The Joe Walker Podcast - An Ode To The Uncorrelated Thinker - Eric Weinstein

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and the Managing Director of Thiel Capital.Show notesSelected links •Follow Eric: Website | Twitter •The Three Languages of Politics, by Arnold Kling •'Opinions and Social Pressure', paper by Solomon AschSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Pinot Noir. So if you're an Aussie who likes red wine and likes helping out a bit as well, go to goodwillwine.com.au, select the mixed red case and enter the discount code SWAGMAN. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. If you're new to the show, welcome especially. It's great to have you here. Make sure you subscribe and follow to keep getting episodes like this one. We put them out on a roughly weekly basis, although we have been putting out a few more recently.

It is the end of a long Sunday night here in Sydney. It is Sunday, the 27th of September, 11.40pm and please forgive me if I mince my words a little bit. I am quite tired but this is a special episode. This is our 100th episode and I wanted to say a huge thank you to you and to this entire audience for helping me get this far. It was never something that I thought I would be able to achieve, but it has been so much fun and we are certainly going to keep going for another hundred, another thousand episodes because there seems to be a lot of value at least in terms of the listenership, the numbers we get, the feedback we get. Essentially, it's just me talking to people I find interesting about

topics that I find interesting. And it seems like there are enough people in the world who share those interests. So it's been so great to form this like-minded tribe and connect with all of you swagmen and swagettes. I have a beer here, which I am going to crack to celebrate the 100th episode. I'm going to crack it into the mic. Oh, yeah. Wow. And I'm just, I'm going to bump the mic to cheers you guys. That's a cheers.

Boom. Oh, bit of ASMR for you. And I've got beer all over my laptop as well. But thank you so much for joining us on this journey. It has been a great pleasure getting to know so many of you and obviously amazing, fun meeting people, particularly at our live event in Melbourne earlier in the year with Peter Singer before the pandemic broke out. You'll probably notice that the podcast now has a new logo um we have tried to professionalize it a little bit more and we've also tried to represent the spirit of the show um and that

comes with the birds in the logo the little white bird who's departed the flock is supposed to represent contrarianism and thinking for yourself um that is a theme that's kind of emerged as the show has gone on through the speakers and the topics. And I don't want to kind of pose as some sort of intellectual guru, but it is something that I hope you take from the show, learning how to think for yourself and having the courage to think for yourself. It's definitely not something that comes easy to any of us, but it's a matter of continually trying. It's an ongoing process. And I think that given how much in life we choose what we want by consulting the gaze of others, it's often really useful to stop and think, am I holding this belief because I've genuinely arrived at it through reasoning from first principles or am I just holding it because everyone else seems to

be saying the same thing? That's a very powerful ability to be able to think for yourself. And and when I say contrarian, I don't mean someone who is contrary. There are a lot of people, you probably know people in your own life who seem reliably to always believe in the latest conspiracy theory. Contrarianism is not about putting a minus sign in front of the consensus. Sometimes the crowd is right in the wisdom of the crowd. Sometimes the crowd is is right in the wisdom of the crowd sometimes the crowd is very wrong which is obviously the madness of crowds and the ability of the contrarian is to to be able to tell the difference so that's what we've tried to represent in the logo and the guest for this episode is a first class heterodox thinker and contrarian himself. It's his second appearance on the episode. He is Eric Weinstein, who you will probably know from all sorts of other podcasts, including

his own, The Portal. But Eric is a mathematician. He has a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University. And he is the managing director of Thiel Capital, which is billionaire Peter Thiel's family office. Eric's a great guy. I think he's an important voice. He's a refreshing tonic in these tribal and deranged times. And I could think of no one better than Eric to be the guest for our 100th episode. So without much further ado, please enjoy this conversation with the great Eric Weinstein.

Boom. That means we're on. Awesome. All right. Eric Weinstein, thank you so much for joining me. Joseph, always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show for our 100th episode. I could think of no better guest guest a man that i find more interesting than almost anyone on the planet and the only person in my phone contacts who has their own theory of everything we're the only one who's dumb enough to admit it so it's a pleasure to be back with the jolly swag man you should know that i've acquired a friend in the math uh mathematics field in melbourne who is now known as Tim the mirthless swag man how did you make this guy well he's part of the sort of the discord community for the portal podcast he's a great great human being and we've been doing doing some mathematics together so

anyway great to be with you all I had a blast last time last time. I know that I was a very difficult guest to get to make plans. But when we finally did it, I had a tremendously good time. And I also really enjoyed some of the feedback I got from your audience. You've got a great audience. Oh, awesome. Yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago. It was sometime early january and one of the bizarre things was um we or many of us were wearing masks i remember we spoke on the phone at some point during the australian summer during the bushfires and you said that i needed to be wearing a mask and um now what is it almost eight months later many of us are still wearing masks but for a very different multiplicative threat that's the whole thing about plagues and the apocalypse it doesn't it doesn't just stop with one yeah so what's happening in la right now are you uh you in a safe space i don't know

nobody knows where i mean are you really in la are you in your house are you connected to other people when you're having skype uh calls like funerals i've been in funeral situations in which people can't meet in physical reality but they're putting you know to rest a family member who um everyone knows and yet everybody's gathered around a screen. So I think we're really seeing a very strange transition where we're leaning very heavily on our technology. Our technology is what's allowing us to have a funeral, for example. And the ways in which we transmit and communicate

as human beings with each other that involve ideas and emotions and eye contact. I mean, like the fact that I don't exactly know whether I should be looking at your face on the screen or looking into my camera so that I have the illusion of eye contact with you. This is really reworking us as a species because we don't really know how to adapt. And I find it fascinating. I did go through the Hong Kong flu in the late 60s as a kid.

And somebody brought up the fact that Woodstock took place during the Hong Kong flu. That at some level, people weren't doing this. So it's an interesting situation given that almost nobody remembers the Spanish flu. We don't really have a lot of precedent. Do you think lockdowns elect the best policy response? So we should be trying other things. I don't know. I don't even, I'm so surprised that we have such a terrible description of the epidemiology of the disease. We don't really seem to agree on what the data means. I feel like we're treating this as some sort of a political football

rather than as a scientific crisis that we actually have to think our way out of. Yeah, I've started playing this game on Twitter where if I see someone glossing over the characteristics of the virus or saying that reinfections aren't possible or that kids can't get infected or that the infection fatality rate is overstated or that masks don't work, I count to three and I say, I bet this person's going to be a libertarian. And then I go to their Twitter bio and like nine times out of 10, they're a libertarian. But it's amazing how frequently people's opinion on what the best policy response is seems to perfectly map over their ideological priors. And I think if you find yourself in that position, it's time to

pause and reflect. Well, that's one argument. A different argument would be that it's what we do with the information. So, for example, I noticed that a lot of Democratic or sort of left-of-center mayors will say things like, the loss of even one life is one life too many. And then I listen to my conservative friends, and they tend to think there's no way of actually carrying through a belief structure that looks like that because life involves trade-offs. So one, there are certainly disagreements about what the data says,

what the data say. And then there's a different question, which is, you know, given that this is a deadly illness, do we talk about it as if every life matters and we can't afford to lose one? Or do we talk about trade-offs and quality of life versus damage to the economy? So in part, I sort of see people who are just not equipped to dealing with life and death issues and to talking about that, trying to struggle with something as children effectively um you know when i hear a mayor say even the loss of a single life is intolerable i don't know what they mean

yeah who are the heroes in america at the moment who are the people speaking up really honestly and intelligently killer mike we got one guy in atl Atlanta who seems to be able to speak in a crisis and everyone else is out to lunch. That's as far as I can tell. It's really tough to find anybody who's behaving properly. We're just so out of shape, I think, as a society. We're dealing with social unrest, potential, you know, even potential revolution. So much has changed. dealing with social unrest, potential, you know, even potential revolution. So much has changed since our last conversation that it's really hard to imagine how 2020 has accelerated our thinking relative to any previous year in the last quarter century, let's say. And in thinking about it, I suppose where I am is that I believe that before this, we were talking about, or you and I were,

the apocalypse, but it was premature. I think it's getting to the point where more and more people can see their way clear to say, yeah, I do see something apocalyptic in the current moment. I see people unable to have conversations. I see governments unable to mount responses. I see geopolitical rivalries dealing with the global pandemic, advancing the ball, people being distracted. We are completely unhinged. What do you mean by apocalyptic well i mean i've been talking about this thing i've called the twin nuclei problem about what happens when you unleash the power of the cell and the atom which we did over

really two years i think 1952 and. 52 was the first hydrogen detonation for a hydrogen device based on the Teller-Ulam design. And then 1953 was the elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of DNA. And those two, the twin nuclei have enough power to wipe us out. And now we don't know. I mean, is the virus that we're dealing with somehow connected to investigation, tinkering, weaponization, laboratories? We don't know. And we know that we're not supposed to ask that question in the US. It's very important that we not ask that question. YouTube will not tolerate that question. But, you know, that's a level of certainty that seems very far-fetched.

As Shakespeare, I think, put it best, thou dost protest too much, methinks. So, I think that YouTube protests too much. On the topic of 2020 and unusual happenings, what did you make of the Pentagon's declassification of the UFO files? I don't know what to make of it. I mean, some very strange thing happened. And I think that now what we know is that people who were talking about very strange things weren't crazy whether that thing constitutes an alien vehicle from a different world or whether that thing

constitutes an advanced um object from another country or whether it constitutes a different disinformation campaign i can't tell you, I can say that the Pentagon has now confirmed that, um, something very strange has happened. Even if that's just a Pentagon disinformation campaign, it doesn't matter what something bizarre has happened. Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, bizarre has happened yeah yeah i think um that's one of the most interesting stories of 2020 that isn't getting much of the um wait till it intersects the kardashians when it affects their

lifestyle people will focus i mean the whole everything is so strange that nothing is registry the fact that the president of the united states may have been named in a complaint along with jeffrey epstein uh you know it's just like something that happened one week and we've already sort of forgotten about it yeah has 2020 changed any of your priors or your broader world view in any way or just kind of reinforce the way you're already seeing things no it's totally changed my priors. I used to think I was crazy. Right. Did you genuinely think you were crazy, though?

Yes. I have genuinely kept a portion of my mind where I entertain the question, am I crazy? So it's a little bit like when you're trying to learn how to lucid dream, one way of doing it is to try to say during my waking hours, I'm just going to practice. And anytime something very strange occurs, I'm going to pinch myself and say, am I dreaming? And then that'll become a habit. And then when at night, something very strange happens in a dream, hopefully I've committed the habit to my mind and then I'll just check. And then I'll suddenly pop out of my dream, like as if I were in the habit to my mind and then I'll just check and then I'll suddenly pop out of my dream. Like as if I were in the movie inception and maybe I'll have lucid access to my

dream state. So I think it's very healthy to always worry about your own sanity. I mean, you know, just take this thing with the Pentagon. Imagine that you believe that the Pentagon had videos of unidentified flying objects. You would have to consider that you might be crazy in order to be sane the person who's not worrying about whether

he or she is crazy is the person i'm worried about the person who has yeah a slight concern for their own sanity is constantly checking themselves that person is much more reliable in my estimation. Last time you came on the show, you expressed this very eloquent idea that courage is much rarer than genius. And if you can be a contrarian, it's sort of like holding onto a lump of glowing hot gold. And the key or the trick is to keep juggling it until it cools down and you can take it to a safe place we actually got these little bottle bottle openers made and on the side is hashtag hold the gold hold the gold that's good eric wine stunning inspired merch

yeah um so 2020 has has made you feel like you weren't crazy in the first instance. Well, you know, I've been talking about... Is there anything else that's changed? I mean, it's gotten much more real and much more visceral. I guess I spent a lot of time seeing this previewed in my mind without actually... There's a state, I don't know how to describe it best, but it's a state of intellectually believing something is true and not being able to viscerally believe what your, what your prefrontal cortex has determined is likely to be the case.

Yeah. So, you know, my favorite example of this was when Dick Gregory, the comedian discovered that the federal government might have been trying to kill him. He said, wow, this is shocking. He says, I always thought they were trying to kill me, but I never thought they were trying to kill me. I always thought, like, what a strange thing to say. But he was really trying to say is intellectually, I believe the federal government is trying to kill me, but the actual evidence of it is shocking because the part of my brain that has kind of an embodied response wasn't triggered. It was a mental awareness

that probably the federal government was trying to kill. Yeah, another example of that is I often try to intellectualize death on my own mortality. I read like some of Montaigne's essays on death where he talks about, you know, how can you fear something which when it comes to pass, you won't be able to fear anymore. And, you know, whether your life is short or long, all are made one by death.

So it doesn't ultimately matter. And I find it incredibly persuasive at an intellectual level. But then, you know know after that thought kind of you realize no that that you're still a um a meat and hormone machine that is very afraid of death it's true i mean i think that um this has been the the big shift is because because i've been sort of preparing for i don't know how to say it exactly. I've been looking at the sort of Damocles over our head and I've been watching the threads in the rope that hold it up,

start to fray. And the, the, the question that arises in the mind is how many threads are left that are still holding it up. And as I've watched more and more threads, you know, break apart, I think more people are looking at it and saying, okay, maybe this is real. Maybe this is really a much more serious problem because to be honest, if you just look at like the death counts of everyone who's died out of uh i don't know rioting fire civil society breakdown covid it may not be a small number but it's not at world war ii world war one spanish flu great leap forward levels

that's not what's alarming us. What's alarming us is that we can see how we get to worldwide conflagration from here very quickly. You know, the very question, is the United States a failed state? Try asking that question in like, I don't know, 1991. Nobody would listen to you. Nobody would know what you're talking about. And that kind of shift where we can actually ask these questions

from a legitimate basis, like why didn't the U.S. mount a competent effort to counter the virus? If this is such an advanced country, it just doesn't seem possible that we would be the keystone cops. And yet here we are. Yeah. What are the causes that have brought us to this point where asking the question, is the US a failed state, is now no longer greeted with ridicule?

Well, I think that what you have to do is you have to look at the center of the country politically went from thinking that its best strategy was to encourage innovation and actual growth to thinking there isn't enough growth to make that fun. How do you steal from other people? And that's the whole issue of when the pie is growing, everybody can afford to watch their slice grow along with it. When the pie stops growing, there's no way to grow your slice that doesn't involve somebody else's slice shrinking. And I think that that's where we are. We've got a government in which the supposed center,

which is what you would hope to retreat into in a time like this is too busy thieving um and uh you know it's it's always funny i always think about the the word for thief in in the languages that uh that i love and you know in in hindi it's chore and in uh uh, in Yiddish, it's Ghana. And these thieves, these chores and Ghana, um, are just hard at work on left and right. Uh, more or less robbing the family business blind because they know they don't believe the family business is coming back. So there's, you know, it's like like imagine you had a family business and there's lots of office furniture and there's a kitty and there's uh you know maybe a campus for your your family office okay now people are like stealing the desk the the the computers the chairs

the pens everybody's just taking as much as they can because nobody believes in the opposite yeah yeah that's the that's the more significant looting that's been happening that's the most significant looting the stuff that we're seeing with like you know dolce and gabbana or some sort of you know abercrombie anditch, whatever that is, is small potatoes relative to the central kleptocracy of both parties. Yeah. And do you think that derangement derives largely from the fact that we haven't had

strong productivity growth since the 1970s? Yep. Because the overall pie isn't growing, we're now just fighting over the scraps? Well, you know, if you think about mathematics and physics, for example, if you believe that mathematics and physics are progressing, it makes sense that you would devote 15 years of your life to learning an incredibly difficult canon. What if you think that there is no function, there is no point, not going to bring

you anything. You're incredibly under motivated to remain in that completely rigorous mindset. You know, if you are a professional athlete and you're told, I don't know that we'll be playing your sport for another seven years, maybe we will, maybe we won't, but you should stay in top physical shape. It's very hard to get up in the morning and make sure that you do all your workouts and you know, you remain ready and waiting. This is why, for example, armies use war games is if you have to wait for a war, you're going to get out of shape. I think that part of the problem is we're not playing games to keep us in shape while we're waiting to get back to innovating and creating businesses.

So we're creating fake businesses and we have fake political agendas and we're faking everything, you know? So in essence, the sort of pressure to become a cargo cult science in a Feynman's famous terms has gotten to be irresistible. It's just too much effort to continue to believe in reality. So it's much more profitable at the moment to believe in kayfabe and fakery, like everything is professional wrestling and you know i've been writing about this for a long time um so you know to me when i was writing the kayfabe essay was probably in 2013 i'm going to say and it probably sounded a little bit weird to people that i was saying that we should be studying professional wrestling because it was going to take over the world

and then donald trump becomes, you know, president of the United States in large measure because he understood professional wrestling, having been very active and a member of the professional wrestling hall of fame. Yeah. What are some examples of fake businesses? Are you referring to like, you know, apps and businesses in the world of bits that just take us from one to end? Well, I would say that most businesses have a largely fake aspect to them. Now the questions about businesses, which are totally fake, like a Theranos style fakery, I don't know, but a lot of businesses have a lot of fakery as part of them. Yeah. Yeah. Any that you want to single out?

No, but I mean, look, every, everybody's lying. Every institution is lying about most of what it's talking about in public. I mean, I think the real reason that your podcast, for example, is, is valued and my podcast is valued is is that we're not institutions people don't trust um the institutional pressures are different than the pressures on an individual you can actually weirdly just barely earn a living outside of the institutional structures by speaking about the truth and so you know there's this very weird thing where long-form podcasting is probably the bright spot in everything that's going on

because you actually have people doing what institutional media used to do. So whatever Walter Cronkite and Eric Severide and Richard Threlkell were doing as American reporters back in the 60s and 70s, that's now being done by people like Sam Harris or Joseph Walker. Do you think if we do survive the Trump presidency, which you've described as an existential risk, and I would agree with you, that in retrospect, Trump will be seen as like an important autoimmune response, like a corrective to the entrenched institutional lying and professionalism of politics.

Well, you know, I said this, we have this old song. I assume that you guys have it in, in Australia. I know an old lady who swallowed a fly. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, I rewrote it as I know a young country that voted a trump um a hillary to bump they voted a trump and so now the idea is that you've sent trump to get rid of hillary now what are you going to send to get rid of trump you know now you're going to send somebody who's senile and is in some advanced state of cognitive

decline last weekend i caught up with ian marlane, who he came on the podcast after you. He's actually coming back on tomorrow. We're recording. He was the governor of Australia's central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia from 1996 to 2006. And he's a great man. I have a lot of respect for him. I'm a man of integrity. And when we caught up last weekend, he said something which just gave me pause. He said, the economy is anti-growth.

And I just thought, gosh, coming from a man who was our senior economic official for a decade during a period of enormous prosperity for Australia, now describing our economy as anti-growth. I just found that so shocking and a little bit scary as well because it's like, how do we innovate our way out of this situation? It's going to take decades for the technologies to catch up if we even do create them.

And in the meantime, we're fighting over the scraps. We don't seem to have enough time. Let me ask you a question I've been asking some of my friends what's the most important part of a human cell of a human cell yeah so you've got you know the nucleus you've got the organelles the mitochondria golgi apparatus what's the most important part of the cell? Well, I've seen Star Wars, so I'm going to say the mitochondria. Okay.

Isn't that where the force comes from? So, what I would argue is that it's actually the least ostensibly interesting part. It's the bilipid layer, the shell of the cell, because without some ability to divide the cell's contents from the entropy of the outside world, without some place to off-gas your entropy, if you will, you don't have any possibility of building all those cool things that actually live inside the cell. You need some means of excluding chaos from your system for the system to function. I think one of the problems that we're having at the moment is, is that we're very, we're very confused about inclusion and exclusion. You should not have only inclusion without

exclusion. You should have very clear rules of inclusion and exclusion because it's necessary to have all processes available. This is the line from Ecclesiastes about to everything there is a time and a purpose under heaven. And right now, the most important thing is to exclude people who can't think properly from conversations of critical importance because everyone else can't carry that person in their attempt to reason let's say morally about a technical issue you know you have a very strong belief which is like i will not be shut out of this conversation because we need more heart more caring about about people, more this and that. Very often you don't. Very often you need absolutely clean thinking.

And you have to incorporate your moral concerns and the humanity at a different layer because if you just constantly spend your time feeling your way through things, you can make a real hash of it. You can end up killing many more people, disadvantaging many more people, oppressing people, not understanding the laws of unintended consequence. And I think it's really important to realize that in the internet era and in the social media era, we have everyone talking in every conversation

and everyone's talking about transparency and inclusion. And what that's led to is like a giant world of chaos with no ability to have adult decision making and to come to rational conclusions that are informed. principally because I know that if the Democrats and Republicans in the United States were to go behind closed doors, what they'd come to an agreement about would be thieving from the rest of us. So I don't trust certain people to go behind closed doors. Do I trust that there are people who should be behind closed doors making policies for us? Yes. And this is this very weird thing about the word elite. We have a really negative view of the word elite because we started using it for people who are anything but elite. We're just sort of thugs with very sharp elbows. And in the war of sharp elbows over sharp minds, we call these people the elite when they are nothing of the kind. And I talk to people

about the fact that when you have a surgeon and you find out that you have an elite surgical team operating on your child, you're excited. When you find out that your armed forces have elite units and special forces, you feel that your country is strong. We use the word elite for elite thieves, you know, elite people who are taking from the rest of us. And so we've become anti-elitist, which is dangerous. One of the purposes of a society, like why do we watch the summer and winter Olympics? Do we want to watch average Joe's goes go to up and down, you know, uh, uh, slalom course on a slope, or do you want to watch a non-elite decathlon? I can't imagine something more boring, but we've turned against the concept of an actual expert and technical elite because those people have been thoroughly compromised. I mean, we're not wrong

in our instincts, but instead of like turning against the concept of competency or brilliance or genius or creativity, we've turned against the entire concept of social status stemming from the fact that some people are better at certain things than others. I know I'm not an elite violin player. You don't want to buy tickets to listen to me play the violin. Well, by similar tokens, I don't want to listen to a lot of the people who are talking about what do we do about the corona epidemic who know nothing i know that i'm not an expert on virology i would like to not hear my my own voice i'd like to hear somebody very competent who isn't compromised we can't find that person it's amazing

the cdc who surgeon general everybody is politically compromised except for long-form podcasting it's about the only place you can go does peter teal listen to long-form podcasts well he he's recorded one with me and one with dave rubin i don't know that he does regularly. My guess is that he has people who listen to long-form podcasts for him. And, yeah, triage, which are the best. You recently appeared on Ted Cruz's show. I can't remember the name of it, but it was a great conversation. You were kind of...

Verdict. That's right. And you were demonstrating what a conversation across the aisle could look like. And you quoted Arnold Kling, who has an awesome little book I'd recommend to people called The Three Political Languages. Can you remind me of the quote? Well, I'm not going to be able to get it exactly right, but it's more or less to the effect that if you wanted to take three major strains, progressivism, conservatism, and libertarianism, and you wanted to reduce them down to one concept, what would be the one concept that you could use to best explain those three strains of thinking?

To your earlier point about why is it that libertarians have a different view of the communicability of a disease. And what he says is that libertarians are most focused on coercion. They cannot stand to be coerced by somebody else. Progressives cannot stand oppression. They don't mind coercing people for public good, but they can't stand the idea that they are going to be disenfranchised by power. And conservatives in general believe that it's taken a long time to build up our store of knowledge. And they're very worried that people who do not understand the richness of what we have done are going to throw things over. So

they're very worried about the loss of tradition and gains in history. I think that's a terrific, very short, very economical description of how to understand a main aspect. I mean, it was helpful for me because I have all three of these traits. I absolutely, you know, come from a progressive background, have a hatred of oppression. If you try to use the government to like, you know, have some kind of a campaign, uh, you know, be a hero. Don't be a zero. I just makes my skin crawl. I can't stand all of that coercive mind control stuff, even if it's for a good cause. Even if it's the whole thing is just to get you to wash your hands, wear a condom and a face mask and go about your business. I have no idea.

I don't like coercion. And then I also very much appreciate how difficult it is to build up civil society. And I don't want to just go around knocking out walls in order to find which of them are load bearing. So I carry all of these traits and it was very helpful for me just to locate myself and then to understand that other people probably carry all three traits as well, but they're very much less balanced. Like their hatred of coercion is so pure and profound.

They can't even think about anything else. Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I would describe myself as someone who, who comes from the left naturally, but also hate coercion,

um, have like a really visceral disdain for authoritarianism, which I think developed at university. Amen, brother. Yeah. And I think only in the last maybe two to three years, I've come to have a real deep appreciation of the wisdom in the conservative tradition

and to kind of really respect the insights of our conservative brothers and sisters um and get a bit up in arms when people on the left throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to conservatism like there are heuristics and you know kernels of truth that our societies and our ancestors have accumulated across generations, which are really important to hold onto. And that's, that's sort of what conservatism is there to protect. Um, and that stuff's incredibly important. Um, there's an interesting, um, phrase or quote or passage in Steven Pinkerer's book uh how the mind works where he echoes actually plato in the republic in writing that um parental love is what causes the fundamental

paradox of politics because no society can be simultaneously fair free and equal the reason is if it's fair then people who work harder accumulate more. But if it's free, people give their wealth to their children, which means that it can't be equal because some people inherit wealth that they didn't earn, which is really striking. It's a nice little formulation because it instantly helps you realize that utopia is totally out of reach but then the question becomes like how do we optimize along those three different axes of coercion and liberty oppressor and oppressed and civilization and barbarism um do you think like well you don't

want an equal society. Yeah. Fair and free you want. And there's something you want to replace equal. You want a society in which there's certain basic standards that are taken care of. And that the society is not oppressive to its least fortunate. But you can't actually dream about equality because that's, it's just not at the same level as the other perspectives. There's something wrong with pathological egalitarianism.

Yeah. You can, I mean, you can't get a fair society either, but you can aspire to fairness. I, what I'm going to claim is, is that aspiring to equality is incredibly dangerous.

Hmm. And I say that as a person with, um, a fair amount of concern about the level of inequality in our world. But you don't want any, you wouldn't want to live in an equal society. You'd be miserable. I mean, this is the conceit of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, where the idea is that the only way to make everyone equal is to keep handicapping the talented. Yeah. Or you need violence. You need a tremendous amount of violence to have equality. I don't want to live in a society where, you know, you say equality, but really you're talking about violence.

You wouldn't want to live in a perfectly free society either. It seems like the only one of those variables that you would accept in extremis would be fairness. Well, you don't want to live in a society that is, you know, questing for utopian fairness either. There's a version of this where all of them are kind of too dopey. But, you know, the issue of saying for greater fairness and greater, uh, freeness. Uh, sorry, let me, let me rephrase this. If I think about an equal society, um, I I'm very concerned that people have to understand that we don't want equality.

I do want to listen to the person who knows more than everybody having an interesting perspective. There's something fundamentally wrong with the egalitarian impulse. I don't think that there's something fundamentally wrong with a fairness impulse. Most people understand something is fair enough that to keep going at you know trying trying to find perfect fairness uh you know you're going to get a pyrrhic victory um you're going to screw yourself over and i think that the same thing is true with with freedom i don't know what it is about equality that really gets people kind of, there's something about jealousy and envy that is not the same kind of motivator as saying, I want to do a great job. Like imagine you're a sculptor. You could think, I want to just make the most amazing sculpture

that I'm capable of making. Or you could say, I really want to have a sculpture that beats that other guy because I can't stand the fact that he got a prize and I didn't. Well, you know, I don't know. I'd rather that you, that you be free to sculpt whatever you want and that we're fair in the way that we judge. We don't judge you in your sculpting by whether or not we don't like your hair color, because that's irrelevant. The idea that we want everyone to be equally acknowledged for whatever they did in the sculpture show, there's something wrong with that. It just is. Yeah. And I guess I'm saying it because, of course,

it's outrageous that anyone would consider that egalitarianism has a flaw and that there's anything positive about elitism. But'm just telling you when your child is sick you want to go to an elite medical facility if you can and you can claim that you can't stand elitism but i guarantee you you'll be right there trying to get the best possible doctor you can for your kid is it accurate to say that most people aren't capable of recognizing the wisdom in each of those three traditions progressivism conservatism and libertarianism well because we don't allow people to graduate like that you know you should graduate from the political spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's kind of absurd that your view on any one issue could be predicted by looking at your views on other issues because they are all part of a package of tribal beliefs.

Like, it amazes me that we accept that. Well, it's very interesting. I was thinking about this in the context of World War II. Imagine that we were back in the 1940s. And I would say something like, you know,

we've really got to defeat Hitler. And somebody would say, wow, I didn't realize you were on the Stalin train. I'm not on the Stalin train. Stalin's a monster. We have to defeat Hitler right now. We'll have to figure out what to do about Stalin later. But there's no way for people to say, look, I support Trump because I can't stand what hillary was doing to the country or uh i

support biden because i just have to get rid of trump even though i think he's in an advanced state of mental decline you know yeah we we would never somehow i don't feel that i know anything about roosevelt's views on stalin because he chose to ally himself with Stalin against Hitler. It's like the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but I'll pretend that I'm working, you know, in a friendly relationship just long enough to defeat this son of a bitch that we've got to get rid of. And then I'm going to go right back to knowing that I'm dealing with a mass murderer whose hands are drenched in blood up to his elbows. Right. Well, that's the right view on Stalin.

You know, on the other hand, as soon as you say, well, I'm voting for Trump. Somebody's like, wow, you support Trump. It's like, how do I know why you're voting for Trump? Maybe you're voting for Trump because you believe we need a wrecking ball and nobody's listening. You know, maybe you hate Trump and you're voting for Trump. It's we need a wrecking ball and nobody's listening. Maybe you hate Trump and you're voting for Trump. It's like watching somebody put on a financial trade. They buy some instrument and they're like, wow, you think gold is going down? The answer is you may not have any thought that gold is going down. But you may have that financial instrument as part of a complex trade that you have on with three or four different legs to it.

And that's just a piece of it, you know? So for some reason we teach people that they have to be like all in or all out and then they never grow up. And if you think about like what relative value, um, investing is relative to long only investing or mutual fund investing. In mutual fund investing, you might buy a collection of stocks that were all in technology. And then you say, okay, I have a tech mutual fund. Great. In relative value investing, you might say, I'm choosing to hold a lot of technology companies that are large, short, and a lot of small technology companies long, because I think that this is going to be an age for technology startups. But because everything in your portfolio

is technology, both long and short, you're not actually exposed to whether technology is going to do well. Your entire bet isn't on technology. So if somebody tries to say, well, I'm confused by your portfolio because I see a lot of small tech companies. So that seems to think that you're bullish on technology, but then I see a lot of short positions in large tech companies. And that seems to indicate that you're, you're against technology. It doesn't make any sense. The answer is, well, because you don't understand the trade, you just don't get it have you found an increasing need to constantly caveat and qualify everything you say now that you have a public platform like I don't support Hitler but also I don't support Stalin like do you need to do that all

the time constantly because everywhere yeah what you'll say like give me any phrase that you think would be completely anodyne that you might say on twitter and i'll show you what happens um okay it's got to be like a political statement though no no it doesn't have to be a political statement could be a statement about something that happened in your day just any statement that's declarative sydney has the best coffee oh it's easy for you to say in the first world you know why because you took it that's originally a product of the middle east and that's cultural appropriation and you know here you are just sipping away without any recognition that you didn't come up with this.

Then I could keep going. I could say, oh, wow. So the idea is that the rest of us are under lockdown and you're sipping away on your coffee, not concerned with anybody else's welfare. Almost instantaneously. There's nothing you can say that I can't give a Twitter treatment to. And then you just realize, okay, well, every tweet has to be balanced internally because a single statement about, you know, uh, I saw a woman on a bicycle today and it, you know, she seemed to be having a good time. And I smiled. It's like, wow, did, did, did she ask you to smile at her? It's like, okay, no, she didn't. Did you ever

think that some people are missing legs? No, that's true. That's terrible. So every tweet now looks like, you know, look, no offense to women anywhere. And if the smile was unwanted, I apologize in advance. But even if there are quadriplegics and amputees, I do think that for the abled, it's wonderful to be able to take, um, a bicycle, a bicycle ride.

And by the way, I hope that everybody else can get out of their wheelchair with more money spent on, uh, helping the disabled community. It's exhausting. It's absolutely infuriating. I just want to be able to say, I saw somebody on a bicycle today and it made me smile and not have to get into a question about why I'm the world's worst person. So your ability to be an uncorrelated thinker, which is something that I absolutely admire, by the way, I haveiel's idea is that, um, to be a real contrarian is to think for yourself.

It's not putting a, putting a minus sign in front of the consensus, but reasoning about every issue on its own merits. Um, and then whatever collection of positions you have at the end is the collection of positions you have at the end. But where, where do you think that comes from in you? Like, what is it about your journey that has given you this ability to extract yourself from the political tribes and their narratives? I don't even know how they do it. I mean, do you just get up in the morning and decide I'm

going to say wrong stuff because my friends say wrong stuff? And then you just get up in the morning and decide I'm going to say wrong stuff because my friends say wrong stuff. And then, and then, and then you get called out on the wrong stuff that you say. And I don't even know how you support your argument because you know that you're in the wrong. Like I just literally don't understand how to belong to these large political positions. Yeah. You see, you have to appreciate that in the life of a mathematician or a computer scientist, whether something checks out and whether it compiles is a big deal.

You can't just say, you know, like the most famous thing in social justice is you must understand my pain and you cannot understand my pain. It's like, OK, so I understand I must and I cannot. So that's in contradiction. And I can stop listening to you, right? No. And you must listen to me. OK, so I have no idea how how does somebody come to those three perspectives or for

example i have a friend who's a very like one of the world's best mathematicians and we were fighting about trump uh in 2016 and he said you know uh eric you have to think about it so you know then i said okay i did and and here's what i came up with and the next line was eric you have to stop thinking i thought okay you just told me to think about it and then two lines later you're like you you can't do this through thinking i have no idea what he what are you saying what is your perspective another version of this one was the head of the American Mathematical Society was at MIT. And he walked into the common room one day and he said, I've got great news. We are going to boost the percentage of American citizens receiving PhDs in mathematics from American

universities. And everybody said, wow, that's great news. And I said, oh, that's really strange. He said, what do you mean? I said, well, that means you're going to decrease the percentage of non-American citizens receiving PhDs from American universities. He said, no, I'm not going to do that. I said, Michael, you're a professor of mathematics. There's no way of increasing the percentage of American citizens without decreasing the percent. I mean, I can do it on the board and the guy just, he got really angry and he walked out of the common room. Now that's

really interesting to me because what it told me was that the part of his brain that thought about these things in analytic terms was entirely distinct from the part of his brain that thought about them in political terms. The other kind of lesson in that anecdote is that the smartest among us are not immune to this mode of thinking. No, we're all full of crap. Maybe we're even more prone to it because we just get better at post hoc rationalization. I don't know. I mean, I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that

what I was saying can't really be countered because it's analytically correct, but it wasn't politically smart. And so what I was really doing was making an ass out of myself. Um, not because I was, you know, I won the point analytically, obviously, but to take on the president of the american math society and point out that he's lying i don't know maybe that wasn't a great move but those sorts of lies have now they've compounded and now now we're in like a society that does this wall to wall where we don't make any sense from sentence to sentence um eric here's how i described um my show in a recent email to a guy who's helping us design a new logo and um sorry to get all up on my high horse everyone but but i just

think this will take us in an interesting direction so i said the topics and the topics and guests are eclectic the one thing they tend to have in common is contrarianism. They focus on important but little known truths. Contrarianism means two things to me. One, it's not so much about finding an idea as it is about holding on to one. Courage is much rarer than genius. Hashtag hold the gold. And two, contrarianism shouldn't be confused with conspiracy theories. It's not about putting a minus sign in front of the consensus,

as you often say, Eric. Sometimes mainstream thinking is correct, i.e. the wisdom of crowds, and sometimes it's wrong, i.e. the madness of crowds. A true contrarian is capable of telling the difference. In that sense, she is uncorrelated to the crowd. But I think playing with that idea could be quite useful, of the difference between the madness of crowds and the wisdom of crowds,

because that's like a tell for when it's right to side with the majority or wrong to side with the majority, because there are kind of domains in which crowds are collectively rational, and then there are other domains in which crowds are collectively rational and then there are other domains in which crowds are collectively irrational and if we talk about the domains in which crowds are collectively irrational it's important to think about how our beliefs can become correlated i'm thinking about things like

mimetic desire informational cascades and conformity. And you often talk about the Ash conformity experiment. Tell us a bit about the Ash conformity experiment. And I'm sorry to ask you to kind of repeat yourself because you've spoken about it in various other interviews, but there might be folks who've never heard of it and actually think it's something that's really important to know about. Well, the Ash conformity effect is discovered by Professor Ash, who came up with a crazy idea, which is that you'd hire a bunch of actors called Confederates. Who would be told how to lie as part of an experiment on perception. And then you'd have one true subject and the true subject would come in. Let's say you'd have Confederates one through five and Confederate number seven. And that person might come in as the sixth person on the experiment. But there in fact aren't seven people in the experiment.

There's only one person in the experiment. One through five and number seven all are actors. And then what Ash would do would be to show people two lines and ask which line is longer. And what he would find is that if one through five were taught to claim that the short line was the longer one by the time it got to the one true subject that one true subject would tend to make the same mistake with quite high frequency because they didn't want... Yeah, something like in two-thirds of cases, they defied their own eyes. Right. They would not want to report something

that would make them stand out as perceiving differently from the rest of the group. They wouldn't want to reveal that if everyone else was in fact normal, that they were aberrant. Yeah. But there are two different types of conformity. There's like informational conformity. So they're taking a shortcut. And then there's like reputational conformity. So they're falsifying their own preferences because they don't want to get on the wrong side of the group. And often, I guess, when we conform, it's for like a mixture of of both but um i'm

just like picturing you in solomon ash's experiment and imagining imagining eric weinstein disagreeably announcing the correct answer i couldn't imagine you kind of going along with the um with the confederates i don't know what i would do i mean i guess i would look at them and say are you guys confederates i i just i don't deal well with these circumstances at a social level because i just don't understand i i don't know how everyone's going along with each other like to me that's the mystery yeah how do you how do you claim that you see a bus when what you have in front of you is a rabbit yeah have you developed any like conversational tricks or heuristics to quickly detect whether someone is the sort of person who would pass the ash conformity test it's an interesting question people what i tend to find is that somebody who is um contradictory rather than contrarian they'll

show you that constantly by putting a minus sign in front of everything if they're conformist they will constantly reference themselves to reality so once you've gotten rid of those two groups you're dealing with people who are thinking for themselves at some level or the other and i i guess um what i find is is that there's just certain sorts of that i get into one interaction repeatedly where somebody will say, surely you're not saying X, are you? You know, like the up talking at the end,

the intensity, the flared eyes, the whole thing. And I'll say, of course I am. You know, like meeting their intensity. That's exactly what I'm saying. You know, like, you know, that sort of, you know, surely you're not suggesting that there might be something anti-Semitic in the Black Lives Matter movement. Like, I really am suggesting that. Absolutely. I'm not saying all of it is, but yeah, there really is some anti-Semitism in that movement.

Then people have this question of like where do i go from here because it didn't work the initial gambit doesn't work with some frequency and they have to make a decision am i going to continue to pretend that this is the craziest thing that i've ever heard or am i going to decide that it's too expensive to um continue to pretend? Because I would love to get into a discussion about racial bigotry, Marxism, anti-Semitism inside of Black Lives Matter. I mean, I think that'd be an interesting conversation to have. But if the person's basic gambit is, wait a minute, you can't possibly believe that.

Then I know that it's not about what's true. It's about somebody, somebody's telling you, surely you don't want to step on that landmine or touch that third rail. Yeah. Gotcha. Have you heard of Brian Kaplan's ideological Turing test? I have not. So obviously he's drawing an analogy to Alan Turing's Turing test, which he called the imitation game,

which is where the movie gets its title from. And you know this, Eric, but it's the test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior, indistinguishable from that of a human. And so Brian Kaplan's ideological Turing test is, are you capable of propounding the position of an ideological opponent? So if you're a progressive and you're asked about immigration, are you capable of steel manning the i would love this stance on immigration i think i'd be great at it um i think you would but but where i'm where i'm

heading is i suspect people who are who pass the ideological turing test with flying colors would also pass the ash conformity test with flying colors and i wonder whether that's because if you're capable of zooming out and viewing each tribe's political narratives through the eyes of lackan and anthropologist it helps the illusion to evaporate and it makes it much easier to be a non-conformist. Well, I think the question, of course, is where do you stand when you're outside of a system? Like you just said, you take the anthropologist's point of view, and somebody will say, well, actually, since Margaret Mead,

we've looked at anthropology not so much as a non-culture looking at cultures and analyzing them, but as a different culture analyzing cultures. There's no escape from it, which is part of the sort of the game that we've gotten into with postmodernism. And the beginning of that game isn't terrible. It's a reasonable thing to make the point that Margaret Mead or any anthropologist is coming from a cultural perspective, commenting on other cultures. It's when you start getting excited about that as a means of stopping people from observing things. Well, you can't observe what's going on in this Ugandan dance circle because you're bringing a sort of an Austrian perspective or you're bringing a Japanese perspective that's that's kind of what where things really go go wrong now my perspective is what I like in in this Turing test idea is somebody should be able to say, yeah, that actually does represent my perspective.

And I find that the steel manning concept is very helpful because after I've gotten to the end of your perspective and somebody says, wow, thank you. I feel really heard. Then you have this next weird thing. It's like the person asks, do you agree with me then? And I say, no. Well, how could you say that so beautifully and not agree with me? And I say, well, let's talk about these aspects. When that happens, the person often just finds it completely intellectually overwhelming. They don't like the idea that somebody can exhibit their perspectives from a compassionate kind. I mean, the key thing is,

is that mostly when we talk about the other person's perspective in this way, we tend to slip in our contempt for it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And, and then you'll see things like, you know,

if I was caricaturing somebody who was coming from, let's say, a progressive point of view, you know, I might say, we cannot afford, as long as there's any inequality, to focus on, you know, new frontiers until we've addressed all oppression. Well, you know, then I'm slipping in the any and in the all I'm making things silly. Yeah. Okay. So when you start actually talking about it from the, from an emotional perspective, which is, you know, we've neglected these issues for far too long. It's we're always told to wait for tomorrow to bring up these issues. Tomorrow never comes. We're not going to do that anymore so when i start talking like that somebody says wow i do feel heard and then you say actually this still isn't the right time because we've got a huge new geopolitical problem with china and i appreciate that that's what you were told after we defeated the soviet union but now we're in a different situation you know then the

person becomes confused how can you understand that we have been put off how can you understand that we have had our dreams put on hold and we've been sold down the river and you still think that we shouldn't push they can't imagine that and i i think that that's part of we haven't instructed people that there is something called adulthood and it's a place you can get to yeah what does adulthood mean to you I haven't instructed people that there is something called adulthood and it's a place you can get to. Yeah, what does adulthood mean to you? Well, it roughly means that you recognize the level of resolution necessary to take on a problem. The problem is going to require this many resources, this degree of trade-offs, this level of granularity, this much data, this amount of teamwork, cooperation, hierarchy,

considerations of ethics, constraints, implementation. When people are sort of chanting things that rhyme and talking about beautiful dreams that cannot be and talking about tearing everything down or preserving everything as it was, or going back to some previous world that, you know, is imagined through the lens of nostalgia, all those sorts of things. I just get sad. I just, it's just like, really, is that what we're going to do? Or are we, I mean, have you ever thought about how preposterous Joe Biden versus Donald Trump is? I feel like the frog in the boiling water where the heat's gradually been turned up. But if I take a step back and really think about it, yeah, it's shocking that we're in this position. You have a 74 and a 77-year-old,

neither of whom are analytically very sharp, in a world that is being increasingly threatened by code, drones, viruses. It's an incredibly technical world. The economy is incredibly complicated, and we're having childlike M me Tarzan you Jane conversations I I I'm so sick of these two generations yeah about what you mean the boys in the silent generation yeah the silent generation represented by Biden and the boomers represented by trump yeah i mean just i don't know i'm 54 and

i would be an adult in a normal society i have an adult brain i have an adult orientation um you know despite the fact that i have impeccable credentials i have no thought that i will ever be a member of the institutional world because these guys absolutely did not open it up to any new entrance. In large measure, nobody from Gen X is part of this establishment in a big way. That's not quite true, but it's pretty close to true, particularly in academics, because there are effectively no Gen X university presidents, which I find fascinating, given you'd expect about half of the presidents to be Gen X and below, like even millennial university presidents. These guys just didn't, they didn't ever, they didn't ever leave the table. You know, it's like you're, you're, you're at a restaurant and you're waiting in line and these people are in like, you know, 12 hour dinners or they've been there for four days.

You're just thinking like, are you ever going to pay the check and get up nope so that's where we are why do you think the boomers uh in particular are so um like narcissistic well i think that it's the real issue came about with the silence. Um, and I think it's a very, it's a very funny point. Um, the silence and the boomers were the first generations to not inherit a world in which things were getting better because of growth and because of changes in technology and science.

So they were very oddly not, they weren't poised to do better automatically than the generations that had gone before them. And so they had to break the system in order to get that growth story to work for them. And that meant that they had to steal from slices of pie that were not theirs but i mean we still had good growth up to the 70s well but the boomers like if you imagine the oldest boomer would be donald trump effectively or bill clinton donald trump and george bush were all born in the summer of 1946 okay so so like when that that coming of age the growth is beginning to peter out by the time they're 30 the growth has already dissipated

these were not people okay and that's the oldest of them so the silent generation is a more confusing part but you can consider what was biden born in like 41 or something or 40 so i forget where he is yes something like that um but uh or no maybe it's 43 so assume it's 43. So assume that it's 43 for the moment or something like that. He's not in that different of a situation than Donald Trump. I mean, those guys are only really separated by three years. And so, okay, maybe Biden joined the Senate when he was 29 years old in 1972. That was really when growth ran out. So right around the time that Joe Biden turned 30, the miraculous growth story was over. And so what you're looking at is you're looking at the generations that came about right after the growth. greatest generation. And they were watching their world not work in the same way that their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents world had worked, which is that if you just

play by the rules, you get the benefit of the fact that everything is getting better. You know, you go back a few generations, people didn't have indoor plumbing, they didn't have electricity, they didn't have horseless carriages. So these guys basically came to the conclusion, hey, we're going to have to rejigger the system. And the silent generation, I think, tried it first. They tried to restart growth. Didn't work. And then the boomers looked at that effort to restart growth during the Reagan administration.

And they said, well, that doesn't work. But it does work well enough to steal from people so we can just grow our slices and that's what they did they grew their slices and the globalization um that they made work for themselves said hey if instead of trying to make our children's world a better world we make cambodians children's world a better world or china's children's world a better world or somebody else's world a better world then um our world can be better too we'll just have to screw over our own children and that's what they do that's that's that's their jam the the the the really distinguishing feature of the boomer generation is a relative and this is not true

family by family but a society-wide complete indifference for their own children In aggregate that is the behavior of that generation And I just did a podcast on this about selling your daughters into prostitution to pay for college through sugar baby University, which you can check out with Kimberly De La Cruz on the Portal podcast. And I just found it fascinating that you can go to any Ivy League school and they have data as to how many young ladies

and a smaller number of young men are sugar dating to pay their tuition. That is, they are usually going out with and sleeping with older men with some measure of allowance, some financial sweetener called sugaring. And, you know, my point was, can we actually recognize that biden in 2005 voted to make it almost impossible to discharge student debt in bankruptcy can we talk about that i it's look joseph the whole thing is preposterous we're sitting here dying because we can't get the these wrongly titled elite people out of their goddamn chairs and my feeling at some point you just have to physically take them and remove

them from their chairs that's partially why people are talking about revolution. And if you don't recognize what's bringing people into the streets, it's not just because George Floyd died in police custody. People are in the streets because they don't have futures. They don't have family. They don't have a point. We're exhausted. This is why I'm so hopeful about Australia. Hey, it's up to you guys. You're seeing something go very wrong in the

Northern hemisphere. You better escape this thing. You better be an outpost for those of us who believe in all of the positive parts of Western culture. I'm not going to pretend that the negative parts of Western culture are untrue, but God damn it. When people start talking about the West is just this terrible thing. I mean, I think I may have mentioned to you that the thing about the West that's different, it's like a guitar with an amplifier. Um,

if you have a really large amplifier, which is what the enlightenment did through science and technology to project the power of the West. If you make a mistake on a Les Paul hooked up to an enormous, you know, Marshall amplifier, I guarantee you people are going to hear that mistake three towns away, you know, because you're amplified at some different level. Okay. Well, everything that the West did wrong, we did wrong at an amplified level.

So yeah, there was a ton that was wrong, but it's certainly not true that the West came up with slavery. Slavery in Africa, there's slavery all throughout the Arabic world. It's a preposterous idea that we in the West shouldn't be standing up for our own culture

because it's generally speaking one of the most interesting and advanced. It's also one of the most destructive because of the level of amplification, but it's not coming out of some special problem of like white devils. This, this concept of whiteness is really racist. Oh yeah. Have you noticed this? You, you white? You white devil Joseph. It always felt a bit off to me.

I did a lot of university debating and I remember when pronouns were introduced, might have been 2013, 2014. You had to announce your pronoun at the beginning of the debate and we weren't given any context. So it was just completely baffling to me. And on the sheet where you wrote your name,

I used to circle he and they, because I thought in singular I'm a he, but in plural I'm a they. Yeah. And then I would announce my pronouns as he and they, like completely innocently um but um yeah coming back to whiteness it that that whole thing has always felt incredibly racist to me well let's just take the pronouns before we get to whiteness right yeah so i i would be up for changing the English language on a one-time basis to get rid of the inflection for gender in the third person singular case. This is the only place that we have the problem.

So it's third person singular inflected for gender where we have he, she, and it you can't use they because they is you need to be able to tell whether or not somebody is speaking about a single individual or a plurality of individuals so even in cultures in which you have a single pronoun for he she or it and turkish is one of the best examples they use a common pronoun called oh for he, she, or it. So you can't tell. And that tells us that the Turkish language is proof that you don't need to have inflection for gender in the third person singular. I don't know why you would ever choose to stop inflecting for number between third person singular and plural like the turks use onlar for the third person plural pronoun so i would have been up for having linguists

do what they did for miss and misses whether we inflect for marital status uh only for women and not for men uh you know there wasn't a version of, you know, Mr. Versus Mr. Oso or something. So try to make us sound more interesting than we actually are. And in that circumstance, um, we, we made an alteration and I was fine with it. I I'd be fine with an alteration as well, but this idea of like, choose your own pronouns and they, this is just childish, stupid. You know,

it's just dumb by dumb. I don't mean that it's dumb to worry about the differences between biological sex, gender traits and pronouns and language. I think it's smart to worry about those things, but the way that we're doing it communicates stupidity. Like choose your own pronouns will never work. It's a very bad technical solution. We should also have begun with intersex rather than trans. Trans is an umbrella category, which has to do with a lot of things involving development. Intersex has to do

with people who are biologically born with some sort of lack of concordance between their, let's say their genetics and their observed phenotype. And I think we need to have much more compassion. And that compassion would have been better if we'd begun with intersex because trans it's so convoluted right intersex is the proof that this isn't a question of development this is a question that certain members of our society are born in an ambiguous state and we have a world that expects zero ambiguity on gender and sex and my point is the progressives had a point. They really did.

And then they fumbled it. Because then they wanted to make it about, I want to watch you go through a fit as you struggle to figure out how to talk the way we want you to talk. Like, it's really fun. You see people shouting at people in restaurants, which you better say black lives matter or you're a racist well okay you're getting off on your authoritarian tendencies that's what you're getting off on and that's what's going on with the trans pronouns what i'm trying to say is hey you you punks want to actually make some progress there is progress to be made we do have a gendered society and we do have people who are in an ambiguous state both intersex and trans do you want to take it seriously do you want to

form a partnership do you want to form a linguistic council so that we can study the world's languages and see why did we have inflection in the third person singular system you know i can give you some reasons but what I see is, no, we don't want to do any of that. We just want to tell you what to do. It's like, oh, okay. Now I got it. All right, and what about whiteness?

As poor seen people, as people pink of hue, I think it's very important to recognize that the black community weirdly wants, some portion of the black community wants to bestow on whiteness traits like punctuality linear thinking scientific reasoning and as as flattered as i am i will have to decline because that's not true black americans for example have been at the forefront of linear thinking

scientific reasoning analysis and in fact punctuality i mean did you see this poster from the smithsonian describing whiteness like the the bad traits of whiteness like effectively if you care about the law of the excluded middle and modus ponens, that's a trait of whiteness. It's just like, shut up. Can you imagine that like technicality and mastery and expertise is about whiteness? I kept thinking about Oscar Peterson for some reason, like one of the greatest jazz piano player, maybe number two only to Art Tatum. Are you telling me this guy didn't practice for hours and hours of every day and no music theory backwards and forwards? It's like,

do you actually know any black people? I worry that what we found is a collection of black Americans that are unaware of all of the work done in science by black Americans, in music, in technology, and these assertions that this is somehow whiteness and oppression, it makes me very sad because what I view this as being is an opportunity for us to come together and to appreciate each other's gifts. You know, it's like almost every day of my life, I'm grateful to Louis Armstrong and a bunch of other people for working out the rules of jazz and blues in terms of harmony and melody and voice leading in different time signatures. And I think about that in the same terms that I think about quantum electrodynamics.

You know, these are just some of the greatest intellectual achievements of, of the human condition. And to claim that this kind of thought is white makes me incredibly depressed. It's like, do you know how much you just stole from so many black people who've contributed to the cannon? It just made me, it's an anger that I have on my part because um i've always been fascinated by black by by the black american analytic gift we brought people over as slaves

and they turned out to determine a giant percentage of our culture um because we stripped them of their culture and they said okay we're gonna have to have to reinvent ourselves. And in 150 years or something, boy, did they reinvent everything. And we've been the beneficiaries of their response to that crime. Yeah. Where do you think the Black Lives Matter movement will end? Do you think it's going to fizzle out or it's going to end in revolution or something in between? Well, it depends. I mean, there's sort of two separate parts to it so there's the part of it that has to do

with the fact that we've had a very long-standing problem i mean you know you can go back to gil scott heron and bob dylan with the revolution will not be televised and hurricane. And, you know, these are long standing problems of differential application of the rules according to race. Now, I was very shocked that, um, police brutality was the first stop for black lives matter, because if I were black lives matter, I'm not, I would have started with the differential application of policing and sentencing before you get to lethal force like why are there so many black men in prison for non-violent drug crime very simple question so I think there's a completely legitimate perspective that somebody's got to uphold which is what do we do about um unequal application of the of the criminal justice

system by race i think that's that that's noble that's what we're supposed to be doing and then there's like this other stuff where, you know, you'll hear from somebody, Hey, white people, when you die, give us your houses. I'm like, what, what did you just say? How does that have anything to do with the criminal justice system? Or, you know, um, Israel is a genocidal state. It's like, huh? Are you worried about black lives in Israel?

You're not, this is this different thing which is you're trying to use this as a trojan horse to smuggle in all of the issues that you want to use to ally people and you want to marxism brought into a capitalism i i don't know that it's that other stuff it's the it's the dumb stuff and the anti-semitism and the abolish the police and the um let's make sure that uh you know there's never an excuse for violence this is ridiculous the police are intended to be violent that is the reason that they carry nightsticks and guns and the idea of a monopoly on violence by the state is an innovation now you say those two words monopoly and violence

wow violence is bad monopolies are bad and monopolies on violence are amazing what i took two bad concepts and i put them together it's like, have you ever thought about what a non-monopoly on violence looks like? It looks like warring factions. It's like, it's like being caught between the Bloods and the Crips. It's like being caught between the Hatfields and the McCoys. That's not someplace you want to be. And that's what, what concerns me greatly is, is that you've got these two things that are fused. And you're starting to see this a lot. This is this Mott and Bailey technique that you're finding where people have a very reasonable perspective, which would be like, can we stop brutalizing people on the basis of race? It's like, sign me up.

Sign everybody up. Everybody wants to be a part of that. Then can we call Jews genocidal? Oh, stop it. Really? Is that where you're going to go? Or, you know, abolish the police. Oh, well, who am I supposed to call when there's a shooter in a synagogue?

No, I'll be calling the police. And stop saying all cops are bastards because they're not. We put them in life and death situations. Some of them are poorly trained. Some of them are well-trained. Some of them are great people. Some of them are horrible, but like really all cops are bastards. It's just, you know, when preschool is over, why don't we get back to the, the issues of solving the country's problems?

I'm totally up for refactoring the criminal justice system. But this idea of tear it all down. I'm just exhausted. I just think that these people are not smart. This is an anti-intellectual movement because it just keeps advocating such dumb stuff that we can't even imagine how we're supposed to respond with the best of our intentions like who doesn't want to rid our jails of young black men who don't need to be in jail who need to be with their families supporting their children and you know at home with their spouses and i I don't know, I'm very emotional about the fact that we both have

a completely unfair system. I do believe in structural oppression, unlike a lot of my conservative friends. I do think as a progressive that we need to go after the criminal justice system in the United States. And this is not how you do it. You're either serious about it or you're not serious about it, you know? serious about it you know and i'd like to see people who are really committed you know i don't know maybe van jones would be the right person to lead us uh killer mike was very impressive there are lots of these people who i think could get us to a better place and i'm just not seeing it and it's it's scaring me and it's depressing me and I I'll be honest I really find the racism implicit in the black lives matter stuff

I can't stand hearing this anti-whiteness stuff it's like didn't we campaign in the 60s for people for nobody to do that to anybody else and then here you are of all people do you do you want to go back to Jim Crow because I don't and I'm increasingly creeped out that you do because at least with Jim Crow you you had an excuse you know like okay well the world is completely screwed up the world is not completely fair now but it's not Jim Crow either I just want to say the indigenous incarceration rate in Australia is egregious as well my friend and former boss Andrew Lee calculated it recently in a report that came out earlier in the year and And I think fully 2.5% of Indigenous adults in Australia are incarcerated. Say that again?

Which is a higher share than among... 2.5% of Indigenous adults in Australia are incarcerated, which is a higher share than among African-Americans. So we are grappling with these problems as well. Eric, do you think you could steel man the Mott and Bailey strategy? Like, is there an argument that we won't get the change that we need without the Bailey?

Well, that's a... I mean, I can... I wouldn't say it is Mott and Bailey. I would say that I could steal man a, an aggressive strategy where you threaten somebody to get what you want. And I've called this the intersectional shakedown where the idea is if you don't, you know, it's a lovely reputation that you have, it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it. And then what you do is, is that you start to say, well, if you start to say that sounds to me a little racist sounds kind of misogynist sounds a little rapey that kind of strategy is you're indicating to somebody i can destroy your career i can destroy your ability to earn a living

and feed your family uh do you want to continue um i think that's going to backfire. And I think it has every right to backfire. So I think that the concern that I have is, yeah, you get something for it. You get a kind of fake compliance. But sooner or later, you know, like you had the Aziz Ansari situation where apparently Aziz Ansari, you know, ordered the wrong wine on a date and, I don't know, wasn't as talented romantically and sexually as his date was hoping for. And then she writes about it for Babe.net and suddenly this guy's most personal moments

are being discussed by the entire planet. That stuff always backfires. Like the Covington kids, that backfired. You know, you have these situations which people are threatening each other and then it just doesn't lead to progress. I think what we were doing before wasn't exciting. We were building slowly towards a better world. You know, the fact that we could be super proud

of Michelle and Barack Obama, at least at the level of image in the White House, that they were relatively scandal-free, they were an attractive um intelligent couple raising uh you know beautiful children i i think that that we saw ourselves positively even racists voted for obama i mean that was one of the really cool things to watch is just we'd gotten to a point where people said yeah you, you know, I have bigotry, but I think he's the better choice. So it's like, it didn't even behave the way you were expecting.

I don't think that Martin Bailey as a technique is working. I think it's just embittering people. And sooner or later, everybody's going to have had enough. You can't cancel everybody all the time. Yeah. I think that's what I'm angry about. I'm angry about the fact that we were on a path and i would take martin luther king or malcolm x over this muddle-headed nonsense

i mean mark malcolm x made perfect sense to me it was terrifying he was like okay well if you guys want to pick up guns maybe we should pick up guns too what do you think it's like i don't like that but i understand it i hear what you're saying because we had we had an unfair unequal world and he was making sense these people don't make sense it's different i may i may really fear malcolm x but it wasn't like i wasn't learning from him i don't feel like i'm getting smarter listening to these folks i just feel like that i want every neuron i spend on them back i'm with you eric it's coming back to growth um which i think we can say is like the deep cause of a lot of these modern tensions. why did productivity growth stagnate from 1970?

But what accounts for the miraculous run of productivity growth between 1920 and 1970, when we were sort of picking the low-hanging fruit and enjoying the last gains of what many people call the second industrial revolution that happened from 1870. And just thinking about so my um one of my one of my grandfathers who passed away in 2008 he was born in 1919 and thinking about like the changes that he would have witnessed in the first you know four decades of his life is just extraordinary like homes were completely changed or emancipated from or you know women were emancipated largely from domestic drudgery um the motor car was introduced air travel was

revolutionized right down to frozen food plummeted yeah all of it and um and if i think about what i've experienced like if you transported me back to my childhood there's probably not that much i would miss i mean it'd be a bit annoying not to have all the world's information in my palm i guess the idea is that what's abnormal isn't this stagnation, but it was the amazing period from 1920 to 1970. And I guess my response to that, and I'd be interested, very interested to hear what you think, Eric, is that that may be true, but we should act as if it's not true. and we shouldn't accept that fate because there's a chance that we could return to those amazing levels of productivity growth that we enjoyed in those halcyon days. And the next innovation might be just around the corner.

But if we have a pessimistic attitude, then we're less likely to find less likely to, to find that innovation because we're just not going to try. Um, is that sort of where your head's at? No. Okay. Where's your head at? We're not going to find that because it was a one-time thing. If you just think, yeah that we had all these like historically contingent low-hanging fruits we plucked them all well but that doesn't sound right that you could only do once you hear this from people and then people say i don't believe that i believe that there's always more stuff to find the human soul will is infinitely creative and that's not the right way of saying it i i think it's spiritually

correct but i think the way i would go about it is i would say let's define umwelt hacking so what's the umwelt the umwelt is that what you can perceive right so for example you and i would be mesoscale phenomena. We're not at the size of galaxies, but we're not at the size of electrons either. We're somewhere in the middle. And, you know, we have a hearing range. We have a visible light range. We can say what it is that we're set up to perceive from the moment we're capable during development of understanding our world. Then the tools came and they said, you know, Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky and was able to see moons of Jupiter. Okay. So he changed his umwelt. He was able to focus light and be able to see things that were

too faint without an instrument and be able to deduce things about them. Now that wasn't that helpful to see moons of Jupiter. Um, but you know, ultimately we were able to land Cassini Huygens on, um, was it Saturn's moon Titan. So it's pretty amazing what you're talking about. I talked to my grandfather about this, that he was born in 1913 and he went from planes being so rare that he and his friends would run out to greet them in the fields where he lived when when they flew overhead to seeing somebody land a probe and send back a picture from the surface of uh titan well that had to do with umwelt hacking like if you look at at Harold Edgerton's photographs of the first atomic explosions,

he was able to slow time down using high speed photography to actually see what was happening in the first atomic blasts. So now you could speed up the slow, you could slow down the quick, right? With, with, uh,

with slow motion photography. Um, you could see small things and make them large, make large things small. And there was just a lot to do with what you could now perceive that you had never been able to perceive, you know, even like the germ model of disease. We forgot that that was the source of a lot of what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries, that it was just Umfeld hacking. And we thought about it as like, well, Faraday did this and Einstein did that. And, you know,

Watson and Crick over here and Rosalind Franklin. And in large measure, that was what people were able to do with increased resolution on the world. It's that thing that came to an end. That's, that's the big shift. It's not that there's no more low hanging fruit. It's that this was a particular orchard and it was the umwelt hacking orchard. And just by hacking your umwelt with instruments, you know, you want to see whether you have a tumor if you didn't have a

cat scan or a or you know you wanted to watch the brain work well we didn't have functional mri you know that's a good that's probably a better example now that we have that we can ask simple questions and the tool will tell you things that you could never have known about any other way well a lot of what we're now finding with these tools has no industrial application. It doesn't change your life. And I always point to the same one, which is that in 1968, we found quarks. Every proton and every neutron has three valence quarks in it and doesn't have any industrial applications whatsoever.

So try to imagine that in every atom you found additional structure and you haven't been able to do anything with it. Now we can hear the chirps of black holes colliding through the LIGO experiment. What does it do for us? Nothing yet. You know, we have,

we have genes that we understand, but we don't have gene therapies to go with it. We're in this very weird state where a lot of the applications from Umwelt hacking were already accomplished. And what we're waiting for, this is my reformulation of your point, is to discover the next orchard and pluck its low-hanging fruit. Well, that's different than saying we should just get back in there we should we should be in a different mode which is searching for orchards and then i'm going to say the most danger i don't think we disagree what i don't think we disagree well let me say the crazier thing so that we have an opportunity to disagree because that's always more fun. Okay.

Yeah. I don't know how to explain this to people, but I feel like we've graduated from this place. We've graduated from skepticism. We've graduated from mysticism. We've graduated from capitalism and from communism. We know that these things don't work. We've graduated from race. We've graduated from our and from communism we know that these things don't work we've graduated from race we've graduated from our religious beliefs and we don't know what to do so we keep showing up to the same high school and i've made this analogy which is like okay maybe the first year after you graduate high school um you still know people at the school. You can still go back because maybe

you know people in lower grades. Two years out, it's really weird that you're hanging around the high school because those aren't really your contemporaries. And then it's just like creepy. That's what we're doing. I feel like we're hanging around the high school that we've graduated from, including earth. We don't belong here anymore. And I don't mean to say that nobody should be on earth, but it's not safe to have, I don't know, all 7 billion plus of us running one correlated experiment. And that's what you're seeing with COVID.

COVID is a really good example of that. You could say, well, COVID is just a Chinese problem, right? No, it's everybody's problem. As will an industrial nuclear accident be everyone's problem. As would deep water horizon have been everyone's problem. Like there is no locality. We are running one global experiment. If something happens on Twitter, it happens to all of us effectively. And we need to now start running uncorrelated experiments because not all human experiments are going to work. And I want to repeat that. So people heard it. Not all human experiments are going to work. If we run one correlated experiment, we are signing our own death warrant. So we live in a globalized, interconnected world,

which means that certain types of existential risks can propagate throughout the entire system and in order to mitigate those risks we should diversify diversify the portfolio so to speak that is colonize other planets potentially even other star systems i think it's not even potentially even other star systems there's not enough diversity has to be there's not even potentially even other star systems. There's not enough diversity. There's not enough diversity locally. There may not be enough diversity because it may be that if you can get anywhere outside of where you thought you were trapped,

that then we're going to, our problems are going to course through the universe as we go to new, new worlds. But all of that nonsense from Star trek was about something and all of those that's the story of the old testament of exodus earth is egypt it's time to go yeah we're hanging around the high school it's not going to work. I know this sounds crazy, right? So it's not a question that I've lost my mind and I don't know how this sounds. If you just think about it, we can't afford to have a 7 billion person single experiment and COVID is your proof. What if this was, um, three orders of magnitude,

magnitude worse as a virus than the one we have? What if we had a completely catastrophic nuclear exchange? What if we have a completely crazy runaway loop in the Arctic with permafrost and methane. We can't all afford to be in the same experiment. We have to have different experiments. And I need to separate myself from people who, uh, you know, don't want to retire the concept of an infallible God and are willing to kill for that, whatever they think that infallible God wants. I'm not willing to say, well, hey, if you want to build a nuclear plant, you know, in Congo or in Paraguay, it's none of my business. Of course it's my business. If something goes wrong with that plant,

you think Chernobyl was none of my effing business? Go to hell. Just, I think because we don't know that it's possible to escape we don't recognize that we must escape that's that's the key issue so yeah so i think the we must escape part is non it's it's is not controversial to me at all, probably to some people listening, but that makes total sense to me. The is it possible to escape question is more interesting. Are you aware of any technologies that come close to offering us an escape ticket from Earth?

It's not technology. If you don't break the laws of physics, you're not going to escape. Yeah. If Elon's program to Mars is best possible, and he gets everything that he wants, the most aggressive timetable, the most success you could possibly have. Let's give more than he's ever said. Let's assume that we're going to colonize Titan.

And we're going to have Mars. We're going to have the moon. We are going to take every rock that is habitable and every space where we can put a space station. There's not enough diversity locally to get this thing done okay i i gotcha so we we actually need we actually need physics that's the first step because we we have to like we have to understand the fundamental laws of the universe in order to be able to design the technologies that are going to take us to other star systems.

It's actually a matter of science. I would say that Einstein and Bohr and Planck and Dirac, but let's just call it Einstein and Bohr to keep it clean for our audience at home, consigned us to death. And I don't like being consigned to death. So we've got to go after them. With an Einsteinian speed limit, we're not going anywhere.

Theoretically, you could try to use time dilation and go really far away and age really slowly. But realistically speaking, we've got an entire universe to explore. Maybe a multiverse, who knows? And we can't go anywhere. We're trapped. It's the most amazing thing. So think of it as a death sentence. Think of it as an Einsteinian the Einstein board death sentence. We're going to give you the ability to unlock the power of fusion and we're not going to give you the ability to escape. That's your high school

wow that's that's that's crazy when you put it like well but that yeah you know people ask why do you work on this geometric unity thing it's like well you don't realize what physics is you don't realize what physics is. You don't get, you know, your generation, for example, doesn't live with nuclear weapons the way my generation did. My generation is correct. Your generation is out to lunch and you know probably the people uh who lived in japan in 1945 understand this better than anyone and they they didn't get the difference between those fission devices and our fusion capabilities is night and day. To say nothing about digital technologies.

I mean, just it is twin nuclei plus that's the problem. It's like we could have all sorts of cyber attacks on each other. We could have solar storms that wipe out our grids. We are sitting ducks for so much. Look at COVID. COVID is nothing,, we're acting like jackasses. I mean like in my country, this guy Anthony Fauci is celebrated as a great scientific hero. That's the level we're at. We used to have like Linus Pauling,

you know, Max Perutz. We had Sidney Brenner. We were killing it, man. France had Pajamo, the Pajamo experiment. Those are the kind of people we want in charge. We've got Anthony Fauci. I'm not even saying he's the worst guy in the world. He's a politically minded guy who, you know, has some kind of scientific integrity and some things I'm not so happy about.

But, geez, we've forgotten what we're capable of. Where is Shackleton? I mean, I know where he is. He's like in South Georgia Island dead, but roughly speaking, Shackleton level energy, where you just say like, okay, we're in deep trouble. Time to survive. Time to survive. Hmm.

Can you explain the Einsteinian speed limit to people? Well, sure. You've got a pseudo-riemannian manifold and it turns out that there is no the idea that nothing can go faster than the speed of a massless particle and that that is a predefined speed according to our models tells you just the concept of a light year how long does it take light to travel a distance so you have a light you know things are light years away you're talking about if you play by the rules of Einstein if you see something that is 10,000 light years away, then it will take you at least 10,000 years to get there. Or more, and it's going to be more because you're not massless.

Nobody wants to go visit the universe that way. So we don't know whether or not Einstein's rules are fundamental. Every indication we have is that there's no way out. Right? So it's very, you know, I'm not telling you that breaking Einstein or going beyond Einstein gets you off this planet. Far from it. The best of our theories indicate you're stuck here you're not going to be visiting the cosmos it is not a possibility now what gives you hope well oddly the two things

that really give you hope um in my opinion are something called the schwarzschild solution and the what is it the uh and the Robertson Walker Friedman solution of Einstein's equations. There's two kinds of ways in which Einstein's theory breaks down. You say that it acquires singularities, has singular solutions, and what that indicates is it's pretty darn amazing but at some point it appears that there's some flaw in Einstein's theory, that it is not the last word. And thank God it's not the last word.

We don't know what the last word is. Maybe the last word is going to be even more constraining. Maybe it's going to actually be like, not only are you grounded, but no video games either. It's like, oh man, now I'm stuck on Earth with the twin nuclei problem. I can't go anywhere and no video games. All right, maybe. But the other possibility is, is that when you go beyond

Einstein, that there'll be something new to do. And this is the number one bet that we have to survive. Unfortunately, because Einstein and company got us into this mess with one of the two nuclei. And you could also argue that X-ray crystallography and the physicists are really the guys who figured out molecular biology to begin with. So physics got us both nuclei. Let's put it that way. The community of physicists are the people who signed our death warrant. These are my friends, my enemies, my competitors, my colleagues, my heroes, my idols. They are, they are the judge who signed our death warrant. We need more of them in case we're going to survive. In other words, you've got to double down on the thing that's already going to kill you. If you want to have a hope of surviving and nobody likes that but the the big thing is is this an intermediate state

on our route to survival and i'm betting that it is because i can't i can't accept the fact that we're all going to die here in this dumb way otherwise you have to believe that we're going to become incredibly wise or lucky and i don't believe in either of those strategies i think we're going to get smarter but i've never known us to get wiser just so people are super clear when you say they signed our death warrant what you mean is they gave us the ability to split the atom and therefore nuclear weapons. But at the same time, they didn't give us the ability to leave the planet. They gave us an indication that we can't leave.

And they also said, by the way, here's how nucleic acid works. Right? So not only did they give us the ability to split the atom i mean francis crick was a physicist right almost all of the the rna tie club was people like george gamoff richard feinman edward teller it was heavy on physics physicists are the creators of molecular biology so yes the physicists gave us two fields i i just as a guy who spends a lot of his life pissed off at physicists i'm always amazed that people aren't more appreciative of the fact that they've written your entire life including the semiconductors that you and i are using to converse right now right in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum,

which is carrying the Wi-Fi. In terms of everything, the World Wide Web, which came out of CERN. Physics, physics, physics, physics, physics. We just don't teach this history. It's very weird. We don't even realize the fact

that we're consigned to death. We're walking around in the prison as if we're going to go on forever as a species. And the prison is called earth. Yeah. We're sleepwalking. We're sleepwalking and you can't have a serious conversation with anybody

because they're just going to yell at you about something that means very little. Yeah. You know, going to yell at you about something that means very little yeah you know i would like to do something more uplifting oh yeah we will get to that we will get all right but you've helped me understand like you've just helped me clarify and organize my thoughts because now now i really get where you're coming from with your whole riff on physics and your own efforts in the form of geometric unity that leaving the planet, which we must do, we agree on that, actually begins with finding ways to break or circumnavigate that einsteinian speed limit and that's actually a question of theoretical physics not a matter of like innovation and technology um it's like a

deeper layer um so that that's that's like quite useful um to know just coming back to like the technology and innovation layer and just questions of more mundane questions of economic growth and productivity growth. Do you think venture capital is largely a matter of luck as opposed to skill? No. How do we know that the top venture capital firms aren't just the beneficiaries of a positive feedback loop whereby the most talented and promising entrepreneurs come to them? Well, it partially is that. I'm sure it is.

But is it mostly that or just partly that? And why? Most of venture capital doesn't work the tiny bit that does work has a different flavor and characteristic to it and you know it really comes down to a relatively small number of people and networks and people coming up with weird rules for what they think will work and being willing to bet on those rules. And I think one of the things that we're seeing is, is that this is probably not the best way of funding tomorrow.

Because if I listened to the way in which somebody will, let's say back a bio startup, I'm often shocked that the person who wrote the check didn't really understand the biology. It's like, well, why are you writing this check? It's like, well, because that person would be on their third startup and I've seen them and I trust them. You're just sort of going through some channel where very often people are funding things without even understanding what they funded. Betting on the jockey, not the horse. That would be one way of saying it sometimes there you'll have somebody who will

demonize the strategy known as spray and pray where you buy a little bit of everything that has the same characteristic because you can't pick which one of them will win so you buy the whole race but then they'll also say that spray and spray and pray is a terrible strategy so they'll throw people off that the fact that they're actually using the stress i mean the whole thing is completely weird when you actually listen to people who are engaged in it. And I think it's changed. I think that venture capital at some earlier point, one of the tricks was just listening to weirdos and now everybody got that.

The weirdos are actually much more valuable than you'd think. And they're not all, they're not all crazy. And then you try to figure out which are the, which are the sensible weirdos, because I don't want to buy more weirdos than I absolutely have to. Um, I think that in part, like everything else, there was a novel period where people were learning the rules and then you get a saturation period where everybody's using similar techniques and things aren't working that well but again nothing is that interesting in that the really interesting thing is to try to find new orchards and that's supposed to be the job of governments you know the reason for ferdinand and isabella is columbus now of course somebody's gonna go out and say, Columbus was a horrible person, and how could you imperialize?

Okay, whatever. The point is different. The point is that if you want to find new territories, governments are probably the only thing rich enough to go looking. Hmm. Okay. So governments are systematically better because to get to those new orchards you need huge resources and and it tends to be the state that has well we've got a problem with our billionaires our billionaires are radically underperforming i what are they doing with this money? Is it just all mistresses or is it drugs or 12 homes?

I'm just confused. I understand what Elon's doing with his money. That makes sense. But like how many new universities of a very original type got built with all of these billions in tech over the last 20 years, completely new models. Where are the new institutes? Where are the new, I just,

I can't understand what these people are doing with their money because I'm nowhere close to those levels. And you know, very quickly, what you want to buy a more expensive bottle of wine? I don't know. I'm very disappointed that our billionaires aren't better. I work for one I'm very impressed with, and I know a few I'm very impressed with and I know a few I'm very impressed with but in general I think that we have to admit that the the billionaire bet on highly original creative work done with private billions uh a few show that it's possible and almost everyone honors the possibility of doing

something amazing in the breach alone what's giving you hope at the moment uh my kids i love them um look geometric unity is giving me hope the fact that we're able to do this long-form podcasting thing is giving me hope the fact that most people are getting completely sick of the political spectrum is giving me hope. At some level, I guess the idea is that we're going through something. The stasis is over. The key thing is we're about to go through crisis, serious crisis. Do we have the right people to go through a serious crisis? You're about to shoot the rapids. Do we have somebody who actually is a boatman who knows what he's doing? Do we have a guide who's been down this river before and she's confident that she knows how to do this? I don't know.

Where are these people? What I'm hopeful for is that the vacuum is going to produce a number of remarkable individuals. We've gotten out of the habit of believing in remarkable individuals and remarkable individuals are our hope in our future. I don't think it's collective action. I don't think it's communal. It's freaks. It's weirdos. I'm really excited about the freaks and weirdos and artists. Like one of the things that our art is terrible right now, we have sucky,

horrible, unwatchable, unviewable art. I can't listen to our music. That's great news. It means that our art is off and wrong and that something amazing could happen. That's something I find very interesting about you eric is you're naturally a progressive or that's sort of where you you come from originally um and progressives tend to overlook or understate the role of human agency in human affairs um and they think in terms of the oppressor and the

oppressed and the oppressed are all just victims of circumstance um but you're someone who really appreciates like the role of human agency and the importance of promoting highly um agentic individuals do you do you view that as a paradox i'm not a collectivist as much as i seem to i'm not an egalitarian right i take progressivism seriously like really seriously yeah what is the number one tool of the progressive it's a market markets lift people out of poverty and give people agency and freedom and control over their lives second to nothing else. So one of the things that you can do with progressives is you can break progressives into two groups. Progressives who are real progressives who have to take markets very seriously.

And progressives who really are about something else. Like, you know, fairness because I'm jealous. And those people hate markets. And they hate hate capitalism and they hate choice and freedom and they're very authoritarian. So I think that roughly speaking within the category of people who are called progressives, the major group in terms of numbers is people who are avoiding progress. And that's weird because, quite frankly, I would imagine that, you know, in a weird way, Ayn Rand, I'm very unsympathetic with her because I think she's insufficiently individualistic. All of her heroes are these sort of admirable people who are wanting to do great things. But you know, lots of times the people who actually change the world are shitty people. I always bring up Bill Shockley, who came up, you know, with a lot of the semiconductor that we're using to talk to each

other. He was a eugenicist. I don't know that he was a good person. Would he have been an Ayn Randian hero? Probably not. But you know, I'm very grateful. The fact that we had a son of a bitch who actually came up with a semiconductor. So you and I can have this conversation or not came up with it, but you know, largely advanced it. I don't understand most people who call themselves progressives. I view them as being people who are like really focused on jealousy. You also see the same thing with like community organizers, people who do the hard work of community organizing, don't spend a lot of time bitching on Twitter. Like you can tell I'm not a community organizer because I spent too much time bitching on Twitter. Um, I think that we're just

very confused about what progressives actually are. And we've become confused because a large group of people has appropriated that label for themselves and they absolutely are not. So I think I'm, I'm anti, you know, you brought up this point earlier about freedom. What was it? Freedom, fairness, and equality. And the original formulation of the theory of natural and sexual selection was based on three things as well. And it was based on variation, heritability, and differential success. And the differential success is the death knell for equality. In other words, you can't have a stable evolving system without differential success. And so in large measure a progressive accepts differential success.

They don't have to love it. They don't have to say, well, let's how much of it are we going to have? You can, you can do things. I definitely think we should trade off some amount of progress for some amount of care for our most vulnerable. So I'm not, you know,

it's not like a go-go individualism and growth at all costs, but we need to be more individualistic than even Ayn Rand. If we want to call ourselves progressives because the human outlier the kurtosis of the human species is where most of like it's weird in statistics people throw out outliers and usually i would throw out the rest of the data and keep the outliers one man's opinion eric weinstein it's always a pleasure and a privilege you are an important voice and you don't need me to say this but um man just keep doing what you're doing we uh we admire you down here and um keep fighting the good fight well let me just say this australia new zealand

i think of you guys constantly you're really important important in a way that you don't know. Now's your time to break out because everything up top is completely screwed up. And if you guys can manage something different, you're closer to China. You're relatively uncorrelated and you've got an incredible spirit and diversity. And I think if there's any fairness in the world historical spirit, it's your turn next. So stop comparing yourself to what's going on in the Northern Hemisphere. Get busy and lead.

Ben, thanks for having me on the program. I'm happy to come back anytime because I really believe in what you're doing, Joseph. You're doing a great job. Thanks so much, Eric. Boom. Boom. Thank you so much for listening.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For show notes and links to everything discussed, you will find those on my website, josephnoelwalker.com. That is my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com. Also, after reaching 100 episodes, we're running a listener survey to learn more about what our listeners enjoy about the show and what we can add or change. I would really appreciate you taking the time to complete

that survey, especially if you're a regular listener. You'll find it on my website, josephnoelwalker.com. In the menu bar at the top, there's a link to the 2020 listener survey. Please head to the website and fill out the survey. Massive kudos if you do that. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our very thirsty video editor is Alfetti. I'm Joe Walker. Thanks for listening. Until next week, ciao.