Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Eric Weinstein on how he comes up with ideas, Black Lives Matter's Marxism, and why he doesn't use nootropics

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoriesOfEverythingPatreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 Another deviating episode, this time focusing on Eric Weinstein. We delve deep into a deconstruction process on his cognition, where he exposes his thought process more here than anywhere else -- a refreshing take.Eric's podcast, The Portal: https://www.youtube.com/user/nobani88.

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slash theories, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash theories. Okay, today's episode is a bit different than usual, and not only because we have the great, great Eric Weinstein on as our conversational guest, but because this one doesn't focus on his ideas, which everyone has done to death. If I have to hear, you know, Eric, tell us about our broken sense-making apparatus. One more time, it's little. You know, I'm pretty sure that he's tired of delivering that same message. He has much more to say. So we're going to follow that adage of teach a person to fish rather than give them the fish

and examine, do an investigation into how does Eric come up with his ideas rather than the specific ideas themselves. Now, Eric has an interesting candidate for a potential theory of everything called geometric unity, which has received somewhat of a conspicuous and loud silence from the physics community, who seem to be protective of their string theory and their loop qg and guide eric by saying you know what predictions does geometric unity make why don't you publish it in peer review first before we take it seriously now feinman has a cautionary tale about this which richard feinman by the way so feynman had feynman said something

like imagine the modern neophyte physicist reverse goes back in time 500 years ago to the aztecs and says hey i have a different theory than yours i think that the planets go around in ellipses and that the earth orbits the sun and the aztecs says well what predictions does like our theory our complicated theory and convoluted theory can predict the lunar eclipse is down to the day can yours all the modern physicists like I haven't worked out my physics to that I haven't worked out this theory to that degree then the Aztec is like okay well then we can dismiss it because look at how much more powerful ours is. The moral of this story is don't prematurely abrogate a theory based solely on nonconformity with the data

or lack of predictive power as virtually any scientific theory in its developmental stages will have that as a feature. Kenneth Young, who's alive and a titan of modern physics, said something similar, which is, if you're looking for a theory that's pristine and predictive from the get-go, you'll at most be an A-plus student and not a researcher. Because every theory in its development, almost every theory in its developmental stages is messy.

It's contradictory, including Bohr's model of the atom, including Newtonian physics. Enjoy. Eric, this is going to be an expose into you, an investigation, a peregrination into your mind. I don't care too much. I care, but not for this, about your idea. I don't care too much about your ideas for this. I care about your thought process. How did you come up with your ideas? Is it all right?

First of all, good to be with you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. We'll start broadly. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. We'll start broadly. Okay. You have quite a few projects. You have your work for Peter Thiel, I assume. And you have your podcast, you have your husband, you're a father. You have Geometric Unity, which you work on. So that's five that I can count. Does that exhaust it? Are there more? Does it stretch you thin? Well, I mean, there's also the gauge theory and economics project, which I'm very keen to push through. I'm very focused on making sure that my brother's work on senescence, telomeres, and antagonistic pleiotropy is understood, recognized, and its implications chased down.

implications chased down. There are some avenues for immigration reform, trying to understand why it is that this important economic topic is deranged because it has to do with units of labor rather than units of capital. Yeah, there are a number of different projects, but they all sort of seek to try to make sure that humanity has a future and that we don't tear ourselves apart in the present,

trying to construct false utopias and that we don't find ourselves limited by what we've already achieved in a way where we forsake our ability to achieve in the future by actually deranging ourselves in a false hope of a kind of utopian present which can't can't possibly obtain do you ever feel like it's too many projects or do you have one day for one project it's a chaotic well honestly to be blunt about it

that's not really where I feel like the problem is the problem is is that I live in a world that I have a very strong impression that people are generically crazy and in a world in which I take people to be generically crazy that is that There's there's simply humans and computing machines that have been fed lots of terrible information on a daily basis from a few centralized sources. And so the biggest problem is there aren't enough people to work on the projects that matter because everyone is constantly distracted and distractible by projects that do not. And that

the incentive structures can't be put towards things that must be done. They're in fact structured almost so that the things that can, that must be done, cannot be done. And I think that's the biggest problem. So that leaves me working alone on too many things. Speaking of working alone, you have a wife who is your collaborator, at least in the economics department. When did you get married? In 1996. How old were you?

About 30. How did you know she was the right one? Or do you not believe in the right one? Well, I have different theories about this i believe that you meet the right one every three years on average that there there isn't one right person for each one of us but there's a very small subset of people who can be the right one and um you know i would say that when you meet an Indian Jewish supermind who's incredibly gorgeous and has a huge heart,

who takes your breath away and makes you laugh, it's pretty hard to resist. So there aren't so many people like Pia Milani. She's just a truly amazing human being on just about every axis. I mean, I sometimes feel bad when people say you have to compromise on various things and outside of a tiny number of areas, I feel like there was no compromise with her at all. Just one person had everything and beyond. And I just, I guess I've enjoyed my time talking, being and traveling with Pia more than I ever imagined

I could enjoy another human being. No, you said enjoyed. Do you still enjoy? That is to say, I know that after some time, marriages don't have the same zeal or spark that they did in the beginning. Do you feel like you've managed to maintain it or it's increased or it's decreased or it's changed? It's a deeper level that's meaningful that is not encapsulated by.

Well, you're talking to the wrong guy. I mean, I'm just I'm. I'm still I guess I would. If you told me I had 10 years on a sandbar with enough coconuts and fish to get by with Pia, I would say that that would be a complete intellectual diet. I could spend my time talking, thinking, theorizing, arguing, and it's very weird if I just think about my family, my wife and our two kids,

those would be probably the three people that any one of whom would be a complete, relatively complete life in terms of just being so connected to people and being fascinated by their minds and appreciative of the differences between us all. My family is exactly the people that I find most fascinating and most fulfilling to talk. How did you know you were ready to have kids? I wasn't. Nobody is. Was it a surprise or you just decided to jump in voluntarily? You know, when I met my wife, I probably told her that I really didn't need to

have children. And I think she really needed to have kids. And, you know, kids are a very strange undertaking in that there are a few features we don't appreciate. First of all, they have the strange feature that they are the most fascinating things that are absolutely not fascinating to talk about. So like if I start to tell you about what my kid did today, your eyes will glaze over. But to me, it's the most fascinating thing in the world. So it divides us in a very strange way because we're so asymmetrically attached to our own children. Another feature that I think is really interesting is that if my kids didn't absolutely fascinate me, it would

be the greatest time sink in the world. But if you have great kids, there's nothing better you can do with your life. So it's really, it's important to love your children. I think Jordan Peterson has one of his basic rules for life is don't let your children become anything that, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them or something like that. I just, I guess I feel like it's about the biggest time sink imaginable. So it's astounding that anything can pay for itself given the demands. And yet child rearing, I would absolutely recommend it to anyone if you really love your kids. You managed, at least in my estimation, to stay productive. I think you're extremely productive.

You might not consider yourself to be. Some people think I'm counterproductive. Well, either way, there's a word productive in there. You're doing something. Do you, do you consider yourself to be productive and do you take nootropics? What does your schedule look like? How do you maintain this? I have no schedule. I have a terrible sleep schedule. I don't take no tropics. I don't self-optimize in any of the sort of Tim Ferriss style ways. Why not?

Well, it's a very weird question. There are ways in which I think, like I really left this planet when I started taking theoretical physics very seriously. And I don't exactly know what those words mean, but it's a sort of a dissociative brain state where you don't really think about this as the plane of existence. You think about trying to commune with something else. And it means you sort of lose track

of the here and the now, the practical, the instance of something. You know, if I have a coffee mug, do I see this as the platonic essence of all coffee mugs, or do I see it as the particular coffee mug that I'm holding as a chip on one side? You know, I think that I started to move towards greater and greater abstraction in how I interacted with the world and probably caused me not to focus too much on the sort of West Coast optimization program. In part, I also think that a lot of those people spend so much time optimizing themselves that they don't do anything with the optimized machine that they create. So there is a trade-off. And for better or for worse,

I decided to ignore some aspects of that to pursue something that seemed impossible. So it's like they're constantly defragmenting and they're not running any applications or besides the disk optimization. I didn't say that, but that's quite funny. Okay. Do you microdose? I remember't say that, but that's quite funny. Okay. Do you microdose?

I remember you were going to talk to Tim Ferriss about microdosing. It was in the title, but I don't recall the topic of psychedelics coming up about you personally. No comment? Taking a drug right now in my mug. Okay. Here's the question with the presumption in it. What life-changing insight have you

gotten from psychedelics that you feel like you couldn't have gotten elsewhere? The life-changing insight that I've gotten from psychedelics is that we should never have created the Controlled Substances Act in the early 1970s to go after blacks and Jews, and that many of the substances on that list do not belong on that list because the twin criteria that have to be met are that something has a high propensity for harm and that it has no known medical benefit. And we now know from research coming out of Johns Hopkins and NYU and other places, our friends at MAPS, that in fact, many of the substances on the schedule one list should not be on that.

Do you find that you're a fast reader? No. Well, I'm a fast reader in a very strange sense, which is that I don't actually read the books. I have a different technique of sampling information inside of books, trying to figure out where it's dense, and then drilling in where I need to. Okay. Let's explore that. Let's expand, elaborate. What do you mean? Let's take us through, let's say you want to learn about a topic, some topic that you haven't touched on before. Particle phenomenology. Okay. Okay. Now I just said a word particle phenomenology to most people, they're like, okay, I don't even know what that is. Now let's assume you obviously know what those

words mean. So you have some familiarity with the field. What do you what's your first step Wikipedia article skim that then? Well, the first thing is, what I want to know why it is that I'm I care about particle phenomenology. Did a professor tell me that that's something I really need to drill down on because I'm asking a question? Or is this just some words that crossed my path and now I have to find out what they mean? So depending upon what the purpose is, I probably do things slightly different. Okay, let's imagine that for your theory of everything, you know that having some predictive power is useful and you want to know, well, what, how can I mangle this into a form that, that won't be dismissed.

Okay. The usual, let's just take the sort of the particle and wave zoo. You know, you've got lots of things that end in the word, ons,, neutrons, gluons, photons, electrons, right? And then you've got different words like neutrinos, quarks, w and z particles. So you've got this whole slew of words around particles. First thing I would say is, okay, how do these words relate to each other, right? So how long before you figure out that the basic division is bosons versus fermions? That's the most important division in all of the particle zoo.

Okay, I'm gonna stop you for a second because I wanna get into some specifics. So you're like, all right, well, there's some terminology and they're disparate, at least right now. How do I connect them? Do you do something like the traditional madman who writes on paper puts it on the wall and then read strings between them or or is it you type it or you ask well this isn't my first this isn't my first rodeo so i know that if i vomit all the stuff that is confusing me onto one let let's say, whiteboard or piece of paper or a spreadsheet or whatever it is,

that there are going to be ways in which all of those concepts relate to each other. And whatever that structure is around the raw unstructured verbiage has to be teased out. And usually the things that I care about are going to be highly structured. I give the counter example that history is not very highly structured because it kind of unfolds haphazardly. Or like the phylogenetic tree in biology is pretty haphazard because it unfolded just as it were. When things are highly systematized like particle phenomenology, you have to understand when somebody says like the word hadron,

where does hadron fit with respect to the word quark or the word boson or fermion? So the next thing is sort of the hierarchy of relationships that are intrinsic to a system. So for example, if I was doing human physiology, or sorry, if I was doing biology, I would think about the breakup into the four layers of anatomy, physiology, histology, and cytology. Right? So think about those as theories. I can't really talk about anatomy unless I'm also talking

about the function, which is physiology and physiology really depends on tissues. So that would be histology and tissues are made up of cells. So that would be cytology. So I would build some sort of dependency structure. And then I would try to remember this is the top level categorization so that I have a map. Okay, now please forgive me if it's getting tedious and I'm getting too much into details. But you say map. Are you writing it down or are you still keeping it in your head? Are you just reading this? I'm in flow. So maybe I'm dancing around next to a whiteboard and I'm recording things

and I'm writing things in spreadsheets. I'm just trying to get the structure because initially I'm always astounded at how the simplifying tend to be hidden from view until very late in the game with most pedagogy. I think because if we give them to people up front, they will learn too quickly and teachers will be out of a job. they will learn too quickly and teachers will be out of a job. That's interesting. Okay. So you think there's a nefarious reason, the selfishness of the self-preservation of the teacher? There's a lot against us all, which withholds the simple diagrams that would keep us much less confused.

You also mentioned... I'm slightly kidding here, but there is something to it. Are you dyslexic? I've been told I'm dyslexic. Of course, dyslexia is itself not always a well understood cluster of disparate phenomena. Certainly, I have learning differences from the average human. Yeah. Okay. What are they? from the average human. Yeah, okay. What are they?

Well, some of them are none of your business and others of them have to do with... Symbols are very cumbersome to keep straight and they dance around too much so that it's hard to learn through a symbolic channel. Okay. Now, when I hear that, and I hear that coming from a mathematician, that strikes me as odd because math is tremendously symbolic. So how do you overcome that? It's a giant pain in the neck. It's a real problem.

Right, right, right. Okay. But at the same time, it doesn't seem like you took longer than the average person to formulate your PhD or to study. You graduated pretty much at this plus or minus one year that the average student was. I mean, my PhD did take longer

because I started when I was 19 with a master's degree. So effectively, you know, functional. Okay, okay, okay. But yeah, but you started at 19 with a master's degree. So effectively, you know, function. Okay, okay, okay. But yeah, but you started in 19 with a master's degree. Many people are entering university 18 or 19. No, but I'm trying to make a different point, Kurt. People have a very simplistic idea. Okay, you were really good at math

or you were really bad at math. Well, both of those things are true. You know, if you look at Ray Charles, would you say he's good at music or bad at music? I would say, I'm not sure who Ray Charles is. I'm assuming he's a piano player. Okay. Yeah. He was a blind sort of piano player. Right. There's a documentary on him. Okay. Right, there is a documented one. And a player. Okay? And the next question would be,

after saying, well, he was obviously very good at music, I would have asked you, how was he at reading music? And you would have said, well, he was blind. Of course he wasn't reading music. Right, right. He's both good and bad as a musician if part of being a musician to you is reading music. In some sense, the same thing is

true in mathematics for those of us who are symbolically challenged. Okay, so there's different facets of physics and mathematics. Is there one in particular about physics that you find hard to grok or to understand or to comprehend? Is there one what? So for example, in math, there's the understanding of the formula, which I imagine comes to you fairly easily. And then there's the writing it, there's this explicit explication of it out into a formula. So that is symbolic.

And that one I imagine is tricky for you. Now, physics has different components. Like there's the formula, there's the understanding as well. And there's the formula, there's the understanding as well. And there's probably three more or maybe a hundred more. What do you, what do you particularly find difficult in physics? The pedagogy is terrible. So people discriminate between closely related concepts. They, between closely related concepts. They'll talk about a classical object in a quantum problem without explaining why they're allowed to have a classical

version of let's say the slit in the double slit experiment but a quantum version of the electron that supposedly is going through both slits at the same time. And then, you know, you ask the question, well, you know, might it be the problem that you haven't defined what an observer is? You haven't said how you have a detector that is itself quantum mechanical. You're never quite sure with the physicists whether they are simplifying things in a way that is not destructive of the truth or whether they are simplifying things in a way that is not destructive of the truth or whether they are actually playing with sleights of hand. So I think physics is just, they don't think as cleanly as mathematicians, but the upside of that is that that non-cleanliness

means that they can do things no other community can do because they've hybridized the purity of mathematics with the dirt and grit of experiment. And when you're thinking, do you tend to, you wrote plenty, by the way, I was looking through your Edge pages as well as your papers, somewhere economics and it's it's fairly lengthy yet you consider yourself to have in part dyslexia do you do you write in order to think or do you think aloud do you think while conversing do you think while walking yeah but i also for example calculate inside of a typesetting program, which is unheard of. What do you mean when you say calculate? I require the rigor of a program

called LaTeX or LaTeX in order to keep my symbols from dropping a minus sign or running off the edge of the page. So I actually use typesetting as the environment in which I calculate as a crunch. Now, when you came up with your theory of everything... Let me just actually say one other thing since you're pawing at this issue. I don't know anybody at all who is in my situation in math and physics. That is, I never met somebody with my learning issues who refused to accept that they couldn't do this, right? Because the strong indication that I have by the time I was leaving high school with a B- in mathematics

was that this was not something I was supposed to go into. And I couldn't imagine that if the secrets of the universe were written in this language that anyone should be fenced out of it because their learning process was different from others. There have been blind mathematicians. There have been... One of the greatest. But I never encountered anyone one-on-one, face-to-face, personally, who had a significant symbolic challenge because the language is so focused on symbolic expression. You mentioned one time about you would take anyone who's been classified as having a learning disability and show them why they either don't have one or you have a teaching disability. Let's be very clear. There are

a set of learning disabilities which are actually not learning disabilities and then there are things like you know the person didn't get enough oxygen in the birth canal and their brain never recovered. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there are certain learning disabilities in the parlance of educators that are simply misdiagnosed superpowers with a deficit that pays for them. Right. Is to choose my learning disabled mutants.

I'll take that group of people over standard learners any day. You just have to change education so that it doesn't consign them to the dummy pile. I imagine it was painful for you to understand your own learning disability because you're just having trouble. You don't know why you're having such a hard time. Now, let's say there are other people who have similar, maybe not similar learning disabilities,

but learning disabilities in general or in the way that you just defined them. What advice do you have so that they can uncover what's holding them back? Because it could be a myriad of items. Well, the first thing is, is that recognize that your performance is a hybrid of your abilities and your teacher's abilities, and that you are going to pay the price if your teacher cannot find your abilities and just uses what they use on every other neurotypical student.

student. So first of all, stop, stop sniveling, stop saying you're bad at math, stop saying you can't do this, stop listening to your teacher, stop reading your report card, recognize that none of that actually matters for you because it's predicated on an idea that, I mean, let's imagine, for example, that you're in Inuit in the north of Alaska, okay? Should you feel bad that you're not going to win the Boston Marathon? Because the people who win that are, in general, East Africans who are the world champions of radiating heat, whereas you are the world champion of retaining heat because of the differences in your environment. So you're going to be maximally bad at marathon running

because you're very well adapted to live in the cold. Now, my people, stop feeling bad that you're not the symbolic king of solving complicated integrals through lots of mathematical you know, mathematical trickery. Instead, focus on what you're good at, which is that, probably speaking, you're conceptually much more advanced as you are symbolically retarded. So it's very bad for me to give advice because I tend to tell people to stop listening to their teachers, get a backbone, become more arrogant, more self-possessed, learn to build yourself up. And then people will say, oh my God, you're going to encourage the Dunning-Kruger effect. Well, you know, that may be true. That

may be the downside of what I'm saying, but let me say the upside. You're going to consign a bunch of super minds to the dummy pile because you don't even understand that they can't perform on the tests for the same reason that one person might taste cilantro as a beautiful spice and the other might taste it as a bar of soap because of a genetic predisposition we are all different and it is not the role of school to tell the super learners who have my profile that they're idiots it's much better to tell the teachers that they may be idiots for not recognizing they have a different population that they're mangling. Okay, right here, you have your own point of view. And almost every single almost invariably, when someone asks you a question,

one that you haven't been posed before, I assume you I assume you haven't, it's novel to you, you will come back in about five seconds with an interesting and different answer i'm not always and it's cogent which is difficult because you can string together a sentence and not have it cohere now does that come from having an articulated worldview i don't want to definitely make that out but i don't mean to keep singing your praises, but at some point I'll insult you. I'll figure it out. But do you, does it come from, were you able to have such quick responses and unique responses when you were 25 or when you were 30? Does it just come with age? If you know some about- No, I've pretty much been the same guy since my 20s but nobody was listening to me in my 20s

okay and that came from life experience and how do you how would you how do you tell someone to think originally i see you as an original thinker and that doesn't mean you're correct but obviously i'm biased like and i don't want to give away my bias but but i tremendously like you and i'm curious how is it that someone else can what advice do you have for someone else to be able to articulate their own point of view well okay so let me this is a super dangerous question if you're really interested i'll give you a real answer. Every single person walks through their day seeing that they're told aren't there or they fail to see things that they're told are there and they learn to silence their own voice. We all have this voice that is not the voice that is

received through the television, the radio, podcasts, newspapers, websites, and we learn to squelch ourselves. Now, that process is a very dangerous one to undo, because what you'll notice is that every time you ask me a question where I don't have a standard take, potentially somebody's going to get really angry about it, whatever it is that I'm saying. Like, you know, what we were just talking about where I just said that many teachers have teaching disabilities that they pawn off on students as learning disabilities. I can easily imagine, you know, an article in a newspaper called American Educator. Like today, Weinstein continued his tirade against the teaching.

Like somebody's always going to get angry. It's not strictly a function of courage, or did you build this up? What I'm saying is you, you can say something, you know, it might be taken out of proportion, just like Jordan Peterson is. At some point you just point you just stopped caring. You mentioned, well, I was the same way since I was 20. I imagine that you would be more hard-skinned as you get older, thick-skinned.

I don't know. Everything still hurts. You know, you're never going to be accepted. When you give up on being accepted, you know that you're never going home. There's no home. So I guess what I would say to people is every single one of us has a lot of ideas and opinions that we've never shared. And you'll find this out because when I say things, somebody will say to me, oh, my God, you're the only other person I've ever heard think this. Nobody's ever said it out loud until now.

I say, oh oh that's interesting you had that observation and it just didn't come out of your mouth because you were terrified as to what it might do someone accused you recently on your q a i was just watching some of your instagram q a's and they said i'm just going to read you a comment and i want to know what you would say to it i i can't find it right now, but it was essentially calling you an alarmist for using the term Marxist and Maoist to talk about those on the extreme left

and what's going on currently. Now, to those who are uninitiated, why is calling them a Maoist or Marxist an understatement or an overstatement or precisely correct? Why is calling a Marxist a Marxist? I don't understand the question. They would say that what's happening right now with Black Lives Matters. Let me get the exact quote. Someone ranted. I paraphrase it. Someone was ranting about you,

you meant you talking about the current state of affairs and it being akin to Marxism or Maoism. Let's remove Marxism because some people will say, I am a Marxist and you can always point to those. I mean, isn't that, um, isn't, isn't, how is that not an accurate statement? Okay, all right, all right. In other words, you have this woman Patrice Cullors, right? Who's a founder of Black Lives Matter, describing herself as a trained Marxist and her fellow co-founder is trained Marxist.

So I just, I guess I'm bewildered. How am I an alarmist? When they self-describe. Again, so let's go back to this. This is in part my frustration with your questions. There's nothing original that I'm doing in calling somebody who self describes them as a Marxist, a Marxist.

And then the fact that I can be called out for listening to the founders self-description. Like I just don't understand what planet I'm on. Am I on a planet that faults me for being an attentive listener? Why do you think people, why do you think people do this? Is it because they don't want to think it's difficult or they have an ideology and they see an attack so they preserve it?

Like what is motivating them? Peterson might say it's resentment, large part resentment. We're losing our mind collectively. We're in a process of mass insanity, right? We've been through these before. And, you know, I'm choosing not to go along with an insanity and that generates epithets. But please don't tell me that the inmates have once again told me that I'm crazy because I know that that's what they will say. They're inmates. They're nuts. Well well you know going back this is this is a reason i just

want clarification on this why am i answering a question about being an alarmist who is fact i mean like i've just given you the name of a person who founded black lives matter co-founded and self-describes as a marx. Trained Marxist, whatever that means. Not my words. And now I'm fighting the question of I'm an alarmist. I'm going to just do something that I like to do, which is I don't like these questions. These are illegal questions.

I'm an accurate person. Whoever made that claim is an inaccurate person. And we don't privilege inaccurate people with the idea that we have to answer their inaccurate question it's just it's a stupid exercise right as I was telling you before one of the reasons why I think the radical left or extreme left or whatever you want to call them is pestilential is because it takes seconds to install. It's like bloatware in my analogy before and,

and days or hours at least to unpack. Do you, what, what avenues when you were going, this is a discursive jump, but what avenues did you explore for your theory of everything that didn't work? I mean, a million. explore for your theory of everything that didn't work? I mean a million. One of my earliest ideas was that we should look towards exceptional algebra

to generate the smaller category of candidate theories. And the natural objects to look at in that world are two objects called E6 and E8 together with something called the exceptional Jordan algebra. Never mind. And you know I that was an... Garrett Leisi later came along and made a theory around E8, which there were certain problems. Effectively, it wasn't large enough. Garrett was insightful, where most people did not understand that E8 is about a principle

called triality. And triality theoretically had the possibility of weaving together the three copies of matter that we find, known as the three families, but there actually isn't enough room inside of E8 to do this little maneuver. And it's also the case that if you use E8, which is this 248 dimensional set of symmetries, you run into a different problem, which is that your bosons and fermions are difficult to treat in different ways, and yet they have to have different quantization. So that's an example of an avenue that I don't see how to fix or how to

solve and probably isn't correct. But that's something I abandoned. Right. What else? If you have to give one more. Just because that one's fairly familiar people know some people know about e8 and i'm curious what was what were you mulling over what do you mean what were you thinking about when it comes to theories of everything like okay i want to come up with my also does it start with this question i want to come up with my, also, does it start with this question? I want to come up with my own theory of everything, or does it just start with the frustration that there doesn't exist one? Well, no, I think it comes up, it comes from the idea that you first want to know what theories exist. And you're not necessarily focused on the theory of everything, you shouldn't be, you should be focused on knowing what time it is in human history. So this is one of my-

Familiarizing yourself with the landscape. Pardon me? So familiarizing yourself with what's out there in the physics. Well, there's that, but there's also the question of, you know, what would Newton have done if Newton had lived in Einstein's time? We don't know. You have to understand this weird question. What time is it? Because the only breakthroughs you can make are the breakthroughs that are available to you from your time.

So, you know, could Galileo have landed a probe on the surface of Titan? No, he wasn't in a position to do it. It doesn't matter how brilliant he is. So I happen to think that this time is the first time that it is barely possible to get to a theory of everything. And, you know, that itself isn't clear, but that's part of my determination. My determination is that we actually, at least as of 1975 or 76, were within striking distance of finishing the whole thing off. The only problem is that the last move is the hardest move of all. And so my take is that by 1975, we were in reach, but the last move is not

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If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. completeness theorem had something to say about a fundamental theory of everything that is to say that it excludes it or potentially excludes it do you do you see girls and completeness theorem says as having anything to do with physical theories sabine hossenfelder doesn't think so for example so there's well it depends what you mean i mean i guess the way i would read it is the following what is the theory of everything that's something we haven't even

discussed and i don't even know that you and i agree on a theory of everything that's something we haven't even discussed and i don't even know that you and i agree on a theory of everything so let me ask you what is the theory of everything to you well i'll tell you what what what i think you think and then i'll tell you what i what i think so i believe i heard you describe it as a theory in which we're no longer looking for mathematical improvements though it leaves open the door for religious, theological, philosophical progress, however one wants to define progress. Okay. It's pretty close.

Okay. So pretty close. Pretty close. Okay. And then for me, it would be similar, except I'm interested in consciousness as well. Now, most physicists, I'm not even sure if it includes yourself, but most physicists believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from fundamentally a material substrate.

And I'm unconvinced. It might be. I'm just unconvinced. And I would like there to be an explanation of consciousness or more of an... See, you can have a quantum gravity, so you can unify them, GR and QM, but that to me isn't in and of itself a theory of everything.

I would like more explanations. So why is there dark matter? What is dark energy? Why are the fundamental constants the way they are? And maybe that's asking too much. Maybe it's like Lee said, Lee Smolin, where the constants evolve and they change within black holes. Still, that's an explanation. I'm more interested in... I see it as broader than most people conceptualize theories of everything. I take the word everything, in other words, I take the word everything very seriously.

I think that's a mistake. Please expand. Well, I give an analogy that I'm partial to, which is a theory of everything is an attempt to look at chess games being played and to learn the complete set of rules of all chess games. It is not a theory of how to play chess well and what can be done inside the game of chess. Okay. So when you're trying to come up with the theory of everything, it's really very restricted. You're trying to come up with what is the natural mathematical description, all of the rules that generate the universe that we see. Okay. The question of the

consequences of those. Sure, sure. Let's take this analogy a bit more, a bit farther. Then there's the question of why are the rules the way they are? Why are there pieces at all? Why these pieces? Are those not questions that you think a theory of everything should answer? Yes. There's the rules, and why the rules?

Well, look, my standard gambit, which nobody ever picks up on, is that a theory of everything is effectively a newspaper story with six questions. Where and when, who and what, how and why. Where and when is obviously space and time, which tells you it's the arena in which things are taking place. The who and the what is like the equipment and the players. So I would say that I'm going to make the players into the fermions, the matter,

and the equipment into the bosons, the force. Okay? So you've got now four of your six questions, and then your last two are how and why. And I'm going to say how is the equations and why Lagrangian degenerates the equation. Now that means that if you don't know anything about physics, you can remember, oh, that guy on the internet said,

where and when, who and what, how and why, and that that's what constitutes a physical theory. So I would say that that's what I'm responsible for when I'm trying to give you an understanding of where all of this comes from. Are you ever interested in how is it that the, how is it that an electron knows what to do? How is it that it follows the laws at all? Do you ever think about that?

Because that can blow someone's mind if you just keep thinking about that. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe you have a reason why it shouldn't blow your mind. Well, that's not how I see it. I mean, the key point is, let's just follow my newspaper story.

I'm asking why is the Lagrangian Why not ask why the Lagrangian? Why is there any Lagrangian? Why is the Lagrangian the way of solving the equations of motion? So why the Lagrangian? And how does it even follow

the Lagrangian? How does it go about following the rules? These may be foolish questions and I apologize, please forgive my naivety. Well what we believe is that the electron, if you will, constitutes a kind of a wave, and a wave taking place over the arena which is the who, which is the where and the when, that is space-time. It is part of the who, because it's a player, it's part of the matter, which corresponds to a wave. And you have to ask all waves live in a medium.

What medium does the electron wave live within? That medium is called a fiber bundle. In this case, a vector bundle. So now you've got a question, okay I've got a vector bundle and I've got a wave. Now how does it know how to behave? Well that question is implicitly to a physicist, what differential equation does it obey? Now a differential equation is something that allows us to say how fast it's moving in time and in space, right? How does it

propagate across the where and the when? Well, that has to involve rates of change, which involve derivatives. That's why it's a partial differential equation. But how do you take a derivative of this crazy gadget, which is a wave in a vector bundle? Now Now here's the weird thing. The photon is effectively the instruction for building a derivative to govern the electron. And we don't say that, I don't know why we don't say that, but a photon is closely associated with the derivative operator on the electron which is effectively a function. We call it a section, but the garden variety would be a function. Okay, that's really cool. Now I've got a derivative which is determined by the photon differentiating a function which is representing the

electron, which is not pushed out to the general public, and furthermore, that derivative has a weird property, which is that what we would say to our calculus students is that normally we lie to you and tell you that mixed partial derivatives commute. I differentiate a quantity in the x direction and follow that by differentiating the y, or I can start with the y direction following it by differentiating the X direction. We claim that those two represent the same quantity. Well, when you have the photon in play, they don't. So you say, okay, well, two objects that I thought were equal are no longer equal.

So now you say, I wanna measure the failure of my calculus class to prepare me for this. I'm gonna take the difference between the two quantities that I thought were always, that are turned out not to be equal. Well, that is the electromagnetic field. So the electromagnetic field that we perceive is the amount of lying that takes place when we attempt to apply the rule that mixed partials commute,

when in fact in grown-up mathematics they do not. Okay, well that allows the electron to influence the photon. So the function is influencing the derivative, and the derivative is feeding back on the function. So now you've got this great situation in which the electron and the photon are having a conversation with each other and changing each other's behavior. Now, what's the name of that conversation? Well, it's called quantum electrodynamics or quantum field theory. That's an amazing story and we don't tell it like this.

And I don't know why we don't tell it like this. Right? Like- Is there any part of you that wants to write a book almost like Feynman did the Feynman lectures of physics in his way? All right. We're talking to an internet gadfly, a non-physicist with a supposed theory of everything. Let's just first of all make contact with the fact that if there are physicists in your audience, they're getting angry.

the fact that if there are physicists in your audience, they're getting angry. Saying, I don't understand. Normally, normally, these guys are cranks. This guy sounds like he's not a full crank. I recognize a lot of what he's saying, but he's acting incredibly irresponsibly. So I might be very interested in writing that book once the theory is understood and accepted. But let's be clear, I am acting as an imposter. I'm not a physicist. I've taken, I think, one semester of mechanics. I haven't taken quantum theory. I haven't taken electromagnetism.

I haven't taken the standard sequence. I haven't even taken the full mechanics. So whatever you're looking at and whatever you're talking to me about, we just put a warning label for the benefit of our friends in the physics community, that this is a totally unauthorized conversation. Now, the fact that I think that they're falling down on the job because they didn't tell you that the photon was part of a derivative and that they didn't define the electromagnetic field strength as the amount of lying about mixed partials. And they haven't really teased out the fact that theoretical

physics is a newspaper story and most of their readers don't really know what a Lagrangian is. And they spend all their time on the double slit experiment and entanglement in many worlds and other time wasting activities. You know, I have a very deep disagreement with the physics community about what they're pushing out to the lay community that they expect to support the physics endeavor. I think it's done a terrible job. And so in part, they should be pissed off that I'm calling them bad exponents of their field

and that they have failed to advance their field in 50 years and they should say that I'm an imposter. But at the end of that day, the key question is, is anybody going to move this field forward? And I'm certainly going to try my hand at it. You know, I see the vitriol thrown at you from the physics community as akin to the word cultural appropriation. And let me just explain my analogy here. I'm just going to read because I have some notes here. So you mentioned that physicists should be thanking you because you put out intellectual novelties to the public

in the form of upper year graduate studies. Wait, did I say that the physicists should be thanking me just now? Not now, but on Brian Keating's podcast. Yeah. Okay. They should be thanking me? Just let me finish. Just let me finish. Or you can correct me after because you put

out curiosities such as vibrations yet physicists at least the popular ones tend to not acknowledge the the good that you're doing for the physics community by by getting people interested in physics and it could be potentially out of spite. Now, I'm wondering if there's a parallel between this and the emergence of the term cultural appropriation. I'll tell you why I think the analogy is befitting. That there's some groups, say black people or brown people, and they weren't able to get success in some market for whatever reason, perhaps predominantly racism in this case.

And so they feel like they have to demean themselves by playing to the lowest common denominator for the most part. And then some outsider comes, usually white in their estimation, it could be Elvis or it could be Eminem, and takes their dance moves or accents and makes it palatable to a larger audience.

Now, when I think about this, part of me says that this should be a move for celebration because it allows the consumption of previously niche and Black or minority areas for the wider audience, like rap music. Now white people love rap music because of Eminem. And so in a sense, it should be thought of as a boon. a sense, it should be thought of as a boon. But perhaps I'm going out on a limb. It's not because of perhaps deep-seated hatred that someone else was successful in a domain that they tried to be successful in, which makes them envious. And so they come up with this intellectual justification in the form of a construct like cultural appropriation. Now, do you see the same

phenomenon happening right now to you, with you promulgating science, the math, physics, and ideas from economics into the broader public sphere when physicists have been twiddling their thumbs. You are a real troublemaker, Kurt. This is very interesting. Okay. And they're parroting the same over-trodden, trite, Schrodinger's cat, twin paradox. All right, Kurt, you want to really get into this thing? You want to dig into this?

Yeah, yeah. Let's go. All right. So who is Otis Blackwell? I don't know. That's the problem. You've mentioned Elvis, but you don't even know the name Otis Blackwell. And Otis, in large measure, made Elvis Presley.

Not single-handedly, but he was one of the people who wrote the songs and sang the songs that Elvis Presley made famous. So, you know, this is a problem that I talked about on my podcast with Stefan Alexander, but in the initial introductory essay, which was coming to understand that there were three names that I kept finding on all the rock and roll that I loved.

McKinley, Morgenfeld, W. Dixon, and Ellis McDaniel. And who were these guys? I didn't know. So I had to find out. And it turned out that McKinley, Morgenfeld was Muddy Waters. W. Dixon was Willie Dixon, the great blues writer from Chicago, and Ellis McDaniel was a guy named Bo Diddley. The idea that a lot of these cats never got their due and that other people who were less talented got richly rewarded for the work that they had done is part of a problem. I don't think that's the situation in physics. I don't think, you know, if you look at Elvis Presley, go look at the video for Jailhouse Rock and tell me that guy wasn't an unbelievable genius. On top of Otis Blackwell, Otis Blackwell may have been a genius for writing the songs and Elvis Presley was a different genius

on top of that genius. That's not the same thing as some Bobby Darin version of What Did I Say, which happens to be palatable because it's not nearly as frightening as when Ray Charles sings the proper. That situation is different than saying, look, I don't even know what you guys are doing. You claim to be high energy physicists, but you spend your time talking about things that have nothing to do with high-energy physics. You're talking about Calabi-Yau manifolds and worlds that we will never visit because they don't actually exist. Because you ran out of ways to attack the problems which you're specifically employed to try to solve. That's a very different situation. And I do want to help that community because I just don't find that that community understands

how much its elders have run it into the ground. I mean, marvel at the old H-bomb footage and recognize what theoretical physics is capable of. I mean, you can't ignore it as being a highly capable subject. Right now, we've failed to make progress in so long, people don't even remember what they're doing at work. They've never seen a breakthrough in their lifetime. Only the really old people have seen the breakthroughs. It's a lot like the only people who've ever walked on the moon are, you know are in their 70s or 80s and higher.

There's something about the idea that no young person has succeeded. Are your motivations entirely altruistic? No, absolutely. They're not entirely altruistic. I say that. No, no, no, absolutely. They're not entirely out. I think that I can buy much more cocaine if I actually win a Nobel Prize than without. What are you asking me, Kurt?

I'll tell you, because for me, I take a step back when I say that I'm trying to help the world. I'm trying to move the world forward because I find myself saying that a lot, especially to myself. And as I studied more psychoanalysis, I realized, well, there's much more deep-seated envy and hatred and callousness associated with my motivations than I let on. So for example- You and me both, brother.

So I'll give you an example. When I was young, fairly young, I heard about the Riemann hypothesis and I was like, I'm going to prove that. And now part of me would say, I'm going to prove that because that would be great for the mathematical community. But the other part is that maybe I want more attention and I want people to recognize me as someone who can be on their level of intellectual prowess. Yeah. of intellectual prowess. Yeah. And so I'm curious, and this is not a gotcha question at all. I'm curious what you see your non benevolent reasons for pursuing a theory of everything.

It's an interesting and bizarre question. This is turning out to be one hell of an interview. I guess the way I look at it is you have to look at my behavior. If I've been playing with this theory since 1983, 84, and I really didn't come through to talk about it with the world until I guess, 2013 at Oxford. I would not say that wanting to be recognized was very high on my list. In fact, I don't really like it. It's fun to get the affirmation. People tell you great work and, Oh my God, I can't believe I'm meeting you.

There's a very quick buzz that very quickly fades off with that. You lose your privacy. You have to deal with very angry people who are very often misportraying you, and sometimes they have a voice to do it at scale. I don't love this part of it. have voice to do it at scale. I don't love this part of it. I am at my happiest when I'm working completely alone on something that nobody even knows that I'm working. So that's a very awkward thing for me to deal with,

which is that as soon as you come out and you say that you've been working on something, and in my case, it took my friend Marcus DeSoto more or less telling me, you don't have a right to sit on top of this anymore. So I don't think my motivations are very different than my motivations for playing the piano. I don't think I've ever performed playing the piano in public.

I guarantee you that if you put me on a desert island with a tuned piano and no one to pick me up for five years, I'd be on the piano every day simply for my own reasons. And I think it's the same thing as with physics. Now, if you want to ask me for insight into my character, yeah, there's a delusional aspect to my character. You and me the same. If everything, you have to be deluded. a delusional aspect to my character. You and me the same. You have everything.

You have to be deluded. I think I'm megalomaniacal. Really? Why do you say megalomaniacal? I think I'm extremely overconfident and that I feel like I can accomplish virtually any task that's not physical. When I say physical, I mean't i don't think i can run

that quickly nor lift yeah too much too heavy a weight but but i was but it's rare for me to find something that that's outside of my scope intellectually don't don't take 37 times 29 intellectually don't don't take so long 37 times 29 right okay no i'm just saying that look the situation is i don't think it's megalomaniacal i think it's delusional i think that there is a delusion and the key question is can you pay back the the cost of the delusion does the delusion actually buy you something like i'm sure that shackleton was delusional when he said that he would rescue his men, but he did rescue his men, but he had no reason to think that he could pull it off. So you have to be crazy enough to think that you can in order for you to attempt it. Yeah. And I have a, I have a saying, which is you have to be crazy enough, dumb enough to get in and smart enough to get out. So you have to be dumb enough to constrain

yourself in a burning building, you know, with no exit. And then you have to be smart enough to figure out a way out of the puzzle. Eric, how did you see that something was going on with the NSF? How were you smart enough to figure it out? I'm not saying that you're not smart. I mean, like, how did you notice that? What red flags were there? And then what led you down that route? Did someone say, by the way, look up this paper? Well, first of all, you should let people know what you just changed context radically. So you should introduce what you're talking about. The National Science Foundation, I believe in the 1980s, said that there will be a shortage of people interested in STEM or people getting degrees in STEM and

that's going to be deleterious for the United States and so we need to increase the supply of people coming into the STEM fields and one of the ways we could do that is by allowing is being more lax on our immigration policy. Now that seems to have been falsely constructed by the NSF for some other purpose, which I would like to get into because maybe I'm too foolish, but I wasn't able to figure that out from the article. Like what was their actual motivation? Was it money? Okay, we can get into that. has had in the short term negative effects. That is an oversupply of the market and a lessening of the salaries for people who are PhDs, postdocs, and lessening of opportunities for them. Even though it was said to be salutary on the whole.

Now, I hope that I'm summarizing that correctly. And please correct me if I'm wrong. that correctly and please correct me if I'm wrong. Well what I noticed was that institutions were obviously lying. Do you remember that Shaggy song, It Wasn't Me? Right, so you know just Shaggy instructs that when you get caught red-handed you should just say it wasn't me. By the way Chuck Berry also wrote a great song, It Wasn't Me. I would check out George Thurgood's version of it. Never mind. Footnote. Footnote. I thought it was very clear that the National Science Foundation was too smart to be saying things that were too dumb.

And there are no labor shortages, long-term labor shortages in market economies. That is a feature of a centrally planned economy, but because the wage level is intended to rise based on the claimed need, one of the great things about being part of a capitalist society is recognizing that labor shortages don't exist. In fact, labor shortages are the misconstrual of wage pressure, which is exactly what was needed to make sure that we had a more equal society. Now, during the 80s, when people started talking about the only thing that makes a more equal society is being a problem, I thought, wow, you're talking about labor shortages in a market

economy. Clearly, you're trying to pick someone's pocket. Why are you doing that? Right. It's our thing. And just as an aside to the people listening, if it's, it's, it would have been good for the minorities and for, and for women had, had the immigration policies not been instantiated the way they were. Oh my God, would it have been amazing? Employers would have had to work so much harder.

They would have had to put so much more money into time for training and recruiting from non-traditional pools of talent. It would have been amazing for young women who want to have a few children and want to be able to negotiate their ability to be serious academics while taking, you know, growing up as the son of a cab driver in the Bronx, coming from a Trinidadian background, one of the only black physicists at the top of the game. How much greater would it have been if there were recruiters coming to Steph's high school and his milieu and saying, hey, how do we get your kids introduced to mathematical physics at the highest level? It is a complete tragedy that we allowed ourselves to be bamboozled. This goes back to an earlier question of yours, Kurt. You asked the

question of how do I always have a different take on everything? How could all of the world's smart people agree on labor shortages in a market economy with nobody saying this is total bullshit almost? That is fascinating. There's two claims to me. There's one that they all agree and one that they don't speak up. And I would say it's the latter. They don't speak up. They don't necessarily agree. Okay. Well, what does it tell you when everyone is silent? Right. So that is a form of agreement. I agree with you that it's you know it's very often by omission. Right. Every economist knows why you don't have labor shortages in the market economy and yet they remain mute because they know who their real bosses are.

Why did the National Science Foundation do what they did? Money? Well, Reagan, I believe, appointed somebody who for the first time came from industry rather than from academics to head the NSF, which was Eric Block. I believe he was hired from IBM. which was Eric Block. I believe he was hired from IBM. And he had one of these kind of corporate mindsets, which is, okay, we were facing a problem. People, there was a huge bulge of hires during the sixties. We had a baby boom, and now we're going to be facing a demographic short, shortfall. So we don't want to have to pay higher prices for all of the technical talent what do we do so it's like the you know it's like the agi paperclip machine somebody sets up a problem

that says we don't want to have to pay an inflated cost for technical talent well the first answer is you don't get to do that and the second answer is you don't get to do that, you dick. Don't be a complete asshole and restructure the labor market around the needs of scientific employers. You just don't have those rights. Yet, that was the charge. And when he did do that, got a group called the Policy Research and Analysis Division of the National Science Foundation

to do an economic study about the wages. Now, the problem is, is that you're not allowed to do this. You're not allowed to go after the wages of scientists as the National Science Foundation. It's like, you know, you wanted to know who should mine the hen house. And so you find the best fox that you can find to guard the hen house and to learn how to manage it. And the fox sets itself a task, which is how do we make sure that the chickens are lined up in an orderly fashion? And as far as I gleaned from your article, another aspect that wasn't too great about the PRA was that they didn't consult with economists themselves. They had their own team, which

already had a conclusion that they wanted to prove. And it was secret as well. Well, actually, they did it. They had economists. They had their own economists. And their economists were very competent. They were not incompetent. The problem was they weren't supposed to be trying to figure out how to screw over American technical talent at the bargaining table for salary negotiations. That's an illegal or an immoral thing to do. Nobody's going to support that. How do we figure out how to screw over our own technical talent? Can you imagine putting that in front of the American people? America's technical employers need to screw over the next generation. How do we lure unsuspecting

kids with very high abilities into a field and decimate their abilities to bargain back and bargain? Because that's what they were doing. All right. So what they had to do now, now that they'd studied the wage, they had to come up with an argument that didn't involve wages because no one was going to support the idea of screwing over. Right, right, right, right. So now they said, if we subtract off the demand curves for labor and only talk about the supply curves, then we can't cross supply and demand and have people ask us about wages. So we're going to take the economic analysis,

which is in fact competent, and we're going to turn it into incompetent demographic analysis by subtracting the demand curves that we have in our own internal studies. And then we're going to push out some fake stuff for the public. This is the beginning of fake news coming out of the National Science Foundation. So then they stirred up a panic, which is that we're going to have a demographic shortfall, meaning that there's a baby bust that follows the baby boom. And we need relief. By relief, what we mean is a transfer of wealth from Americans who work to Americans who employ Americans who work. So why we are suddenly becoming so sympathetic with scientific employers is beyond anyone. Like, why are scientific employers something that needs relief? We don't know. So what they did is

they panicked the country into passing the Immigration Act of 1990, sometimes called IMACT 90, which had the H-1B provision and other provisions. And then it was later found out, about two years later, that they had faked this entire analysis in hearings held before Congress. And what I did on top of that was to find and locate the actual study that proves that in 1986, they were doing secret studies inside of NSF and the National Academy of Science and something called the Government University Industry Research Roundtable, and how to gut the bargaining power of the American scientists. And for that, they should be consigned to hell. I mean, it's an absolutely unethical program, which was then covered up by anybody who challenges it as a

xenophobe or doesn't believe in the best and the brightest, which is the funniest part of it all. Yeah, I saw a tweet that recently you excoriated because the person said you're a pure villain or pure evil if you don't allow an open border. Unfortunately, we don't know if there's an answer to whether or not children should be allowed on the internet, but there are many of them on Twitter. Okay, now I don't know too much. So please forgive me. I don't know too much about US law. And it seems like two years later, 1992, around that time, they figured out that the NSF was lying and there was, like you said, a congressional meeting about it. So that to me sounds like, well, it was just a two-year program. The effects shouldn't be felt now.

like, well, it was just a two-year program. The effects shouldn't be felt now. Was there any change? Is it more drastic now? No, no. They got what they wanted. They changed the law. Now you have a permanent cabal of employers who every time you talk about decreasing their access to visas, I mean, just picture multi-billionaire employers whining about a labor shortage in a market economy when their workers can't put pressure on them. I mean, look, there's something evil about technical employers, just positively evil. You know, when you talk about the transfer of wealth from the employees to the employers, you're referring to that the salaries would have been higher for the employees of Americans. And so the employees didn't want to pay more. Employers didn't want to pay more. And that's why they allowed. Well, it's also the case that we produce a different style of product.

You know, the Chinese graduate student and the American graduate student are coming from very different milieus. The U.S. has been drenched in freedom. And, you know, even leading Chinese people in tech will tell me we have a culture of obedience that stretches back thousands of years. That's not me saying that. That's Chinese people saying this. Do you want a worker who's going to give you lip and be in a position where they don't have to take your crap if they don't want to? Or do you want to deal with somebody who's tethered to you

because of the conditions of their visa, who's grown up in an authoritarian regime, who you can tell what to do. I mean, I have, I conducted interviews for the American Society of Cell Biologists. And there were multiple biologists who referred to the foreign workers and students in their labs as literally slave labor. So, you know, you're talking to an employer talking about their slave labor and laughing about it. I just find it astounding.

This seems to be a running thread that you notice is that people have a conclusion and then they come up, you know, with a, they come up with a reason to the public to justify some action so that they can have this conclusion. For example, one recent one is with the masks, that we don't want hospitals to run out of masks. So let's tell people masks are ineffective. They're worse than that. Don't you know that an infected mask can get you sick? Right. I see this too on the extreme left. So for example, I was talking to someone who is part of the social justice studies.

And one time I was with my brother actually, and we pointed to some breed of dog. We said, you know, that's an intelligent breed of dog. And then the person said, no, no, it's not. You can't, that dog is not more intelligent. That breed is not more intelligent than any other breed. And then I was wondering, no, it's not. There's not, you can't, that dog is not more intelligent than that breed is not more intelligent than any other breed. And then I was wondering,

like, this seems to be not a controversial statement. But then I realized, well, the reason why she's saying, no, don't compare dog breeds is because then if you compare dog breeds, maybe what about races? And then you might be able,

and because that's not allowed. So the idea being that natural selection applies to every species other than humans, and we have totally different rules. These are infantile thought patterns. Right. When I look at, just to wrap up, but this is going to be another tangent. But when I look at some of your older videos, like from the early 2000s, you're much more articulate now than you were then. You're eloquent now. I'm not saying you weren't back then, but I'm saying you're you're much more articulate now than you were then you're eloquent now you're

i'm not saying you weren't back then but i'm saying you're more now what video are you talking about so firstly some of your early tim ferris interviews second you speaking with lee lee smolin about economic age theory and one about the economic Manhattan Project, which is I believe on the perimeter website, though I'm not 100% sure. Okay. Well, to each his own. Yeah, yeah. I'm getting older and I'm losing my faculty. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying you're better now. I know, that's what... Okay. I'm curious. I thought it was more articulate before, but... Okay, okay. Right, well well what i want to know is is do you do you work on your articulation do you practice in front of the camera turn it off watch it and then don't release it you're like okay let me

improve or is it just something that comes as a function of age i don. You don't do exercises to improve. Your vocabulary is even improved. I don't see the change, but maybe it's there. I don't know. Okay. You mentioned that on your recent podcast with Brett, that talking about free will in the Discord servers, you said sometimes you log on, you see people talking about free will and one other topic, which I can't recall, but free will in particular is unproductive. Why do you say that debating about free will is unproductive?

Well, what I notice is that people will have the same conversations over and over again. And if I tune in on one or I tune in on another, I've pretty much heard all of the arguments that are being advanced. So I believe that you have to learn to recognize the signature of people trying to solve a misstated problem, trying to solve a problem where the framework for solving that problem does not yet exist. Okay, so it's not the problem itself, it's the framework of the problem? Much like the problem relative to the framework that we're in, where people will have a conversation that'll go on for an hour before anyone will ask the question, do we even know what we mean by free will? So I just find these conversations are not like the conversations of,

you know, another topic I wanna get people interested in is that the Habermann switch pitch, which is a toy based on the self-duality of the tetrahedron, could you build one exhibiting the duality between the dodecahedron and icosahedron? That's a very concrete thing that could be done. Somebody could actually build a physical implementation of this idea. I'm positive that the free will discussion

is going to be going on two weeks from now. And it's going to sound the same as the one this week. Now I could be wrong. Maybe somebody in some discord chat somewhere is going to, and then I will have egg on my face, but I'm so unworried and I'm concerned about that. I'm willing to commit to you on this podcast that 20 years from now, we're still going to be having free will discussions. if we don't have a more profound theory of physics

do you do you have a personal definition of free will that you think is okay you mentioned once that you like hey i do the rituals of judaism i don't consider myself a practical you consider yourself a practicing jew but not a believing Jew in the sense that you consciously believe it, but maybe unconsciously you do. In a Petersonian sense, their behaviors are reflections of people. Did you say Petersonian? Yes. I didn't know there was a Petersonian. I like to use the word Petersonian. It's easier for me.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, do you pray? Yes. Oh, okay. Now, when you pray, who do you feel like you're praying to? If you don't, if you... Whoever's around.

Literally, as in people? I know you're joking, but I'm actually trying to, I'm actually curious. And please forgive me if this is too personal. No, no. I mean, I think it has to do with the idea that the concept of prayer is a conserved concept in the human psyche. So you have widely separated groups who come up on the idea of prayer.

And I think it's because the human mind has an extended phenotype, if you will, of behaviors. So, you know, we build churches and mosques and synagogues and all sorts of houses of worship. That's part of our extended phenotype. We gather to sing. Do you pray? I try to. What tradition did you grow up in? I grew up in my family as Christian, but then I became an atheist as a young person after my brother told me about quantum fluctuations. Because I always wondered, well, how the heck could nothing,

could something come from nothing? And then one time my brother was walking with me to blockbuster. This is how long ago it was. And, and he mentioned, yeah, well, there's something called quantum fluctuations. And then I remember sitting up in my bed and just thinking, well, there doesn't have to be a reason for God. So I was an atheist. And then, and now I'm i'm unsure i would say that i i hope i'm i hope i'm religious because well we can get into that conversation well i'm pretty much of an atheist um if you take let's say the lyrics of Forever Young by Bob Dylan.

I don't know too much of music. I'm not a musical person. I play music, but I don't listen to it. Yeah. It starts off, may God bless and keep you always. May you promise to be true. May you always do for others and let others do for you. May you always be courageous, stand upright, and be strong. And may you stay to be true, may you always do for others and let others do for you, may you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong, and may you stay forever young.

It's an absolutely beautiful song. It gets tremendous power from the form of, right? It gets tremendous power from the form? The form of a prayer. Okay. Right? The form of a prayer. Okay. Right? You know, if you think about Madonna's Like a Prayer, if you think about, you know, I've talked about ACDC's song, You Shook Me All Night Long, which uses these four notes. Yes, you shook me all night long.

Very similar to Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Like the power of those four notes. I don't know you, but I want you all the more. To deny this as part of the human endowment is crazy. So yeah, maybe you're not going to go to synagogue and then you're sitting there and you're doing what you're singing you shook me all night long you know and it's erotic it's sacred it's profane it's all of those things that

animate us and the contrasts and the contradictions and the you know the run-ins and the you know weird ju weird juxtapositions. So I think that you have to recognize that prayer has a function in our minds that we only partially understand having nothing necessarily to do with whether there's somebody on the other end of the phone when we place the call. Eric, you sing when you're alone. Yeah. What are you saying? And even when I'm not? Yeah. What are you singing? And even when I'm not. What are some of your favorites?

Unfortunately. You know, interestingly, I love Nirvana, so I love Kurt Cobain. And one of my other idols is Kurt Gertl. And my name is Kurt. And that's just complete. I wonder if that's a correlation or if it's just coincidence. You may be losing your marbles, but okay. Yeah.

So Nirvana, Our Lady Peace, Alanis Morissette are like 90s. Yeah. Well, if you think about Kurt Cobain, there's something very sort of, I think that there's something very blasphemous and very sort of profane about his alienation. And honestly, it's better when it's animated by its relationship to religion. A little bit. Wait, okay.

Sorry, explain what you mean there. That Kurt Cobain's music is better when it's animated by its relationship to religion. What do you mean? Well, you know, if you just take a line like, she's overboard and selfish should i know i know a dirty word what is a dirty word right clearly that's animated by religion you know did somebody say damn and you have to have your mouth washed out with soap in the 1920s i don't know so uh

with soap in the 1920s. I don't know. So, uh, I see. So you're saying that music has made richer when you appreciate religion or you merge it or you understand it in the context of religion? Well, like I was talking about, what did I say before? You know, um, the most scandalous thing about what did I say was the merging of sexuality and gospel. So he stops in the middle of the song and goes, and his backup singers go, he goes, oh, oh, he's going in through this grunting ritual, which is clearly extremely sexual with a gospel feel to it. Well, I can tell you that there's nothing quite so transgressive as the concept of sacred sexuality with the choir.

So that song has the power to shock us precisely because a different standard was referenced. And I do think that the tension between reason and religion and between superstition and ritual versus our metacognitive facility, which says, why am I doing these things? That's been incredibly potent. It would be very weird to throw religion out once you realize that it's not literally true, but yet many people do that. Right. And that also has the sub claim that if you don't believe in religion as it literally is, then you're not Christian or you're not Jewish. And I was speaking with Peter Glinos, who's a specialist in the history of religion. He was saying that if you go to early Christianity, early Judaism, like third century and 300 or 200 BC as well for Judaism, that to think of the Bible as literal was also a sin for some sects. You can say whatever you want.

These are tensions that don't get resolved. And most of the rabbis, I think I've said I know five or six rabbis well enough to ask the question, do you believe in God? None of them do. Eric, thank you. There's a standard, typical, trivial sense of, yeah, I believe that these stories are literally accurate. standard typical trivial sense of yeah i believe that these stories are literally i'm curious about your use of language sometimes even brett in the most recent podcast said eric you do use terminology that i'm pretty sure you know that the interlocutor is unaware of so

for example with you and anna you use the term expansion point to describe the media and me as a mathematician i know what expansion point means but i'm pretty sure anna doesn't and neither and i'm pretty sure that you know that anna doesn't know so i was curious why would you use that another example was when you were being asked about bitcoin and you said something this is locally conserved this is like local conservation law something like that and i I'm curious, why, why do you use esoteric language? Now here's some theories. So someone might say, well, you're trying to sound intelligent and, or another one might be, well, this is how you think. And you're thinking aloud. Another one might be, well, you're trying to provoke curiosity in the,

in the audience. Well, I don't want to give you some answers, but I'm curious. An excellent job of answering your question. I'm not interested in sounding intelligent because that's gonna cut down on my estimation of intelligence probably, and it's gonna cut down on my listenership. So to be blunt about it. Just a minute, babe, just a minute.

To be blunt about it, I think there's a difference, which is why does this language even exist? Why don't you ask the people who live inside of every single discipline to conduct themselves so that if their grandmother barges in she'll be able to follow the conversation um i don't know where that became a good idea or a gold standard you know there's a quote of feynman's that everybody uh likes to throw at you which is you know that which i uh cannot create i do not understand or another one which is you have to if you can't explain something, you know to every man Then you don't really understand it. Mm-hmm worship with nonsense We develop certain language for a reason because it's well tailored to what it is that we're thinking about so

What you know, let's take the case of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is frequently advertised as digital gold. Well, what is gold? Gold is a physical element. It's created from the fusion of stars where stars collide. And that allows us to overcome certain barriers so that the protons can fuse together. All right. So gold is effectively based on a nucleus, which is fermionic.

And that fermionic nucleus is a wave. And that wave behaves in a physical sense. Now, what is the quintessential issue about gold is that it's hard to produce. It's hard to fake gold. You can't just go print up a bunch of gold because you'd like some gold bars. So of course, if you could put water and dirt into your Smithson 5000 machine and have gold bars come out the other side, gold wouldn't work as a form of

currency or as a store of value. So what are the properties abstractly of gold that makes it work as a store of value? Well, the fact that if I have a gold bar you do not and if I give you the gold bar I no longer have it. That is a conservation law and the fact that I can give you a gold bar in my backyard and nobody can stop us from making that transfer has to do with the fact that it's locally enforced. I don't need to go to a central authority and permit, like if I have money in a bank account and I wish to put it in your bank account, we have to involve the banks in the transfer. Okay, well this is a locally enforced rule with gold. It's because gold is conserved. The amount of gold I give up to you is the amount of gold that

you now have that I do not. Now, that's how I think. Now, do I constantly want to be referenced to some standard whereby the source of my thinking is covered up? No, effectively, the way I'm using language is a bit like scaffolding for a building. I'm leaving the scaffolding up so that if you're confused by what I'm saying, you have a hope of not only saying, well, that's interesting. But you can also say, I wonder where he got it from. Oh, his language is a clue. I'm going to find out what a conservation law is. So by leaving the scaffolding up, I feel like it's actually an invitation to people who are more interested to figure out where this stuff comes from. So if I have some paradigm in the

theory of natural and sexual selection, and I talk about in the theory of natural and sexual selection, and I talk about it in terms of natural and sexual selection, I'm giving you the pointer, the hyper, the metadata, the hyperlink, to go find out where I got my thinking from. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm giving you extra, And if you're put off by that, that's really your problem, not mine. I guess I started deciding that I would use my own native language. My own native language is a version of English with a Creole or Pidgin on top of it made from the languages of the fields that I draw from. It could be economics, physics, finance, risk, computer programming, music, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, architecture, wine, whatever these things are, they're all sources of inspiration. And so I guess I actually just reject the charge and I find it very infantile that

people imagine that it's an affectation. I think I just gave up not talking the way I natively think. So at some level you're looking at somebody else's code and I probably use a pastiche of different programming languages, if you will, where most people agree that they're going to write programming in some very restricted set of commands. And my feeling is, well, your restricted set of commands aren't sufficiently expressive. Now you see I've just done it again. Expressive is a concept that you would

talk about in the comparison of computer languages. But my point is that that's the natural paradigm for me to explain the thought. Do I want it? You said to me earlier, you asked the question, how is it that you always have sort of a contrarian or original answer no matter what question gets asked? And in part, it's exactly this. It's that I try to look at all the different fields for what they excel at and borrow whatever I can learn from them

about how to think about various paradigms and then even to see the same paradigms crop up in fields that are widely separated and nobody knows the same way of thinking occurs across them all. I think that's one of the ways that you are able, perhaps, to integrate the knowledge occurs across them all. I think that's one of the ways that you are able, perhaps, to integrate the knowledge.

Because one of my earlier questions that I didn't even say was, if these fields are so variegated, and they seemingly have nothing to do with one another, although if it's a part of this world, there's some connection, how is it that you're able to keep all this knowledge in your head? Because, for example, I took an economics course in university, but I've forgotten most of the fundamentals. And I blame that partially on not using the knowledge on a regular basis.

I was like, well, does Eric use his knowledge? Well, how does he use it? Perhaps he uses it in conversation. Now you're actually giving credence to this idea. And then I thought, well, maybe also he uses it when he writes. Maybe he writes privately and is constructing some theory on it. That's why I asked you about writing. So this whole conversation was an attempt to deconstruct you.

I see. Well, I would say that I just have more room in my brain because I've decided not to keep track of the Kardashians.