heartfelt meaningful and the idea that Einstein got to write ideas and opinions because of the field equations, even though almost nobody knows the field equations, they have a sense that he must have been onto something important. So if my stuff turns out to be right, I would like the rest of what I've been saying, be taken seriously. And thankfully, I've been able to leave a lot of it as audio.

Because I'm an ear-mouth person rather than an eye-hand person. Right. Because of a learning issue. Desgraphia and other challenges you've overcome. Okay, this brings me into my last kind of standard question that I ask all my guests in one form or another. It's a quote by Sirin Kierkegaard who said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be live forwards. And what I want to ask you is what thing in your life at age 20 was perplexing and then makes sense now through the lens of time, experience, wisdom? You know, I would say science means knowledge.

It doesn't mean wisdom. So now that you've accumulated wisdom, what thing would you tell your 20-year-old self that seemed impossible and then venturing into the impossible gave you clarity into the reality of this aspect of your nature? Well, it's going to be very,

it's going to sound very specific, but it actually governs all of our lives. I was astounded by the brutality indifference, cruelty of my elders. And I did not understand the extent to which the entire world changed in the early 1970s in a structural fashion. There is now a website, I wouldn't put it exactly in 1971. Sometime between 1971 and 1973, the world changed character

in a way that can be easily seen. I think it's called WTF happened in 1971, if you want an introduction to somebody else's version. I did not understand that my entire life as an adult would be lived in a bubble dominated by two generations that cannot come to grips with the fact that the world changed structurally and punishing those of us who came after them,

forcing us to live in a simulation of the world before 1971 through 73 that we are eventually going to have to pay for. And for example, when I started working for Peter Thiel, who was a guy who has many of my opposite characteristics, you'd never think we'd get along. But he's slightly younger than me by a year or two. And I always thought I had a problem with authority, and I thought I had a problem working for other people.

And more or less, we've gotten on great for seven years. And the reason in part is that I only worked for people considerably older than I was or under. And I realize that this is just a very serious dividing line, this bubble, which began initially in the fall of 1945 when World War II ended and ended, I think, on February 19th of this year, 2020, when the market figured out that Corona was going to be a big deal. It's been a 75-year interruption of reality. And in particular, the power nap was between 1945 and 1970 through 73. And the rest of the time after the interregonum, from 73 on, has been this bubble of complete unreality. And I think most people that I know don't realize that they've grown up in the Truman Show.

It's a universal Truman Show, and it's cracking. now. This is the end of it. And so, you know, an interesting example inside of the university system is look at the career of Norman Steenrod on the Math Genealogy Project, a guy who's advised his last advisee in 1972, right when this thing changed. And all of his students go on to become professor. It's impossible for everybody to train professors to become professors and to have 20 students because you start 20 to higher and higher powers and you see the explosion. And so in essence, we have been growing up in a simulation of a world we have never seen. And the intergenerational stuff is so far thrown off that we are actually considering having an

election between a 70, what, four-year-old man and a 77-year-old man. when previously, you know, before Trump, Ronald Reagan was the oldest president ever to take the oath at inauguration was 69. This is not believable. And if we do not realize that we are going to have to pay the bills of our grandparents and parents, and we have no resources to do it,

we are spinning out of control. It is time to recognize as much as we love these people, they have led us into a very dangerous place. Far away from reality. We found out that we don't manufacture our own masks. We can't get tests. We don't have reagent. We are sitting ducks.

There is no government effective. There is no ability to convene smart people. There's no place that we can have a Manhattan project for anything because we can't have smart people asking questions because everyone's too busy looting. So I think that this concept of Babylon long that we live in comes from a change in growth regime that happened between, let's say, 1971 through 73. And just like the period between 1952 and 54, where you have DNA and the hydrogen

bomb, everything changes sometimes over a tiny period of years. So if I asked myself when I was growing up, why are these old people so horrible? I would have understood that what happened was that they've been locked into a Ponzi scheme, which is structural, and they weren't courageous enough to stop it, and that it wasn't coming out of personal cruelty. It was coming out of the fact that they just couldn't imagine that they should live in any different circumstances than they did. Well, Eric, I want to thank you for that discussion.

It's been incredible. I will certainly refer people to all the different sites. I'll point out that that site is, WTF happened in 1971, and I know that one of the things, that happened is very important to me because that's the year I was born. So it's not listed on the chart, but it has some importance to me. Well, also the standard model more or less got to put in place. And that's right. And some date that as, you know, sort of controversially speaking,

is, you know, kind of the end of the high growth period. Now, I mean, what you're saying is in direct opposition to a guest I had on recently Peter Diamandas, who kind of views, you know, the future is getting rosier all the time, along with his friend Ray Kurzweil and the so-called popularizer of the singularity hypothesis, that we're going into this realm of abundance. And you've heard this in the heat speaks in the material world. You've heard this from Stephen Pinker and even Michael Shermer and in terms of the better angels of our nature and rationality now and et cetera. And I wonder, you know, how you react to those, you know, hypotheses that basically are

or conjecturing something completely the opposite. That seems that life is... Very simple. Very simple. If you don't have a potential energy term, you don't get conservation of energy inside of a physical system. If you don't have a potential horror term, I guarantee you everything is getting better, as Dr. Pinker says. But the problem is that the singularity already happened.

It was predicted by Derek DeSoul of Christ at Yale in around 1959. came true in about 1971 through 73. It wasn't the singularity that Diamandis, Kurtzweil are talking about. And Pinker can be explained by making sure that you neglect the fact that the potential horror is the conversion of kinetic horror. So yes, it appears that there is a weird free lunch.

But if you'll think about the blast radius of a high hydrogen device superimposed on your favorite metropolitan area, you will find that, in fact, there is a price to be paid for this peace and this prosperity. You've talked about the cell and the atom and these two different... Twin-tun nuclei problem. Yeah. And, you know, the problem is that Pinker will appear to be right until the object is impressed upon him.

And my friend Nassim Taleb is fond of saying, The farmer is awfully good to the turkey right up through the end of November. That's right. For our vegan friends, the pumpkin is treated well by the pumpkin farmer until the end of October. Well, Eric, I want to thank you so much. You're a real mensch, and I do want to extend an invitation for you to visit. And I'm not, you know, this is totally sincere. I'm inviting you in front of the, you know, tens of thousands of people who will listen to this.

And, you know, after this podcast, it's going to be good for you. because between my show and Joe Rogan show, you will have been seen by like 6 million and one people. So that's really, I take great credit for that. But I do want to extend to you in all seriousness, an opportunity not just to meet with me, as I would treasure, but also to meet with my colleagues who work on experiments. These are people like Elena Apriel and Kai Shuan Nie and Frank Worth,

and other people here. And they are mentioned like you. And I think you will derive great. benefit from talking with these wonderful folks because I think the truest sign of respect is when we challenge each other. But it has to be in a good nature fashion. It cannot be for vindictiveness, ad hominem attacks. And that's, you know, just to circle back to the beginning, it really set me off. I know you don't need me to defend you in any way, but it set me off that there were ad hominem things being raised about you, about Stephen Wolfram. And, and, you know, I challenge him. I

challenge you here and there today. I think it's important. Can I just ask you, where did you see these? So there's tweets I can send you. There are Reddit fora that speak about this. They're, you know, mostly it's these, you know, people on the, on the social media. So the original one was obliquely, you know,

mentioning, mentioning that, you know, the degree of credulity expressed at a theory, this by Sean Carroll of something presented on, you know, TikTok or on a podcast should be taken, you know, quite low where, you know, unless it's published in a paper, perhaps, you know, he didn't respond directly and say your name, but there are others who, you know, have criticized you specifically, and I can send you that. But again, it's, it's the same kind of, you know, publish or it didn't happen and refereeing. I think Sean wasn't wrong. His point was very carefully phrased. It did the effect of on the inference

you could tell that he was pissed. Yeah. But he was careful in saying, not that this can't be true. Correct. But that the Bayesian prior should tell you that something is wrong. Sean carefully avoids me in many different ways. His wife less so. But I think that the, Sean at his best,

is trying to perform a service. for the world so that it does not become confused. I wish he would perform the same service for string theory because he has been relatively friendly to a much more dangerous theory. If you look at the number of 10 hours that have been spent string theory, if you look at the number of PhDs, time wasted, the cost, the string theory is astronomical relative in its cost to either Wolfram's theory or to my theory.

The problem is selective application of the rules. You have a speed limit that is enforced against black motorists and not enforced against white motorists. You have to ask yourself the question, why the asymmetric enforcement? But I don't think that what Sean is saying is wrong at a technical level. And the great pleasure would be to show that unlikely

is not the same thing as definite. Yeah. Fair enough. Well, Eric, it's a pleasure to spend so much time with you. I thank you for your graciousness and the willingness to come on and speak with us. I do. I will keep badgering you to both write a book

and to visit San Diego in the near future. I accept on the latter. Okay, well, I'll try to work on. I have ways of making you write. Eric, a bit of pleasure. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I know you've got to get on to other stuff. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Dr. Keating, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk to with your listeners, and it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD.

Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.