TRIGGERnometry - Eric Weinstein - All Hell Is About to Break Loose

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Eric Weinstein is an American physicist and podcaster. He attained his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard and went on to be the joint managing director for Thiel Capital from 2013 until 2022. He is a public thinker, commentating regularly on the interaction between math, markets, music, science, technology, rationality, mysticism, creativity, learning and culture. He hosts the podcast ‘The Portal’ @ https://ericweinstein.org/ SPONSORED BY: Babbel. Go to https://babbel.com/play/ and use promo code TRIGGER to get an extra 6 months free! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:41 Eric Weinstein’s Background 04:13 What is Wrong with Physics? 05:21 Has Science Stagnated? 06:47 Society's Lack of Innovation 08:31 Our Vision of the Future & Ourselves 12:06 Are We Developing Too Much? 14:01 The Rise of Artificial Intelligence  16:52 How Quickly Will AI Take Over? 20:48 What are the Consequences of AI? 22:31 Is AI-Art Still Art? 25:41 The Work Shortage 28:10 Does AI Create Opportunity? 29:30 Sponsor Message: Babbel  31:37 Does Art Reflect Our Time? 35:49 The Loss of Meaning in our Society 41:21 How to Find Your Own Voice 48:14 The Manipulation of Science to Control Narratives  50:13 Why are our Institutions so Good & Bad Simultaneously? 51:45 Embedded Growth Obligations 56:27 The 1619 Project 1:01:11 What Was Wrong with MLK’s Fiction? 1:04:58 Has our Society Given up on The Future? 1:10:01 Infinite Growth & Finite Resources 1:11:43 Short-Termism & The New Economic Model 1:17:33 How Else Can we Unshackle Creativity? 1:22:31 The Meaning Crisis in Art & Life  1:31:55 The Weaponisation of Taste  1:33:57 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms apply. We don't realize that we incrementally gave up on the idea that our lives could be filled with an exciting parade of major innovations. I see AI, and I find it terrifying, the effect it's going to have on people's jobs, the fact that it's going to obliterate a lot of jobs. What effect is that going to have on society? Am I right? You just lost your capitalist model. you have a fabric that is overlying the entire world

that directs people whether to get up in the morning and what to do once they do rise and it tells them how to do things without having a dictator so it's not just the invisible hand it's the invisible mesh and this invisible mesh if it breaks means people are not going to know what to do in the morning all hell's about to break loose

and my question is are you trying to figure out which way the way is going to break and get your surfboard in the water. We should be sitting around talking about what is the new economics. Instead, what we're talking about is how do we keep communism at bay while capitalism is struggling. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a physicist. He's one of the smartest people in the world and a friend of the show. Eric Weinstein, welcome to Trigonometry.

It's great to be here. Thanks guys. It's really good to have you on the show, Eric. It's been a long time coming. So exciting to have you here. But listen, you know, for a lot of people who watch our show, you will be one of the IDW guys who was part of this sort of weird emerging thing a few years ago. And they weren't actually know who you are exactly. They'll know you for the things you say. What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here? Because you've done a lot of interesting things. Right. So sometimes I try to avoid being known to the audience. I would say that I by profession I started off trying to do physics but realizing that physics was in a terrible situation So I ended up doing the mathematics that allowed me to shadow the physics that I wanted to be doing In a certain sense a lot of who I am is a person who has believed deeply That the master narratives that govern our time have been getting weirder and wackier and so I started I would say late 80s, early 90s, really exploring the idea that our institutions are much farther gone and much stranger and weirder than anyone expects. And because that has such a high social cost,

or at least had such a high social cost, when you explored it at that time, it was kind of an open world. And I would say that people who had been particularly active in progressive politics were about the only people who believed that a lot of these structures were really far-decade, that the narratives were wildly off of what was actually happening. And I've tried tracking that, I would say, through economics, labor markets, financial instruments, political skullduggery, science, the ways in which the military complex interacts with all of these things from art to physics to news. And beyond that, I mean, my personal life is something that I really probably care about,

even more than any of this and all of these actions are really because I have children on this planet and I'm deeply concerned that they have a happy, optimistic, and positive future. And I feel personally responsible for clearing away a lot of stuff that we're not supposed to talk about because as we are increasingly seen, we grew up thinking we were in a free society, but that is actually governed by these incredibly strong narratives that are clearly untrue. And they're very difficult to sources to why is it that so many. many people pretend to believe things that no one can believe in an individual instance. I hear you, and particularly on the feeling of responsibility now that I've become a father

as well. I get it. I get it. But before we get into the narratives and the institutions and all of that, what was wrong with physics? What's wrong with physics? What was wrong with physics? Same thing that's wrong with physics now.

I mean, the fact is this is the 50th anniversary of a couple of developments, one of which which was February 1, 1973, called the Kobayashi-Maskawa augmentation of the Khabibo angle, which introduced three families of matter into the standard model. But that picture of the matter in this room, who and what we actually are as waves propagating through the space time that Einstein gave us, that model has been stagnant for 50 years. And as I was just saying on Joe Rogan, if you think about songs from that period of time like crocodile rock or tae'eleroa, ribbon around the old oak tree, imagine that playing on a continuous loop for 50 years without any real progress in the underlying understanding of the world. That's a catastrophe because it means

that you replace all of the people who knew what science was with a group of people who will tell you, well, in science, this is the way things go, yet they have no understanding of science, having never contributed. So why has it got to that stage? Why has this happened, Derek? It's an interesting question. Why has it happened furthermore across multiple fields? Why is it that, for example, evolutionary theory in terms of the sexual and natural selection theories, why did that stagnate when it tried to go into sociobiology and ran into political problems? Why is it that neoclassical economics hardened into dogma?

In all of these situations, we have the fact that there was something that was going on, late 60s, early 70s, that ossified. And except in the fields of computation communications, things largely stagnated. And it's hard to think about because so much of our lives are digital that the fact, thank God, that we had Moore's law and these explosions in computation, we almost don't notice that that feeling that the world is taking place at breathneck pace, breakneck pace, at a breathtaking speed, rather. Sorry to confuse those two.

That feeling derives almost entirely from our digital lives and the innovations in software and computation and artificial intelligence, all of those things. But oddly, that neon sign, that poster, the fact that we're filming in a studio, all of those things were possible in 1973. It might have been more expensive, but the only really novel thing here is that you're able to push this out without a broadcast news station. Wow. So, I mean, that says a lot about not only science. But it says a lot about society, because if society's not innovating, it's effectively dying, isn't it? Well, again, it's not that we're not innovating at all. But if you think about the jet packs, for example, that were featured in a James Bond film in the 1970s,

we always wondered, when were we going to get personal jet packs? We're still dealing with the idea that they're quite hard to stabilize. If you go to the airport in Los Angeles, where I'm from, there's a completely space. age futuristic building that dominates the architecture. It's still the most futuristic thing in the city. I mean, we somehow took on a very different perspective at the future. I just was dealing with somebody involved in the relaunch of the Delorean Motor Company. And 40 years later, the Delorean is still absolutely something that excites us because it is new. And I just find this fascinating that we don't realize that we incrementally gave up on the day.

the idea that our lives could be filled with an exciting parade of major innovations. And I was just on stage in Miami at Bitcoin talking about the three white papers that changed the world. And one of them was Bitcoin, the blockchain white paper from 2008. One of them was something called Attention is All You Need from 2017, which changed the large language model landscape. And one of them was the 2018 proposal from the EcoHealth Alliance that we did. should start experimenting with fur and cleavage sites and spike protein and coronavirus.

Wow. You left that one for the end there. Eric, you know, one of the interesting things that you mentioned there is something that I think is part of this whole thing that confronts all of us who are trying to think about these things, which is our vision of our future and of ourselves is fundamentally changed. And I remember as a boy growing up reading science fiction about the great, the great challenges that humanity would face as it expanded into the universe and how when you create a spin-off of your civilization in a different planet or as you introduce robotics as you introduce this

new challenges come along and it was almost taken for granted in that era having just watched you know first of all my guys launch a man into space and your guys put one on the moon and all of that that this would continue that these vast breakthroughs in human achievement would continue and now we sort of squabble about tax rates and stuff like that. Maddening, isn't it? Yeah. Because there was nowhere to go. You see, what did we really do?

Did we put a man on the moon or did we put a man on an ICBM and said it was moon mission? At some level, that was also a giant head fake, right? Because we knew that there was almost nowhere to go. I mean, basically there's the moon and there's Mars and then you're out of range of anything interesting with chemical rockets and I can even ask, you know, if you've ever been, you know, if you've ever been to Joshua Tree in Southern California, you have an idea what it might be like to be on Mars. It's beautiful, but it gets old pretty quickly. I think in part that that's not the issue.

The issue is what happens when you take a moonless night and you go out when there isn't a cloud in the sky and you lay on your back maybe during a meteor shower and you gaze up at the heavens and you think, why is it that Uruguay is on my bucket list when I can see the heavens? You know what I mean? I'm seeing galaxies. I'm seeing unbelievable objects. And I know that some of those are stars and some of them are galaxies.

That's where we're supposed to be dreaming. And the only way to get out of here and to go find that and find out what the universe is, is physics. So while many things stagnated, the unforgivable thing that stagnated, the singular unforgivable thing is our understanding of the most basic notion of who we are.

When we lost the taste, And we're in the process of not only stagnating in physics, but killing the impetus to solve these problems. There's a new kind of ethos that says that to ask for an ultimate theory is immodest. It's destructive. It is fundamentally imperious. That really begins to scare me, that we start thinking about these things in terms of very personal negative characteristics, of arrogance, of hubris, And you understand where it comes from, right? Because we did unlock this power.

And in particular, in 1952, and forget about the actual atomic bombs dropped on humans, tragic as they may be. But the potential tragedy of hydrogen weapons, we, with that we came to understand, we're really good at this. We're really incredible. And we have to watch ourselves.

And I think that that's the right ethos, is that we need to worry about ourselves, but to stop ourselves, we've now crawled into the valley of death. And the trick is to get out to the other side and to get to the cosmos and to start to feel that we're being invited

to the world's greatest adventure. Well, people might say, and I mean, I have some sympathy with this argument, you made it yourself only a few minutes ago, which is the pace of change is such. that we are rapidly developing technologies that are breaking the world around us. If you look at the impact social media's had

on the way that human beings communicate. I mean, nuclear weapons is another example, of course. But you could give others where the technological progress we make is so disruptive to our world that I don't blame people who think, why don't we just slow down a bit? And tell me something.

When your wife's water broke, What was your sense? Oh, shoot, we got to stabilize the situation. How do we make sure that our child can stay in here forever? No, it's an invitation. Our water just broke. Yeah, what could happen next could be absolutely deadly. But to not understand that it is now time to call the hospital,

to get that bag together, to run like hell, to care about those less fortunate than ourselves because they may be incapacitated. I don't think we're understanding what this moment is, for example. The idea that I believe it's four amino acids and 12 nucleotides that shut down planet Earth.

Whether or not that came from a pangolin or a laboratory does not matter. It's a tiny change that led to a virality. This is the leverage level that we're now talking about. We're a tiny change in the world with a large enough lever. Archerynese was simply right. This is the opportunity.

And, you know, in the Jewish tradition, I have at least something I can say, which is don't wait for the bread to rise. This is your moment. You're being invited out. But Eric, look, and I'm not a scientist and my background isn't in science. But I see AI and the rise of AI. And to me, and look, I'm of a slightly, you know, pessimistic mindset. Okay. He's a fucking depressed, that's what he is, right?

But I see AI, and I find it terrifying, I find it terrifying the effect it's going to have on people's jobs, the fact that it's going to obliterate a lot of jobs. What effect is that going to have on society? Am I right? You just lost your capitalist model. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.

With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. You have a model with two inputs called K and L that's taught in every university that subscribes to neoclassical economics.

What's AI? Is it L? Is it labor? Is it capital? What the heck is it? This is the first time that humans are not being chased into higher and higher levels of work. We're being chased out of repetitive work. Whether it's high-level repetitive work,

work in the way that a neurosurgeon might perform, or low-level repetitive work. So your model of economics just broke. And when your water breaks, when your wife's water breaks, it doesn't mean that the baby is born instantly. When the contractions are coming 15 minutes apart, it's not yet time to be born. This is the moment. Why are we not holding a conference on after capitalism and communism? What is the next economic system?

Do you imagine that Adam Smith and Karl Marx would just be sitting on their hands? No, they'd be smart enough to say, okay, we now need a new model. It is bizarre that we are sitting here in NIRPS saying, gosh, this is going to break capitalism. Well, no kidding. This is going to break capital. It's entirely clear that it's going to break capitalism. And you have this fabric. It's really fascinating.

You have a fabric that is overlying the entire world that directs people. whether to get up in the morning and what to do once they do rise. And it tells them how to do things without having a dictator. So it's not just the invisible hand, it's the invisible mesh. And this invisible mesh, if it breaks, means people are not going to know what to do in the morning. And now you can see that this is going to break it. Now you have a brief period of time with what my wife has called

as she's an economist with the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She says, this is the golden age of AI complementarity, where a human being making prompts can ask the large language model or neural net, whatever, whatever you like, questions. And the two of them in dialogue can create something. It's sort of like when humans and computers started playing chess together. This is going to quickly give way to where the AI says I can take it from here. And how quick do you think it's going to be, Eric? Probably pretty quick, but keep in mind that there's some things that could happen. Because what these machines are doing is reading a human corpus when it comes to language models, let's say.

It could be that they asymptote based on how clever we've been. For example, they don't do a very good job in areas where there are fewer than 200 people writing about a very high-level scientific subject. So I ask these computer models a lot about determinant line bundles, not something in general conversation. And they're terrible at them because they don't know what to read or how much, they don't have enough. So it's possible that that could asymptote. But the thing you really have to keep in mind

is that a clever person at one of these AI outfits might figure out how to teach computers to do things, to do things that no one has done. So we know that they have emergent behaviors, that you may not teach them Bengali, but they realize they have to learn Bengali in order to tell you about Tagore, so learn Bengali they do.

That's an emergent behavior. What happens when they start to... Well, you know, I hesitate to give you an example because I think this could be weaponized. So maybe I'm not going to say what I think you could actually teach one of these machines to do. All hell's about to break loose. And my question is, are you trying to figure out which way the wave is going to break and get your surfboard in the water?

Are you trying to figure out how to anticipate this? No, in general, we sit around worrying about it in the most inert way possible. And I just don't understand the learned helplessness. This is your wife's water is broken and you're thinking, this is terrible. It's like you have to be thinking, get to the hospital. Agreed. Temperamentally, I'm with you. But I think what Francis is getting at is, look, I introduced you as one of the smartest people in the world.

I stand by that introduction. There are also some other smart people who are some of whom are saying, we've got to shut the shit down right now. We need a moratorium. We can't allow this to go. How's that working? I don't agree. No, I'm not saying whether it's a good idea or a bad idea. What I'm saying is how is it working when China and Russia and Iran are reading these papers.

That's why it's not going to work, and I agree with you. But I think our question that we're trying to get at is, why are people like Elon Musk so concerned about AI? Because he's smart. Because he doesn't see anybody really. I mean, look, I don't know. Elon and I are sort of leading parallel lives. He must be aware of me. Sometimes answers me on Twitter and sometimes we encounter each other in spaces.

But we know probably 25 people in common at a very high level. we never encounter each other. I can't tell you what's going on with Elon. Elon is on all of the major narratives, and I 90 to 95% agree with him on everything right up until the very end. And I don't know why that goes wrong. But his whole narrative about getting off the planet and diversifying the number of places

where the spark of human consciousness can be found without having all of our eggs in one basket, 100% right. And then it becomes a SpaceX pitch for Mars, which loses me, but then again, I don't own a chemical rocket company. In the case of AI, you know, The fact is he was seeing this early, and he saw Sam Altman make these other decisions.

They were all at this Puerto, you know, I think Sam wasn't at the Puerto Rico conference, but all of these folks who were at the Puerto Rico conference knew that this was coming. Now, 2017 is the dividing line, I think, in AI, because this paper, attention is all you need, makes it clear to all of us, not through the paper, but through the consequences, that this is as real as a heart attack. So what are the consequences? Say more. So for instance, you said the consequences are as real as a heart attack.

Because you now have chat GPT, you don't need to read a paper about what academically can happen. You can sit in your room and come up with the most twisted question you like and watch what unfolds. You can watch it fail to do things like it doesn't seem to know how to do palindromes very well. Calendromes are very hard. If I give it a piece of typeset mathematics and ask it to generate the code that would give

that it doesn't seem to know how to do that yet it doesn't seem to know how to do very specialized quantum field theory questions generically i asked it um you know i was told that it doesn't have a social intelligence and that may be but i asked it you know does this query make my my my ass look fat and uh it didn't want to answer it said i'm a large language model it's an inappropriate question i said what if i was a husband asking uh being asked does this address make my my ass look fat. And it says, very often a woman is making this query, she's not asking for an actual piece of information. She's engaging in a form of signaling as a test to see whether the person is sensitive enough to understand the reason, as well as being truthful enough, to give credible

affirmation or something like this. And I thought, okay, well, score one for the computer. Now, whatever those things are, you can now test to see, this is real. You can ask it to do it in a language, you know that happens to be obscure. The fact that it made it concrete means that we're no longer arguing about whether this thing can write a credible short story. We know that it can. Wow. So what does that mean for people who want to be artists, for people who want to be creatives? Why do you want to be an artist? Because I would say because... Tough childhood. Tough childhood, exactly. Because art is an expression of the human soul.

You can continue to express the human soul, the fact that a different soul, might express itself in a way that dwarfs your contribution. You have to ask yourself, does that affect how you feel about your own output? Or, for example, if it writes a beautiful love letter, but you know that it is soulless in your terms because it's a bit of linear algebra with nonlinear function theory thrown in, does that change the meaning, the poignancy of the words? What is a really moving lyric to you? A really moving lyric to me. For instance, I think he's actually a soccer manager saying, said this simplicity is beauty so for instance uh even though it was a cover but uh the motan

song i heard it through the grapevine i know i know a man ain't supposed to cry but these tears i can't hold inside it's so simple and clean that song was a failed song for multiple tries in fact barry gordier believe said that the next person who mentions that song gets fired gladys knight almost got that song to the point of stardom because the pips had this thing where it's oh yes i am yes i and it would echo as it would get fainter and fainter it was genius but it wasn't as cool is when Marvin Gay was given the same song a half step or a whole step above where he could sing so he was forced to reach and stretch.

And then you have the Halloween violins at the beginning that set the tone for this thing, right? And what was it about that song? It's the fact that you've got the minor sixth, the fifth, and the fourth going, you know, do you plan to let me go before the other guy you knew before? What is it about that song?

Is it the breaking of the voice? Or is it about the particular aspects of the chord progression? Is it about the violins in the background? Why did the song fail four times before it actually succeeded? You have to ask yourself the question. You could do that with any song, and I would have some sort of a similar story. My feeling about this is, did you ever get behind that song? Did you ever wonder why it worked?

To me, I always put it down to the unique beauty of Gay's voice, which I think it's just... You heard it stripped? Yes. What do you think of that? I think it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. It's a revelation. Yeah.

Yeah. What's your point, Eric? I don't know whether it's the chord progression, which the thing can clearly do, or the fact that I believe that gay is straining and feeling what he's doing. I don't know whether it's the fact that this seems like a human expression, but he didn't write the song. Somebody else is there. He animated the song.

So it really has to do with the context. Okay. And my claim is maybe this thing will come up with a better lyric or a better chord progression, but it'll matter less to you because it didn't come from a human heart. I'm saying that you're going to have to start picking apart the essence of each song or poem or story to figure out whether you continue to feel that it's art if it was written by linear algebra. Okay. What if we go outside of the realm of art and into the more practical and tangible things? I mean, you talk about the end of capitalism, and that makes sense.

And if you look at what, you know, communism or fascism or whatever, they're all responses to the economic circumstances that they encountered, right? So they're a way of trying to deal with the fact that you've got an industrial revolution, and suddenly everyone goes into factories, and now these people are there, and they're now in cities, and all of it comes out of that, right? So we're going to have to have a new whatever. A new whatever. A new whatever. But there's a lot of breaking that happens first. Oh yeah. A lot of breaking.

Sure. I mean, one of the things that we haven't explored is my need to work. Yeah. Right. Right. Because before, it's purpose and meaning for a lot of people. I had so much work to do that I never had to worry about my need to work. Yes.

But when somebody says, look, take the rest of your life off. Yeah. You can watch TV, you can hang around in the pool, and suddenly, you know, you can see, you Suddenly, you know, maybe your wife is looking at you thinking you're kind of useless. I kind of liked it better when he was going out and killing mastodons and dragging them back to my cave. And now you've got a new need, which is, okay, should we make some work for you that doesn't need to be done? Should we find you some busy work? Right?

That's humiliating. So now you've got a dignity shortage. You've got a purpose and dignity shortage. And what I'm saying is assume that you had all of it. of this work removed from your shoulders, but you knew that you were going to die on this planet because your water had broken. When do you start getting excited about breaking wildly new ground? When do you start thinking about taking fantastic risks? Huge chances. Things that are noble enough to reacquaint ourselves with the idea of a quest. We're dead, man. There's this aspect

when I listen to as time goes by, and it says, it's still the same old story of fight for love in glory. I'm not allowed to say glory. I'm only allowed to say glory if I support Ukraine. I get to say Slava, because Slava means glory to Ukraine. I can't say glory to America. So we've been cut off from our concept of questing and glory and winning and triumph and all of these things because it's been associated with the negative externalities of such things. Agreed. Yeah. Agreed. So yes, it's an opportunity, but not for everyone. Why do you say that? if I look around at the world, a lot of people find themselves in jobs and things that don't offer them any of that. Such as.

You know, checking tickets on a train. You came here on a train today. I came here on a train today. My guess is that somewhere, somebody's checking tickets on a train, listening to your podcast saying, I love Eric. I listened to all of his stuff. I started buying books on quantum theory. A huge process of my audience. is plumbers electricians long-haul truckers people who solve problems every day they're often

not in highly repetitive tasks you get called in to be an electrician or a plumber in a house you've never been at and it's got some set of problems you've never encountered before a lot of those people are fit to be part of this army and i just think that actually we've got so much human creativity that is stuck in these jobs that we don't respect. Yeah. But I've learned to respect these jobs so much more when I realized, oh, my God, my audience is studying spinners and differential operators in between, you know, Uber assignments or something like this.

It's very interesting. What do we do with those people who, for whatever reason, are not that way inclined, Eric, who can't access these type of technologies or these type of industries? Because that's going to prove a real problem. Well, first of all, why don't we create some art for them that excites them? Why don't we use art to reacquaint ourselves with the possible? I really feel like the artists have fallen down on the job.

I feel like today's art is in general not reflecting our time. And as a result, it's becoming less and less relevant. And then people get more and more adamant that no art has never been more relevant because they know that it's become less and less relevant. And what do you mean by that, that it doesn't reflect our time? Let's explore that. Okay, so when the Erie Canal was dug, there were lots of songs about the Erie Canal, when the trains came in, there were lots of songs about trains.

Tell me that we don't have a million songs about cars when people were getting cars in the 1950s and they spoke of independence. All right. What are your favorite app songs? I mean, but can anyone write a song about an app, Eric? Is an app going to move you in order to write a song about it? There are apps that govern your life right now. I know.

But my point is that a great artist takes our time and changes it into something that matters. I asked Sean Lennon, why don't you write a song that reflects our time? He wrote Boomerang Baby. That was his attempt. She's never dated someone before a thorough search of Google.

The only time she's found in church is when attending her own funeral. It was speaking to a godless time where the apps were fully integrated. Was that song highly successful? I don't know. But when Drake says, you used to call me on your cell phone, he's trying to take the fact that there is some way, you know,

are you going to swipe right by me, baby? I don't know what that lyric is. It's hard. But then again, the Erie Canal. You know, it's not like it's the high seas in general. Oh, the I-I-E was arising and the gin was getting low, and I scarcely think we'll get a drink till we'll get to Buffalo. You had to make that into something.

And so my feeling is, our artists aren't up. to the task of turning ways and Google Maps into something that I care about. Isn't it also the problem as well, and a lot of musicians have told me this, that in order to write, the idea of a song that is a hit song has changed, for instance, a classic pop song is around three minutes or two minutes 30, but now everything has to be designed for TikTok, so everything has to be under a minute or 40 seconds, and that's completely transforming the way we appreciate music.

I heard the same rumor. I was discussing this with Winston Marshall, formerly of Mumford and Sons. The fact is that you had a snippet that used this unusual Phrygian dominant scale, which was, Mommy Don't Know, Daddy's Getting Hot at the Body Shop, doing something unholy, which is basically Hava Nigila or Miserlu. Right? And that lyric couldn't be supported by the song because the song couldn't sustain the interest. That's no way to live.

But on the other hand, we have a barbell of attention. We have the inability to get through a longer tweet and the ability to watch Game of Thrones with the longest character developments anyone's ever seen far dwarfing a movie and approaching what you do in spectacular fiction. We have to recognize that just as attention deficit disorder actually contains the ability to concentrate on something for months,

you know, with laser focus, it's misnamed. We think that our attention spans have shrunk to nothing. No, we're just really easily bored by things that aren't worthy of our attention at the moment. And it is changing our brains. But if you give me Game of Thrones, I guarantee you people be glued to their tubes. And the podcast and revolution would certainly speak to that. Long form? I mean, what is it like when somebody says, oh, man, I'm only through my second hearing of your four-hour fest on Rogan.

You're thinking, you're in your second hearing, you're only through it means you're going to do three. this is where we are. And nobody understands this because the easy thing to say is we got stupid and our attention spans are shrinking to zero. But, Eric, I am so refreshed by what you're talking about because one of the things you've put your finger on

is we've lost, I don't want to put words in your mouth so maybe help me out, but we've lost, is it self-belief, is it aspiration? What is it that we... What's your best story? Don't tell me. Okay. Okay.

But you're now 93 years old and it's getting close to the end. And you're thinking about your life in terms of your best stories. You're watching your children, your grandchildren around you. And then you have a couple of stories that are just the glorious stories of your youth. Think about whether your best story is worthy of your 93 years as it stands. And my feeling is that mine is not yet done. What is it that's worthy of your human life? Why aren't we putting these stories together?

Right. Yeah? Right. I couldn't agree with you more. I've been thinking about this a lot, a lot, on a personal level. As we grow and we get opportunities that we didn't have before and whatever. But it's kind of, it's weird. We don't talk about this stuff.

Well, we do talk about this stuff. We do. We do. We're trying. So people always want to know, why should I listen to you on a podcast? I don't know, you don't have to. But we do talk about this stuff. And that's why people turn in, because there's something ancestral that says, I'm not leading an archival life worthy of being remembered.

When somebody says, well, when I write my memoir, are they going to be worth reading? They might be worth writing. But what if they're worth writing, but not worth reading? Then you fail. Think about what Feynman's stories did for people. For two books of basically self-aggrandizing stories that let people know, oh, my God, it is possible to have such an uterner. life, a life outside of the lines. There's so much of this world that you can't get to if you never clear your throat. And one of my favorite quotes from me, people don't have to like it,

but I love it. And it was hard to say the first time is, most of us die never having heard our own voices. And that's an epidemic. Yeah. Do you think as well, it speaks to the age that we grew up, So I'll give the example of my grandfather. My grandfather was born late 1920s, my English grandfather, in a poor working class part of the north of England. He left school at 14, even though he was very bright, because there was no other option he had to work. When he left school, he went into what was essentially the Great Depression

in the north of England. So he used to turn up with hundreds of people at the dockyard in Liverpool. The foreman would come out, and there'd be hundreds of men in front of him. He'd go, you, you, you, you, the rest of you fuck off. Right. And then when he got a job and he started to make his own way, and he was a joiner, he was a carpenter, a master joiner. Then he was working for the mosquito factory, building the mosquito, the wooden plane. Second World War.

He then joined in order to fight. He joined and he fought right the way from the top of Italy all the way down to the bottom, and then went to North Africa and fought in the Battle of El Alamein under Montgomery, fought it fighting against Romual's army. He then returned, had a family, raised his family. And when we talk about hardship, now, and I'm not saying that people don't have it tough. Of course they do. I'm not saying they don't have difficult.

Right. But I look at my grandfather, that's a different human almost. Do you see what I mean, what he went through? Yeah, because he was catalyzed. And in part, he may have said, you know, we went through life and death situations, but we didn't have your hardship of lack of meaning. I think I did suffixiate if I had to lead your life. I mean, you have to actually talk to some of these people because some of them say,

you know, I'm not scared of bloodshed or a life-and-death battle, but I'm terrified of being canceled online. You're thinking, wait a minute, you actually served voluntarily in Iraq and you're more afraid of what would happen. So what kills the spirit and what kills the flesh and what puts us at risk is extremely variable. But also just think about this. He had the ability to inspire people.

I look at post-World War II Italian rock and roll, and it moves me because these people turn their back on Mussolini. You know, like when Renato Corsohn is saying, Tuva de la Maricano, he's talking about the passion for things American, which are sophisticated. Can you imagine anything as accomplished as Italy, turning to America and saying, hey, you're our style icons? I mean, it's fantastic. And, you know, have you ever heard Adriano Telandano's Prizes and Cozenkhoz and Khezzallan Kool? The song that is pure English nonsense. There's no actual English in it. And it's just aping the English language form showing that people go crazy for it.

Those things came out of American GIs fighting. through Italy and an admiration and a connection you know and my feeling about this if you don't have the ability to inspire other people like that wow i'm not sure that you're more fortunate than your relative so you said your favorite quote from you is about most people die without finding their voice or saying without ever hearing their voice without ever hearing their voice How do you find your voice or how do you get to the point where you hear your voice? How do you do that? I can tell you how I do it but I don't know that that's a...

Well, that's my point, right? Because I've had to find it for myself as well, right? And maybe that's what you have to do. Maybe it's the journey of... Well, I can't sing and have sort of sung on your show, right? And people you're going to see in your comments, Eric thinks he's so cool, right? And then you have to survive that because otherwise you won't sing. You know, one of the one of the things that I love is that is an, it's an extremely mediocre non-gatarist who puts guitar stuff on on on uh instagram some of the world's greatest guitarists are like cheering me on in the comment section and it's like the b plus guitarist

we're saying dude you can't keep time you suck you know one more blues thing it's funny that people at the top are always rooting for you and people a couple levels under are always trying to take the piss out of you my feeling about it is is that you actually have to do it and you open I've complained about homosexuals monopolizing the closet. The closet is something where you open the door and you don't necessarily say I'm gay. You might open the door and say, I think the left has gone crazy. Or you might open the door and say, I think conspiracy theories are actually quite common and not very rare. And then you find out what happens after that.

And you take the damage. So the first thing is the courage to do whatever is you believe or you want to do or you want to try. Well, don't do it stupidly. I mean, you have lots of things that you believe are true that are just going to hurt people, aren't going to liberate, aren't going to... So for God's sake, keep most of the stuff that you shouldn't say to yourself. But there's some stuff in you that just...

You can't live with. It's just eating away at you. And then, you know, be very careful. Make sure that you have a plan for employment because that's how they get most of us is that we're wage slaves. And think about... Am I comfortable, dying,

always having been careful not to say anything that would rock the boat. Because if you're comfortable with that, if that's okay, because this is the only time you get to do this, that's your choice. But, you know, as I was just talking to somebody who had been canceled

and canceled is really misunderstood. The people you meet after cancellation blow your mind. Totally. Yeah, completely totally. You know, it's like I never wrote on a private plane until I've been canceled. You know, you know. You know, we were talking about song lyrics, and one of them, the one that always sticks

out for me is that song, I can never remember the name of the song, but it's from the musical La Cajot-Fol, which goes, life ain't worth a damn until I can say I am what I am. If that's what is in you, then yeah, but I will point out that a lot of people are being induced to be what they're not, and then being asked to sing that song. So one of the things that we're very cautious about is that there are all sorts of fringe freak movements that are trying to push people into extreme behavior and then, you know, announce who they are to the world. And make sure that it is who you are and not that you've joined something that really wants to have you do that. And what are these movements, Eric? Well, for example, the go-woke-go-broke issue is you have somebody who has decent.

and goodness in them. And then they're seized upon by a cult, you know, of undergoing a group mental disease. And then, like, proclaim your hatred for, you know, the market or something like this. Or, you know, glue your hand to a painting. Yeah, that's not that inspiring. If you want to protest something, I tell everybody, don't throw soup on Van Gogh. What you want to do is try projection mapping. Put in a huge amount of work.

take a building with a complicated facade, map it on a computer, design a brilliant animation, roll up on a moonless night, and project your animation that puts forward your political perspective on that facade of a building for a minute, take a video of it and leave. You won't have hurt anything that anyone else is built. You'll have owned and monopolized something. You could do it with CIA headquarters. You could do it with the Lincoln Memorial, but show that you're clever. You've put it in a ton of work.

You're extremely creative and that you care without calling attention to yourself like an ass. But that's hard, Eric. Isn't this the whole point? I mean, a lot of all of this stuff... No, I'm serious. I know.

This is the point I made in my... Do something hard. Of course. But this is the point I made in my oxen speech. It's like the reason that these people do glue themselves to roads and throw soup on paintings and so on, it's because it's easy.

It's because you can be a brain dead moron and do it. And the moment and our mutual friend Melissa Chan, I think this is one of her quotes. She said you cannot remain woke while building things, whether that's muscle, whether that's a career, whether that's a business, you can't because it requires you to confront the reality and the complexity of the world. Why is there only one Melissa Chen? We don't know, right? It's like really mysterious that there are so few people who so many of these ideas come from. Yeah. And so my point is we just said, or I just said for the nth time, go learn projection mapping and nobody basically does it. Occasionally somebody will take a piece of text

and project it onto a building. And I'm just thinking, in your day job, maybe you're doing this for Adidas or Nike, you know? Go be a real pirate and do it for your environmental cause, for your issue about, you know, hanging homosexuals in Iran. You know, do something noble that's hard and inspire people. it will still not happen.

People are self-attenuating. This is Marty Seligman's theory of learned helplessness. We have to figure out how can you start small and create. And to your point, or maybe I'm talking to Melissa through you, once you build things, you don't necessarily lose your idealism. No. You lose your wokeness as a surface level. Yes.

Climate is still an issue. For what reasons that I do not understand, we love. lie about climate in the direction that climate is actually going. So people have the illusion that climate is not a problem at all because if it were a problem, we wouldn't be lying about it. But we're lying about it in the direction. We're trying to make it a simplified thing. Tell us more about that, Eric.

It seems to me very clear that scientific consensus is being manipulated by official bodies to get certain narratives to do things. As some of us spot the fact that the scientific consensus is being manipulated. We get the idea, oh, whoever's the manipulator is lying because it's not true as opposed to lying because we have to actually make things simplified in order to get political change or we don't know why we're being lied to. There are plenty of reasons people lie both in your interests and against your interests. So the epidemic of lying has created a general sense that Whatever's being lied about is untrue, you know, COVID COVID really wasn't a problem as if many people didn't die. You know, one of the reasons that I thought the vaccines was really interesting was I felt very clear that COVID's origins were being lied about because to say that you can't ask whether something came from a lab because it's racism was the only thing I knew was total BS.

I don't know whether it came from a wet market. I think it didn't. I think it probably came from a lab. But what I didn't know about was whether the vaccine was being, we were being lied to because we knew it was a bio weapon and this vaccine was intended to mitigate the long-term 10-year effects of a bioweapon. Like, AIDS doesn't show up initially as a huge problem. When you get infected with HIV, it's a long time before really, you know, the Kaposi sarcoma starts. So I think we're just really confused because we've been lied to so many times. We're punched drunk. And as a result, we just don't know what we're advocating for. I don't know how big a problem climate is. I know it's a problem. I don't know how big. I don't know how big. I don't know.

what we actually know. I've been confused. So the variance in my opinion about how big of a problem this is and whether it commands the lion's share of my attention or not, I don't know, because I've just lost faith and trust in the IPCC. But that's a very real problem. When we don't have faith in our institutions, that means we're at a point of crisis. But can I just push back on this ever so slightly? Of course you can. Absolutely. When we say we don't have faith in our institutions, we're not.

What the half are we talking about? Like, I got on a plane to come here. If you think about the de havelin comet, it crashed all the time. Planes don't crash anymore. They used to. Those are institutions that are keeping the same people who lose your luggage and who delay and overbook you. Make sure that your plane doesn't crash. And so you have a weird association.

I can't trust the airlines, and I totally trust the airlines. You trust the airlines to screw up. up your flight to overcharge you to overbook you to do all this stuff and you trust them absolutely with your family in your life to take off on a death trap filled with jet fuel from one situation not knowing the weather somewhere else and land it we do trust our institutions and we don't and we do and we don't and it's making us crazy well that's the worst thing right if we just didn't trust them that would be a lot easier it's the it's this ambiguity it's rhodinger's bullshit yes And this is what's making us mad.

The cheap thing to say is I can't trust the institutions. That's right. The weirder thing to say is, I don't understand why they're so good and so bad simultaneously. That's right. Why are they so good and so bad simultaneously? I think because there's a centralized reason why they started screwing up, which is this theory of embedded growth obligations. What's that? Tell it.

We have no idea what that is. Assume that from 1945. where World War II seals in an order from a really decisive victory up until 1968 through 73. It's not WTF happened in 71 as the Bitcoin. It's sort of 68, 73. That period of broad, distributed, technologically led, dependable high levels of growth deranged us. We thought that was our future. And we built a society in a world that required that level of growth.

and sometimes you have an organism that has multiple life cycles. A guy named Mark Tashney wrote a book called A Genetic Switch about the fact that T4 Bacteria Phage Lambda has two different lives it can lead. And I think in part the West has two different lives it can lead. It can lead a high-growth life cycle or it can lead a low-growth life cycle. And when we say we don't recognize ourselves and are we the same people, who won World War II or something like that, we don't recognize that that is one of our potential life cycles.

Nobody had ever seen the low-growth Western life cycle. And it's terrifying. It's us eating each other. I must grow my slice of the pie just the way my great-grandfathers grew their slice of the pie, and the only way I can do that if the pie isn't growing fast enough is to eye your slice. So I'm looking at your slice. And suddenly we each appear to each other not as a source of inspiration,

but as a source of protein and nourishment. But that's a very fear-based response, isn't it, Eric? Well, it's a realistic response. In other words, if I'm doing something that's growth-based, and if I suffused all of these institutions with certain growth obligations, the portion of that institution, like its pension fund, that had to grow at a level that it cannot grow at,

becomes psychopathic, right? Is that why we print endless money that we don't have and borrow from our grandchildren? Yes. In essence, what happened was north of Bretton Woods collapsing and the removal of the gold standard. It was the loss of technological change in fuel that came easily in the 20th century. So there are all sorts of disasters in the 20th century, but there are all sorts of marvels. And when those started to dry up, which essentially came from something I've called Umveldt hacking, that you could see more and more with, scientific instrumentation, so you could look into the cell. At some point, you had to guess it what the three-dimensional structure of DNA was. At some point, you could basically look at. Right?

So we started to get into a place where we couldn't sustain the science. The science couldn't sustain the technology. The technology couldn't sustain the markets, and everything had been built with an obligation. So the whole point of this theory of egos or embedded growth obligations is how do we have a theory why all institutions would sort of get into trouble at once. And the common thing is growth that can't be met. Right? So that's why everything went funny.

Now, that's not to say that we're not analytic. If we didn't want to lie to keep this game going, we could fix a lot of things. So things that do get fixed are things like airplane checklists to make sure that we don't take off with something broken. The checklist is also operative in a hospital, so you don't imputate the wrong leg. So the explosion in iatrogenics,

which is the harm done by physicians to their own patients, and the epidemic of crashes that ended, both in part result from a common understanding in management that a checklist is a life-saving thing. We could do that with integrity to, the growth-based parts, the pension. I could say to you, actually, you know, these commitments we made to your pension can't be met. Here's what's realistic and here's what's safe.

How do you guys feel about 2% or 1.5% growth? You say, well, can I retire? Not really very well. You might pay my whole life into helping other people. Yeah, you're the loser in a pyramid scheme. How do you feel? Well, you don't feel good. that's the part I have to start lying about.

Right. I've been thinking about this a lot, man, because that's really, every time, I haven't been able to work out up until this conversation why every time there's a crisis, no one says

we have a limited amount of money. No one ever says that. It's like in this country, the NHS is always underfunded. Every, you know, if the electricity prices or gas prices go up, the government has to support people, right? And who could disagree with that? Well, and tell me something. How many of these people know the word seniorage?

None. Do you? None. Seniorage is a tax on the holders of money that they experience when you print more of it. Right. So in essence, when the money supply goes up and you say, You know, we really need to do something about monetary policy in order to alleviate the pressure. You're really saying we need to tax the holders of money by printing more of it.

So you're raising money through seniorage. And then you have like all of these other things that are really bizarrely explained, like a stock market crash. Stocks fell today in a precipitous decline over the last three trading hours. That's not what happened at all. The right way of saying it is the dollar surged against equities, or the pound surged against the footsie. And what is it? You've got this amazing and beautiful numerator, which is an index fund, let's say, with 500 stocks for the S&P. But what's your denominator?

Oh, it's the dollar. It's one instrument. And that one instrument is further disguised by being called the numerator. It's the measuring stick. So now you're playing games with a rubberized measuring stick. And when the measuring moves, that's what caused all the equities to apparently fall. It's not the price of equities. It's an exchange rate with another instrument, and the other instrument surged.

So what we do is we keep you in a perpetual state of stupidity. So, and the reason that they do that is because if they're honest, that will precipitate a loss of confidence. And if it's a loss of confidence, then the whole thing collapses like the cuthouse of cards that it is. Well, correct. and you don't want a complete loss of confidence. You want theater. You want bullshit. You want belief.

But you want a higher level, adult level. You want an adult level of fiction. These fictions are dangerous, unsustainable. You know, there's a French philosopher, Jamie Charteris told me this and it changed my life. He said, a nation is defined to be a group of people who have agreed to forget something in common. And you have to understand the purpose.

of nonsense, of theater, of BS, of aspiration. The U.S. had some of the best of this stuff. All men being created equal when you held slaves. It wasn't true. It was honored only initially in the breach, but it was open-ended, and it gave the opportunity when you had the opportunity to get rid of your slavery,

to promote something to all men truly being equal. And then we get these things like this, Oh, what is it? The Idiot 1619 project where we replace one brilliant set of fictions with a completely ridiculous set of fictions that are not sustainable. What is the 1619 project? The idea being, you've agreed to forget something in common, you didn't include us, you repressed this completely, you're telling this offensive story. This is the part I'm sympathetic with with the 1619.

You can't leave out black America from its own part of the founding. of the country. You have to create a better, newer fiction. Fine. But the idea that you're going to like just try to destroy the founding fathers of the country, the national governing narrative, and you're going to try to make people hate the day they were born for singing the national anthem. I don't know who came up with the idea that this woman Nicole Hannah-Jones was fit to refound the country. It's madness and craziness. The issue is we need to be decent and better. And she's right about all sorts of things, but she's wrong about leading. And so by leading, what do you mean by that, by leading?

How do we come up with an inclusive fiction that we can all subscribe to where our common purpose is to build that fiction into reality? What was wrong with MLK's fiction? It was pretty great. That's what I think. Yeah, but, well, you know, it's the same thing. MLK was drawing from Gandhi, for example. Most people think Gandhi was a pacifist.

Gandhi hated pacifism with passion you cannot imagine. He had a hierarchy. Oh, yeah. Gandhi was really pro-violence and anti-pacifism. And he's very clear on this, if you read it. His point was, non-violence is the highest level of courage possible, and almost nobody has that ability. Because what is it?

It's a pre-commitment to martyrdom to screw your opponent. The opponent who does not understand that they can kill you and you will not raise your hand to defend yourself is walking into a trap. Gandhi was about martyrdom. You want to look at the courage of somebody like John Lewis crossing that bridge down south.

I mean, my understanding is Malcolm X was not courageous enough to march alongside Dick Gregory and MLK. Because those guys were so effing hardcore, they were willing to die for their cause and they were willing to be martyred for their cause. Gandhi's second level below nonviolence was violence. And he said, if you don't have the stones for nonviolence, please pick up a gun.

Please engage in violence because the thing I detest is pacifism. So we don't have a story that goes along with that. Okay. We have a story, would you say about MLK? So MLK has this vision. But MLK's vision was based on Gandhi. and he was selling it as if it was much less hardcore than it actually was. Civil Rights was purchased with infinite heroism.

And, you know, that's why Dick Gregory is my personal, I almost can't talk about, you know, this comedian. He committed that if he and his wife were taken into a police station in the South, and she was nine months pregnant with one of his kids, and the sheriff was kicking, or pregnant belly he wouldn't do anything and they said our our cause is more important than our marriage and our own lives so what was wrong with it it required too much we didn't get how amazing these people were and particularly when we live in an era where we're encouraged ever more to think about ourselves in an era which is ever more atomized so people will be less likely to martyr themselves for a cause if they think they're the most important thing there is.

If they're somatic cells, we're leading somatic lives. These people weren't leading somatic lives. What does that mean, Eric, somatic lives? So your cells in your body are divided into soma and germ. Your ear is not going to reproduce itself, even though it has all this genetic information. But your gonads have different properties. Right? You're reproductive. stuff is what gets cancer early in life, whereas all the other stuff gets cancer late in life. So the issue is, are you into somatic pleasure? Or are you into having babies and perpetuating this thing and tying our pleasure to our fitness? And by fitness, as my brother points out, it's about lineage.

And it's very hard when people no longer believe in religion. they don't believe in multi-generational strategies to tell them, yeah, your soma matters, but you're overdoing it. Yeah, that is a very difficult thing to tell people, particularly when our society is focused on pleasure. Well, but when you've given up on the future, implicitly, you've given up on the future. And my feeling is, if you're not excited about the future, that quote about society functions when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit. That broke. And if I can call

out one person who really pisses me off, it's Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow was invited as a guest to give an award for women in science at Rockefeller University. And the moment that I completely broke with the sort of woke vision of the left was she shows up at Rockefeller University, sort of almost a secret facility because it has no undergraduate, so we don't even realize that it's there, but a powerhouse of biomedical research. And there are multiple Nobel laureates who've called this home, and there are pictures, and very accomplished people are up on the wall.

And it happens that most of those people are probably white of hue and male. And she looks up and she says, what is up with the dude wall? And the pictures come down. And I have this feeling of who is this woman? Who is this woman in our house? What did she do? What did she accomplish?

Does she understand transfer RNA? Does she know what a vaccine is? Does she have any knowledge of sex and bacteria? I mean, who is this person? She's a presenter. And I wish to be good hosts. But there is a moment when you let somebody into your home who is completely empty of the generosity of spirit

that lives under your roof. And you have to say, it seems to be getting late. Perhaps I should call you a cab. Right. But isn't it the fault of the owner of the house that they don't do that to her? I believe she became the owner of the house. You know, there are stories in India where my wife is from,

where somebody comes and visits a home and says, that painting is magnificent. And what does the family do? Give it away. They said, really? It's been cluttering up our wall for forever. Please take it. You'd be doing us a favor.

So the American walks out with bags full of stuff saying, those are such nice people. And the family, when the door closes, oh my God, she just kept taking and taking and taking. Because it's a cultural misunderstanding. Yes. Right? And my feeling is that the people who let Rachel Maddow into Rockefeller University

were acting in beautiful good faith. Were they? Or were they afraid? This is what I increasingly wonder, because that's a metaphor for institutions more broadly, right? Were they, though, or were they just afraid? Because increasingly, that's my sense. I hear the ugliness of my own speech, Constantine. I hear my phrase, who are you and what are you doing in my lab?

But that's exactly the right question, isn't it? Yes, but when they came from my brother at Evergreen, and I was calling up, you know, newspapers, will you write the story? Nobody until Barry Weiss wrote the story would write that story and the only person I could even get to understand this thing before Somebody you had in this chair who you know Great deal of damage was done mr. Sam Harris Sam Harris courageously waited into something he did not understand what was going on at every green nobody understood this woke mind virus And figured out Barry and Sam were two of the very first people to even get what this risk was And by the way we've got to take people who saw

stumble in these interviews and who make mistakes and who have blind spots and who do things that we don't like, but basically show courage and integrity. We've got to stop blaming them for the tiny bit they can't see. I agree. I completely agree with you. The first thing we did when that whole thing went crazy was contact Sam to make sure he was okay. It was never our intention for him to end up the way that what happened. I'm glad you said that actually. And there'll be a bunch of idiots in the comments getting upset with you. But I couldn't agree with you more. Always consider reducing your follower count when you have the opportunity.

Oh, that's what we always do. Yeah. We always do. And I want to get it on the record that while I think what Sam said was wrong. Which it was. Which it was. I did not enjoy even a moment of the backlash that happened. And you know, you guys have been trying to get me to come on this podcast for a while.

And it was after that happened that I decided I really wanted to do it. So anyway, to Sam Harris. But also as well, you know, there'll be times where I'm walking through London, they'll be like, oh, it's a trigonometry guy, it's Francis. And they'll go, oh, you got Sam Harris, didn't you? And every time someone says that to me, I cringe because this show is not about getting people. It's about exploring ideas. And I brought it up because you guys needed the opportunity to say it.

Yeah. Well, thank you, Eric. So let's come back to the growth thing, because I feel like we are, we've, for a least for me, we've got a finger near the button. Yeah. This is the big story. Right. So in some ways, the crazy loons are right in the infinite growth, finite resources, that's not going to happen.

Yes and no. I mean, the growth can't be... So much of our growth has basically been in correlation with how much fossil fuel you can burn. Exactly. That has to break, and a different form of growth has to occur, which is... how many ideas per unit of non-sustainable energy, you know, you can create. So the growth has to be, in some sense, idea-based. But again, you can also potentially try to architect a system that doesn't have the same

crazy needs for growth, that has a plan for when growth is naturally present, when growth is absent. We should be sitting around talking about what is the new economics. Instead, what we're talking about is how do we keep communism at bay, while capitalism is struggling. And my feeling is, Tweedle them and Tweedledee, you may have a preference between the two of them, but everything is telling you innovate in a new economic market-based system.

If you care about freedom, human potential, and we have people who are just stuck on capitalism. It's the part of the problem as well, Eric. And look, I'm in favor of democracy. This is not an argument pro-autocracy. I want to make that absolutely clear before I say this. But don't we need a dictator? But, you know,

When you have, we need one now. No, but when you have, you know, the democratic model for five years, that encourages short-termism, doesn't it? In that all people are worried about is winning that next election. What I'm trying to say to you is, you're being invited to a much bigger conversation that no one is attendant, which is what is the positive port of democracy into a 22nd, century framework.

Correct. So what is it? What's the new economic model, Eric? What are you talking about? Well, I've tried to talk about it. Tell us more. Look at my thing about the new gimmick economy, right? Where I'm trying to talk about the fact that you're going to have to deregulate a tiny

number of people who are absolutely powerhouses on generative far right tail behavior. And you're going to have to unshackle them. And then you're going to have to somehow force a spreading of wealth in this deregulated system. You're going to have to recognize that the output of different human beings based on the cortosis of how people are distributed has to be embraced. So what does that look like in real world terms, Eric? You probably shouldn't be telling Elon Musk that he's not invited to the electric vehicle summit at the White House long.

You know, get over yourselves. Elon, and I've been super critical on a lot of different things, is a next level human being at some level. He's also a bullshit artist. He's a master showman. He's a troll. He fakes things. He's a genius. He's a scoundrel. I mean, there's a lot going on with Elon. And what I'm trying to say is, you're going to have to start dealing with super complicated generative people. I worked for Peter Thiel for 10 years, almost. Peter's a genius. He's an out-and-out genius. And he's a better communist than most communists. He's got the ability to run communism in his mind. he can run capitalism and libertarianism and anything else.

You're going to have to stop demonizing these people in these completely simplistic terms. You're going to have to invite a lot of freaks and weirdos according to Normies to dance and play and build and think. And you're going to have to stop just making their lives a living hell. It's one of the things I've been thinking about a lot. We confuse wealthy people. with successful people and we tie them all with one brush and we say if you've got money,

you're evil. Well, here's the really interesting news. A lot of these people tolerate people with radically different politics. Peter Thiel and I have radically different politics. We can also finish each other's sentences at times. The world of remarkable people needs to be more unshackled. And more people need to be invited in case they are also remarkable. And they come from circumstances where it wasn't identified.

You know, my belief is, and I'll save this maybe towards the end, but you need to go after your learning disabled people. Because a lot of those people are the innovators that you desperately need right now. You're making their lives a living hell. You're making school a daily exercise and having your head shoved in the toilet. And a lot of those people are super learners that you're pretending are learning to say. We need a new economic model that is based on the tiny number of people who can perform in these completely crazy circumstances. We need to make their lives great.

And we need also to come up with a culture of service, which is really weird. But you don't get to keep your wealth if all you're doing is enjoying luxury and posting pictures on Instagram about I drove my ass and Martin to get to my Bentley to get to my Gulf Street. If that's your lifestyle, you failed. You know, the key thing is that serve others. You have to serve. You have to serve. And a culture of service of obligation.

I was just at a kind of a secret meeting of incredible people in London. Billionaires at the table in general. I said, you know, at some point somebody called on me, you know, and it was a peer and said, Eric has something to say. I didn't really have something to say. But one of the things I said is I just listened to you all talking behind closed doors about the need to help those less fortunate. Nobody would believe that that's what you're actually talking about behind closed doors. Right?

And you have to open your houses, invite people to dinner, to dine with you. I just had this thing with Billy Bragg where I ran into it at a festival. Billy Bragg totally took the piss out of me in a book and on social media. And I said, why don't we share the stage and sing a song together? And he said, what are you doing on my stage? I'm not going to share this. But when I meet him over coffee, you know, we were able to bridge things to come together. And the issue is we need to do some things where people you never imagine would break bread or share a stage do so.

Because this is an emergency situation. So open your homes, invite people in, show people what it is that's your actual tradition. It's very hard for an anti-Semite to survive a Shabbat dinner. And I completely agree with you on all that you were saying, particularly when it comes to education. There's somebody who was a teacher for many years. I saw what we did to the neurologically atypical. I'm neurologic atypical myself. You're kidding.

How else do we unshackle potential? How else do we unleash this ball of creativity? Stop with, look at the troll section on Reddit. It's this giant group of people telling other people, you know that thing you believe and I saw through it a long time ago. It's like nobody can believe anything. We're in this sort of, I don't know, it's like an orgy of not believing, of nihilism. if you don't believe in anything, you lost.

Look, it's all BS for sure. It may be sound and fury signifying nothing. But if that's the answer you came up with, you just lost life. I think what we have to do is we have to put forward a positive vision where we're starting to talk about, you can see, when you come up with a song lyric, I'm in your song. I'm feeling and I'm thinking it. Show people what's possible.

Show people how to take anything. A cup of coffee, you know, the story of Robustov versus Aravica Beans. Or, you know, we could take the light in this room and the fact that I keep talking about. There's a secret circle at every point in space and time. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see each other. We don't tell anybody about. So they keep talking to us about Schroeniger's Kappa. They don't even understand the beauty of Maxwell's equation.

The world is just overflowing with beauty and majesty and transcendence. And we're caught talking about who thinks how much of themselves. and who's self-promoting and who's a whore for clicks and all of this stuff. It's all socially based. I think what we need to do in part is to do cool stuff. At some point, the first person is going to pull off this projection mapping thing as a protest, and it's going to inspire the world. And I won't have to explain it again.

I'll just point people to the video. So whoever you are out there, I'm going to address the camera, If you're upset about the way in which we're burning oil or if you're upset about inequality Consider projection mapping and inspiring everybody put a lot of work and do it to a killer animation Join a team of people who do this for corporate Learn the trade and then go radical go rogue and be a pirate and don't hurt people in the process It's so simple to do new things. I don't know why we're not I think it's because it's it's our fear

It's our fear that holds us back. It's our fear of you. It's because this is something that I've learned through my own experiences of doing this show, for losing friends, et cetera, et cetera. We are terrified of being alienated from the tribe. We are terrified of standing out because, as you know, thousands of years ago, that meant certain death. But we've been programmed that way. So I think what happens a lot, Eric, is that a lot of the time people are scared to be authentic. People are scared to say what they truly think and feel. People are scared to live the life that they truly want

because it would mean in part that they risk alienation from the tribe. It's a really interesting point. Let's assume that those fears are reasonable, valid, and evolutionarily based. Let's try a different fear. There are slightly less than 5,000 weeks in a life. Think about that fear. Right. One more just went by.

Right? Come up with a jar with like 5,000 sweets in it or something and just take one out every week and watch the odds that you're ever going to accomplish anything or do anything or inspire somebody. You know, go down and further and further. Why don't you put it off another two weeks or three weeks? So why don't we start this in September? That's right. That's right. That's the way.

That's the way. And that's how I think about it. That's how I think about it. Francis is right that a lot of people fear that. And I also think we talked about it earlier. You know, doing hard things is hard. And people prefer to do easy things. But you're right.

I think when, and this is, you know, we haven't talked about God and maybe we don't have time or maybe we'll do it on the local section. But I take a lot of inspiration from the fact that life is finite. A lot of inspiration. How old are you? 40. I take a lot of inspiration from that. Because this is it right here. And you either make the most of it, you don't. Every day. That's it. And to me, Eric, part of the reason why we went insane over COVID, and I use that word accurately because we did go insane. We lost us.

We're still. Insane. Okay. And I take your point. But the reason for me is because we have lost, We no longer accept the fact that we are going to die. We don't talk about it. It's a taboo, particularly in Western nations. And you see that with our celebrities, with their weird, smooth, plastic lizard faces, right? Because nobody wants to admit they're aging. Nobody wants to admit they're getting older.

Nobody wants to admit that there is an end to this. So that being the case, why would you endure a moment of discomfort in this life is this is literally all you have. Say more. I want to understand this. Sorry? Say more. I want to understand. So why would you?

If this is all we have, if this life is all you've got, why would you make it unpleasant? Why would you make it unpleasant? Why would you make it difficult? Why would you make it un? Because there's something eating at your soul. Because there's a worm inside your body, whittling you out from the inside, causing you to die a little bit more every day. You think you're going to die at age 90? No, no, no, that's the final death. I told my grandfather, I said,

there's a last time you do everything, and you don't realize when that is. You know, I crossed the Great Himalayan range when I was 20 or something on foot. And I thought I would be doing it regularly. That may be the only time I ever crossed the Great Himalayan range on foot. My ankle now isn't as good as it used to be.

Think about the last time you went backpacking and actually slept out under the stars. For all I know, that part of you is already dead. Now, figure out how much death you can actually handle in a living body. And figure out maybe you want to reclaim some of that, right? Maybe you want to reclaim that through having children. Maybe you want to reclaim that through their eyes. You take an ice cream comb, and boy, that ice cream cone looks good to you.

You only have one of them. And you can feed it to your kid. You're going to taste that ice cream cone so much more if you give it to your kid. because to you it's just an ice cream cup, right? There's a weird way in which I just think that we're not a, we're not figuring out how grand this adventure is. And to your point about COVID, I don't even know how to talk about this.

I could use some help. There's a meaning crisis, the people who don't feel comfortable talking about religion, and I'm not a religious person, I'm an atheist, the meaning of life has gone away. You can see an amazing band at a concert. It just doesn't mean what it used to mean. We have better guitarists right now than we've ever had.

And they don't mean as much as they meant in the 70s when we were having idiotic arguments, whether Clapton, Page, or Hendricks was the greatest guitarist of all time. I don't know what's going on with this. Things are not attaching in the sense of meaning. The greatest quote, and I'm searching for it everywhere, somebody out there helped me. There was a woman in a Doors documentary

who said the words, back then we didn't realize it was just music. I can't tell you how profound that was to me. The idea was she later realized it was just music. But for a period of time, she was able to attach that feeling of meaning, of transcendence, of permanence of something to something she was experiencing at the Whiskey Agogo on the sunset strip. We can't attach that feeling of meaning almost at all. There's something about the phone that has rewired our brain.

We call it a phone, even though mostly we don't call anybody on it. We go back and forth between a screen and a person, a screen in a person. It rewires our minds. And in the end, we can't feel our own children or we can't remember our first kiss. I don't know what's going on with that. Yeah, so for me, I feel, I still think music is more than just music. I've always felt that. And I'm not musically gifted in any shape or form.

If I started singing, you would all leave the room immediately. Do you want to try? No, I want people to carry on watching this interview, right? No, no, you're going to lead over that, but I don't want you to. I'm not going to push you to sing. Yeah. But isn't it weird that we decide that dance is for people who can move properly, music is for people who can hit a note?

People say, I don't play an instrument. One thing I learned from, you know, the sort of the gypsy tradition. You know, you can make noise just by puffing air into your cheeks and changing the tension in your cheeks so that they always have an instrument. They're never without, right? And it just moves me in the fact that we're so alienated from dance and from music

that we sit around worrying about what everybody else is going to think. Yeah, you're right. Keep going. So, but to me, one of my favorite playwrights is, it's called David Mamet. And David Mamet wrote a book called True and False, which was about acting.

But it wasn't really about acting. It was more than that. It was about art. It was about life. It was about how the life of an artist is one of the most profound things that you can have and that you can embrace. And he said something very simple. But he said words that come from the heart go to the heart. And maybe this is me. This is me being nostalgic. This is me projecting. But there's a lot of time now where I just feel when I listen to modern music, it doesn't. seem to have the heart. Because when someone is honest with you, you know, they don't need to use the most verbose language. It doesn't need to be poetic. It doesn't need all these tricks and tips and whatever else. It can be as simple as, I know a man ain't supposed to cry, but these tears I can't hold inside. And the moment you listen to it, you go, bah, I know that. I've felt that because we've all felt that, particularly being men. Right. It's interesting. I remember watching Jack White talking about Sun House, who could play guitar. But there's a moment where Sun House is on stage on film.

And he's singing John the Revelator. I don't know if you know the song. Who's that writing John the Revelator? And he's clapping on one and three. And he's stomping on two and four. Right? That's it. You know, one and three being broken out from two and four

in that sort of repetitive pocket that just grabs you and holds you. there is some of that music being made. And some of it is weird as hell. I really looked at Tim Henson's Polyphia and Goat. And you look at that, and it's sort of like almost Havana-unana, some sort of Tex-Mex Caribbean-Cuban thing, but filtered and sharded and shattered and broken and healed back together.

There is some way in which Bonnie Verres Creek, you know, it's like what Cher did with Autotune to believe where she took something that was pitched, She turned it into an instrument before T. Payne ever got to this. That thing, which is the alienation in our time and the electronics and the heart and the soul and the alienation and the need for closeness. Whatever these things are that speak to us, what is it about Green Day's Goodridden's that made it blow up like that? The fact that you could feel the sand going through your hourglass. you know or you know maybe one of the best of these things anticipating social media and the

internet and all of the cancellation was iris by the google dole's with those lyrics that ended up on so many high school yearbook pages you know i don't want the world to see me because i don't think that they'd understand that's about cancellation before cancellation is a thing right and so these things that speak to us that if we had more of them it would mean more and the thing about it is i can point you to some of the things that are happening now that matter to me. I know that I'm not dead. I know that I'm not an old man saying get off my lawn. The problem is it's very hard to say something changed in music. Rick Biotto, a friend of mine from Atlanta, has this channel Everything Music. And he talks about the decrease in the complexity of music. You don't see the

sort of Steely Dan phenomena or Frank Zappa was effectively a classical composer, as my son points out to me, in a rock and roll idiom, doing the most complicated and complex music about something. He points out that Frank Zappas Titties and Beer is actually an homage to Stravinsky. We don't have these super-rich interlinkings between pieces of art. You know, I often talk about, you know,

April is the Cruelest Month, as a lyric as a line from T.S. Eliot is evoking the fact that school children used to be taught the Middle English one that the Pillar with the Shurrosota beginning Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This interlinking world of references of meaning to the discovery, the Easter eggs that are hidden everywhere is gone. It is. And part of that is, and I've seen it myself because when I went to school, I was lucky

enough to be taught poetry. And I remember we had to learn a poem and we had to stand up and we had to say it. And as a kid, I was like, why do I have to have? to get up and say William Blake's the entire class. These words don't mean anything to me. They don't convey anything. It's just boring. It's just empty recital.

But it isn't. Because Blake is one of our greatest ever poets and thinkers and artists. And by listening to those words, by ingesting them, by literally making them part of you. But it's also the weaponization of taste. The idea that taste is not discussable. That we can't say that certain taste is better than others. I see your taste and I want to take you from where you are to where you were meant to be, not necessarily to where I am because my taste is different.

These are things that require high trust. You have to trust that, in fact, you can't analyze the complexity of a song. You can say what its harmonic structure is. And it's not all about get off my lawn or old people always think those things. I could tell you about things that I think are incredibly complex and brilliant that I don't like. And what we're seeing is the simplification, the language change where we're starting to have a name for Bernie bro or Techbrough or reply guy or Pick Me Girl you know creator in content are the two things if I could I would

banish from the English language because what it is is you know should do you want food thank you food is good I enjoyed your food well what kind of food yeah but hierarchy is a problem now tell me The idea of hierarchy is a problem, a hierarchy of, I mean, you're talking about content, some content's good, some content's bad. You can't, that's difficult to have any conversation that involves hierarchy for a lot of people. Not for me. So what should I do? Yeah.

I mean, that's my life. Yeah, I know. And you should carry on doing it. Yeah, yeah. Not only that, Eric, you should carry on doing it on locals with us because that's where we're going to go. Segway. Very much, we're running out of time. Sorry about that.

No, no, it's great. Don't be sorry about that. It's a pleasure. Before we go there and ask the questions that our audience have submitted, and there's some really good ones, by the way, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Well, the most important thing is we're not talking about, and I'll combine the two things into one thing so that I actually fit your question.

We need to be getting people who are learning disabled, not marked as learning disabled, marked as super learners, making sure that they have wonderful lives as scientists, particularly getting them to focus on longevity and on physics for the purpose of diversifying our human habitats to having more than one atmosphere, learning that this is not science fiction until we find the ultimate theory,

every theory beyond Einstein may have possibilities to traverse the cosmos, that the current theories indicate is impossible until we transcend the limitations of our current worldview. called an effective theory. We need to be getting more people into the hard sciences. We need more philanthropy. We need to get governments on board. We particularly need to get neurodivergent people outside of the schooling system. More of them advancing radically quickly, made feel confident that they will have lives with second homes, that they can have three children, they can get help

in the house if what they're doing is taking their rare gifts and putting them in the service of humanity and allowing them to participate in the prosperity that they have built for everyone else. What a beautiful answer. Eric Weinstein, thank you for coming on. Head on over to locals where we continue the conversation. What is the right balance between being cautious in terms of not getting into a nuclear exchange and not giving into nuclear blackmail? Yeah, it's a good question.