or maybe under slavery and Jim Crow or even the harsh tyranny of the coal
and steel employers during the labor wars. But in general I would say, it’s hard for us to understand
and imagine the collective culture, unless we have the system of selective pressures,
that for example, Russians were subjected to. – Yeah, so if there’s one good thing that comes outta war,
it’s literature, art and humor and music. – Oh, I don’t think so. I think almost everything is good
about war except for death and destruction. – Right. Without the death it would bring the romance of it,
the whole thing is nice but– – Well, this is why we’re always caught up in war. We have this very ambiguous relationship to it,
is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful, and at an unacceptable price
and the price has never been higher. – So to jump into AI a little bit,
in one of the conversations you had or one of the videos, you described that one of the things AI systems can’t do
and biological systems can is self replicate in the physical world. – [Eric] Oh, no, no.
– In the physical world. – Well, yes. The physical robots can’t self replicate,
but there’s a very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we’ve been able
to create that’s really complex that has an analog of our reproductive system is software.
– But, nevertheless, software replicates itself, if we’re speaking strictly for the replication
is this kinda digital space. So let me, just to begin, let me ask a question. Do you see a protective barrier or a gap
between the physical world and the digital world? – Let’s not call it digital. Let’s call it the logical world versus the physical world.
– Why logical? – Well, because even though we had, let’s say Einstein’s brain preserved,
it was meaningless to us as a physical object because we couldn’t do anything with what was stored in it at a logical level.
And so, the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically, are not necessarily,
we don’t always benefit from synonymizing. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a material basis to the logical world, but that it does warrant
identification with a separate layer that need not invoke logic gates and zeros and ones.
– And, so connecting those two worlds, the logical world and the physical world or maybe just connecting to the logical world inside our brain,
Einstein’s brain, you mention the idea of outtelligence.
– [Eric] Artificial outtelligence. – Artificial outtelligence. – Yes, this is the only essay that John Brockman every invited me to write
that he refused to publish in Edge. (Lex chuckling) – Why? – Well, maybe it wasn’t well written, but I don’t know.
– The idea is quite compelling. It’s quite unique and new, at least from my stance point.
Maybe you can explain it? – Sure. What I was thinking about is why it is that we’re waiting
to be terrified by artificial general intelligence. When in fact, artificial life is terrifying
in and of itself and it’s already here. So, in order to have a system of selective pressures,
you need three distinct elements. You need variation within a population,
you need heritability, and you need differential success. So, what’s really unique and I’ve made this point,
I think elsewhere, about software, is that if you think about what humans
know how to build that’s impressive. So, I always take a car and I say does it have an analog of each of the physiological systems?
Does it have a skeletal structure, that’s its frame. Does it have a neurological structure, it has an onboard computer.
It has a digestive system. The one thing it doesn’t have is a reproductive system.
But if you can call spawn on a process, effectively you do have a reproductive system.
And that means that you can create something with variation, heritability and differential success.
Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was where do we see inanimate non intelligent life
outwitting intelligent life? And I have two favorite systems and I try to stay
on them so that we don’t get distracted. One of which is the Ophrys orchid sub species or sub clave,
I don’t what to call it. – Is that a type of flower? – Yeah, it’s a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species
in order to dupe the males into engaging in what is called pseudocopulation, with the fake female,
which is usually represented by the lowest pedal, and there’s also a pheromone component to fool the males
into thinking they have a mating opportunity. But the flower doesn’t have to give up energy in the form of nectar as a lure, because it’s tricking the males.
The other system is a particular species of muscle,
lampsilis in the clear streams of Missouri and it fools bass
into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young and when
the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that the bass like to eat,
the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the bass and also use the bass to redistribute
them as they eventually release. Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent dupe,
being fooled by a lower life form. And what is sculpting these convincing lures?
It’s the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies.
So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, those weaker mimics fall off, they have terminal lines,
and only the better ones survive. So it’s an arms race between the target species
that is being parasitized, getting smarter, and this other less intelligent
or non intelligent object getting as if smarter. And so, what you see is, is that artificial general
intelligence is not needed to parasitize us. It’s simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves,
so you could have a program, let’s say, one of these Nigerian scams that writes letters
and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin to figure out which
aspects of the program should be kept, which should be varied and thrown away, and you don’t need it to be in anyway intelligent
in order to have a really nightmare scenario being parasitized by something that has no idea what it’s doing.
– So you phrased a few concepts really eloquently, so let me try to, there’s a few directions this goes.
So one, first of all, in the way we write software today, it’s not common that we allow it to self modify.
– But we do have that ability now. – We have the ability. – It’s just not common. – I just isn’t common.
So your thought is that that is a serious worry if there becomes–
– But self modifying code is available now. – So there’s different types of self modification right?
There’s personalization, you know your email app, your Gmail is self modifying to you after you login
or whatever, you can think of that way. But ultimately it’s central, all the information is
centralized, but you’re thinking of ideas where you’re, this is a unique entity operating under
selective pressures and it changes– – Well, you just, if you think about the fact that our
immune systems don’t know what’s coming at them next, but they have a small set of spanning components,
and if it’s a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape or binding region can be approximated with the Lego
that is present, then you can have confidence that you don’t need to know what’s coming at you
because the combinatorics are sufficient to reach any configuration needed.
– So that’s a beautiful, well terrifying thing to worry about because it’s so within our reach.
– Whenever I suggest these things I do always have a concern as to whether or not I will bring them into being by talking about them.
– So there’s this thing from OpenAI next week,
to talk to the founder of OpenAI, this idea that their text generation,
the new stuff they have for generating text is, they didn’t wanna bring it, they didn’t wanna release it because they’re about the–
– I’m delighted to hear that, but they’re going to end up releasing. – Yes, that’s the thing is I think talking about it,
well at least from my end, I’m more a proponent of technology preventing,
so further innovation preventing the detrimental effects of innovation.
– Well we’re in a, we’re sort of tumbling down a hill at accelerating speed.
So, whether or not we’re proponents or– – It doesn’t really matter. – It may not matter. – But I. – Well, may not.
– Well, I do feel that there are people who have held things back and you know, died poorer than they might have otherwise been.
We don’t even know their names. I don’t think that we should discount the idea that having
the smartest people showing off how smart they are by what they’ve developed may be a terminal process.
I’m very mindful in particular of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller of all people wrote to Leo Szilard
where Szilard was trying to figure out how to control the use of atomic weaponry at the end of World War II and Teller
rather strangely, because many of us view him as a monster, showed some very advanced moral thinking talking about
the slim chance we have for survival and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable.
I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut, what it is we are playing with when we are working on
technical problems, and I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it, a movie called A Bridge on the River Kwai,
about I believe captured British POWs who just in a desire to do a bridge well,
end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors. – Well, now you’re making me question
the unrestricted open discussion of ideas and AI. – I’m not saying I know the answer,
I’m just saying that I could make a decent case for either our need to talk about this and
to become technologically focused on containing it or need to stop talking about this and try to hope that
the relatively small number of highly adept individuals who are looking at these problems is small enough that
we should in fact be talking about how to contain it. – Well, the way ideas, the way innovation happens,
what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus. Whether if he was silent, the idea would emerge elsewhere,
well in case of Newton, of course, but you know, in case of AI, how small is this set of
individuals out of which such ideas would arise?
Is it in question– – Well, the ideas of the researchers we know and those that we don’t know. Who may live in countries that don’t wish us to know
what level they’re currently at and are very disciplined in keeping these things to themselves.
Of course, I will point out that there is a religious school in Kerala that developed something
very close to the calculus, certainly in terms of infinite series in, I guess religious prayer
and rhyme and prose. So, you know, it’s not that Newton had any ability to hold that back and I don’t really believe
that we have an ability to hold back. I do think that we could change the proportion of the time we spend worrying about the effects of what
if we are successful, rather than simply trying to succeed and hope that we’ll be able to contain things later. – Beautifully put.
So, on the idea of outtelligence, what form, treading cautiously ’cause we’ve agreed
as we tumbled down the hill. What form– – Can’t stop ourselves can we? – We cannot.
What form do you see it taking? So one example, Facebook, Google, do want to,
I don’t know a better word, you want to influence users to behave a certain way.
And so that’s one kind of example of outtelligence, is systems perhaps modifying the behavior
of these intelligent human beings in order to sell more product of different kind.
But do you see other examples of this actually emerging in? – Just take any parasitic system, you know?
Make sure that there’s some way in which that there’s differential success, heritability and variation,
and those are the magic ingredients. And if you really wanted to build a nightmare machine, make sure that the system that expresses the variability
has a spanning set, so that it can learn to arbitrary levels
by making it sufficiently expressive. That’s your nightmare. – So, it’s your nightmare, but it could also be,
it’s a really powerful mechanism by which to create, well, powerful systems.
So, are you more worried about the negative direction that might go versus the positive?
So, you said parasitic, but that doesn’t necessarily need to be what the system converges towards.
It could be, what is it, symbiotic– – Well, parasitism, the dividing line between parasitism
and symbiosis is not so clear. – [Lex] That’s what they tell me about marriage. I’m still single, so I don’t know.
– Well, yeah I do. Would could go into that too, but um. (Lex laughing)
No, I think we have to appreciate, you know, are you infected by your own mitochondria?
– Right. Yeah. – Right, so in marriage
you fear the loss of independence, but even though the American therapeutic community
may be very concerned about co-dependence, what’s to say that co-dependence isn’t what’s necessary
to have a stable relationship in which to raise children who are maximally K-selected and require
incredible amounts of care, because you have to wait 13 years before there’s any reproductive payout and most of us don’t want our 13 year olds having kids.
That’s a very tricky situation to analyze. I would say that predators and parasites drive much
of our evolution and I don’t know whether to be angry at them or thank them. – Well, ultimately, I mean, nobody knows the meaning of life
or what even happiness is, but there is some metrics– – Oh, they didn’t tell you? – They didn’t, they didn’t.
That’s why all the poetry and books are bought. You know, there are some metrics under which
you can kinda measure how good it is that these AI systems are roaming about.
So, you’re more nervous about software than you
are optimistic about ideas of self replicating larceny?
– I don’t think we’ve really felt where we are.
You know, occasionally we get a wake up. 9/11 was so anomalous compared to everything else
we’ve experienced on American soil, that it came to us as a complete shock that that was even a possibility.
What it really was, was a highly creative and determined RND team deep in the bowels of Afghanistan showing
us that we had certain exploits that we were open to, that nobody had chosen to express. I can think of several of these things that I don’t talk
about publicly, that just seem to have to do with how relatively unimaginative those who wish to cause
havoc and destruction have been up until now. The great mystery of our time,
of this particular little era, is how remarkably stable we’ve been since 1945 when we
demonstrated the ability to use nuclear weapons in anger. And, we don’t know why things like
that haven’t happened since then. We’ve had several close calls, we’ve had mistakes,
we’ve had brinkmanship and what’s now happened is that we’ve settled into a sense that oh, it’ll always be nothing.
It’s been so long since something was at that level
of danger, that we’ve got a wrong idea in our head and that’s why when I went on the Ben Shapiro Show,
I talked about the need to resume above ground testing of nuclear devices because we have people whose
developmental experience suggests that when, let’s say Donald Trump and North Korea engage on Twitter,
oh it’s nothing, it’s just posturing, everybody’s just in it for money, there’s a sense that people are in
a video game mode, which has been the right call since 1945.
We’ve been mostly in video game mode. It’s amazing. – So you’re worried about a generation which has not seen any existential–
– We’ve lived under it. See, you’re younger. I don’t know if, and again, you came from Moscow.
– [Lex] From, yeah. – There was a TV show called The Day After that had
a huge effect on a generation growing up in the US,
and it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange.
We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively where we’ve thought about this,
and I think it’s one of the most irresponsible things that the elders among us have done,
which is to provide this beautiful garden in which the thorns are cut off of the rosebushes
and all of the edges are rounded and sanded, and so people have developed this totally unreal idea
which is everything is going to be just fine. And do I think that my leading concern is AGI
or my leading concern is thermonuclear exchange or gene drives or any one of these things?
I don’t know. But I know that our time here in this very long experiment
here is finite, because the toys that we’ve built are so impressive and the wisdom to accompany
them has not materialized. And I think we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945.
We had a lot of dangerous, skilled players on the world stage who nevertheless, no matter how bad they were,
managed to not embroil us in something that we couldn’t come back from.
– The Cold War. – Yeah, and the distance from the Cold War, you know, I’m very mindful of,
there was a Russian tradition, actually, of on your wedding day going to visit
a memorial to those who gave their lives. Can you imagine this? Where on the happiest day of your life,
you go and you pay homage to the people who fought and died in the Battle of Stalingrad?
I’m not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say, but there were a couple of things that the Russians did
that were really positive in the Soviet era, and I think trying to let people know
how serious life actually is, is the Russian model of seriousness is better than the American model.
– And maybe, like you mentioned, there was a small echo of that after 9/11, but–
– We wouldn’t let it form. We talk about 9/11, but it’s 9/12 that really moved the needle.
When we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak. We witnessed something super serious
and we didn’t want to run to our computers
and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings. And it was profound because we woke up, briefly,
and I talk about the gated institutional narrative that sort of programs our lives,
I’ve seen it break three times in my life. One of which was the election of Donald Trump,
another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers, when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns wasn’t that
important, knew that Lehman Brothers met AIG was next,
and the other one was 9/11. And so, if I’m 53 years old and I only remember three times
that the global narrative was really interrupted, that tells you how much we’ve been
on top of developing events, you know? We had the Murrah Federal Building explosion,
but it didn’t cause the narrative to break, it wasn’t profound enough. Around 9/12, we started to wake up out of our slumber,
and the powers that be, did not want a coming together.
You know, the admonition was go shopping. – The powers that be, so what is that force?
As opposed to blaming individuals– – We don’t know. – So whatever that– – Whatever that force is. – In silence. – There’s a component of it
that’s emergent and there’s a component of it that’s deliberate. So, give yourself a portfolio with two components.
Some amount of it is emergent, but some amount of it is also an understanding that if people come together,
they become an incredible force. And what you’re seeing right now, I think is,
there are forces that are trying to come together and there are forces that are trying to push things apart,
and you know, one of them is the globalist narrative versus the national narrative. Where to the globalist perspective,
the nations are bad things in essence. That they’re temporary, they’re nationalistic,
they’re jingoistic, it’s all negative, to people more in the national idiom, they’re saying look,
this is where I pay my taxes, this is where I do my army service, this is where I have a vote,
this is where I have a passport. Who the hell are you to tell me that because you’ve moved into some place that you can make money globally,
that you’ve chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special and elevated duty. And I think that these competing narratives have been
pushing towards the global perspective from the elite and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised
people are saying, hey, I actually live in a place and I have laws and I speak a language, I have a culture,
and who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some far away land, that my obligations to my fellow
countrymen are so much diminished. – So these tensions between nations and so on, ultimately you see being proud of your country and so on,
which creates potentially the kind of things that led to wars and so on.
They ultimately, it is human nature and it is good for us, for wake up calls of different kinds.
– Well, I think that these are tensions. And my point isn’t, I mean nationalism run
amuck is a nightmare. And internationalism run amuck is a nightmare.
And the problem is we’re trying to push these pendulums
to some place where they’re somewhat balanced. Where we have a higher duty of care to those who share our
laws and our citizenship, but we don’t forget our duties of care to the global system.
I would think this is elementary, but the problem that we’re facing concerns the ability for
some to profit by abandoning their obligations to others
within their system and that’s what we’ve had for decades. – You mention nuclear weapons.
I was hoping to get answers from you since one of the many things you’ve done as economics,
maybe you can understand human behavior of why the heck we haven’t blown each other up yet.
But okay, so we’ll get– – I don’t know the answer. – Yeah. It’s really important to say that we really don’t know–
– [Eric] A mild uptick in wisdom. – A mild uptick in wisdom, Steven Pinker who I’ve talked
with has a lot of really good ideas about why, but he– – I don’t trust his optimism.
(Lex chuckling) – Listen, I’m Russian, so I never trust a guy who’s that optimistic–
– No, no, no, it’s just that you’re talking about a guy who’s looking at a system in which more and more
of the kinetic energy, like war, has been turned into potential energy like unused nuclear weapons.
– Wow, beautifully put. – And you know now I’m looking at that system and I’m saying, okay, well if you don’t have a potential energy trim,
then everything’s just getting better and better. – Yeah, yeah, wow, that’s beautifully put. Only a physicist could, okay.
– [Eric] I’m not a physicist. – Well, is that a dirty word? – [Eric] No, no, I wish I were a physicist.
– Me too, my dad’s a physicist. I’m trying to live up to that probably for the rest of my life.
He’s probably gonna listen to this too, so. – Hey dad. – Yeah, (chuckling). So, your friend, Sam Harris,
worries a lot about the existential threat of AI. Not in the way that you’ve described, but in the more.
– Well, he hangs out with Elon. I don’t know Elon. – So, are you worried about that kind of,
you know, about the, about either robotics systems
or traditionally defined AI systems essentially becoming super intelligent, much more intelligent
than human beings and getting– – Well, they already are, and they’re not.
– When seen as a collective, you mean? – I can mean all sorts of things,
but certainly, many of the things that we thought were peculiar to general intelligence
do not require general intelligence. So that’s been one of the big awakenings that you can write
a pretty convincing sports story from stats alone.
Without needing to have watched the game. So, you know, is it possible to write lively
prose about politics? Yeah, no, not yet. So, we’re sort of all over the map.
One of the things about chess, there’s a question I once asked on Quora
that didn’t get a lot of response, which was, what is the greatest brilliancy ever produced by a computer in a chess game?
Which was different than the question of what is the greatest game ever played. So if you think about brilliancies,
is what really animates many of us to think of chess as an art form.
Those are those moves and combinations that just show such flair, panache and soul.
Computers weren’t really great at that. They were great positional monsters. And recently we’ve started seeing brilliancies.
– [Lex] Yeah, a few grandmasters have identified with AlphaZero that things were quite brilliant.
– Yeah, so that’s an example of something. We don’t that that’s AGI, but in a very restricted set
of rules like chess, you’re starting to see poetry of a high order.
And so I don’t like the idea that we’re waiting for AGI. AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives in the same way
that I don’t think a worm should be, you know C. Elegans shouldn’t be treated as non conscious
because it only has 300 neurons. Maybe it just has a very low level of consciousness. Because we don’t understand what
these things mean as they scale up. So, am I worried about this general phenomena? Sure, but I think that one of the things
that’s happening is that a lot of us are fretting about this in part because of human needs.
We’ve always been worried about the Golem, right? – [Lex] Well, the Golem is the artificially created–
– Life, you know? – [Lex] It’s like Frankenstein type of character– – Yeah, sure, it’s a Jewish version.
Frankenberg, Franken– – Yeah, that makes sense. – Sorry, so the, but we’ve always been worried about
creating something like this and it’s getting closer and closer and there are ways in which we have to realize
that the whole thing, the whole thing that we’ve experienced are the context of our lives,
is almost certainly coming to an end. And I don’t mean to suggest that we won’t survive, I don’t know.
And I don’t mean to suggest that it’s coming tomorrow. It could be 300, 500 years, but there’s no plan
that I’m aware of, if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit that are sensible within current
technological dreams; the Earth, the Moon and Mars, and we have a very competitive civilization
that is still forced into violence to sort out disputes that cannot be arbitrated.
It is not clear to me that we have a long term future until we get to the next stage, which is to figure out whether
or not the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken, and that requires our source code.
– Our source code, the stuff in our brains to figure out? What do you mean by our source code? – The source code of the context.
Whatever it is that produces the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos. – Oh, our source code, I got it, so this is–
– You’re talking about the stuff that’s written in a higher level language. – Yeah, yeah, that’s right. You’re talking about the low level, the bits or even lower–
– Right, that’s what is currently keeping us here. We can’t even imagine, you know, we have hair brain schemes
for staying within the Einsteinian speed limit. You know, maybe if we could just drug ourselves
and go into a suspended state or we could have multiple generations of that. I think all that stuff is pretty silly.
But, I think it’s also pretty silly to imagine that our wisdom is going to increase to the point that
we can have the toys we have and we’re not going to use them for 500 years.
– Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough when I realized you’re just one letter away from the guy.
– Yeah, but I’m also one letter away from Feinstein. – Well, you get to pick.
Okay, so, unified theory. You know, you’ve worked, you enjoy the beauty of geometry.
Well, I don’t actually know if you enjoy it. You certainly are quite good at it– – I tremble before it. – Tremble before it.
If you’re religious that is one of the– – I don’t have to be religious. It’s just so beautiful, you will tremble anyway.
– I just read Einstein’s biography and one of the ways,
one of the things you’ve done is try to explore a unified theory talking about a 14 dimensional observerse
that has the 4D space time continuum embedded in it. I’m just curious how you think,
philosophically at a high level, about something more than four dimensions.
How do you try to, what does it make you feel talking
in the mathematical world about dimensions that are greater than the ones we can perceive?
Is there something that you take away that’s more than just the math? – Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me.
Okay, now. (Lex chuckling) On the front of that tongue. – Yeah? – There was a sweet receptor.
And next to that were salt receptors on two different sides. A little bit farther back there were sour receptors,
and you wouldn’t show me the back of your tongue where your bitter receptor was. – [Lex] I show the good side always. – Okay, but that was four dimensions of taste receptors.
But you also had pain receptors on that tongue and probably heat receptors on that tongue. So let’s assume that you have one of each.
That would be six dimensions. So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza
and it’s got some hot pepper on it, maybe some jalapeno.
You’re having a six dimensional experience, dude. – Do you think we over emphasize the value of time
as one of the dimensions or space? Well, we certainly over emphasize the value of time
’cause we things to start and end, or we really don’t like things to end, but they seem to. – Well, what if you flipped one of the spacial dimensions
into being a temporal dimension? And you and I were to meet in New York City and say,
well where and when should we meet? And I say, how about I’ll meet you on 36th and Lexington
at 2:00 in the afternoon and 11 o’clock in the morning?
That would be very confusing. – Well, it’s so convenient for us to think about time, you mean?
– We happen to be in a delicious situation in which we have three dimensions of space and one of time,
and they’re woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade off a little space for a little time.
But we still only have one dimension that is picked out relative to the other three. It’s very much Gladys Knight and the Pips.
– So, which one developed for who? Did we develop for these dimensions? Or did the dimensions, or were they always
there and it doesn’t– – Well, do you imagine that there isn’t a place where there are four temporal dimensions? Or two and two of space and time?
Or three of time and one of space? And then would time not be playing the role of space?
Why do you imagine that the sector that you’re in is all that there is? – I certainly do not, but I can’t imagine otherwise.
I mean, I haven’t done ayahuasca or any of those drugs. I hope to one day, but–
– Instead of doing ayahuasca, you could just head over to Building Two. – That’s where the mathematicians are? – [Eric] Yeah, that’s where they hang.
– [Lex] Just to look at some geometry? – Well just ask about pseudo-Riemannian geometry, that’s what you’re interested in. (Lex chuckling) – [Lex] Okay.
– Or you can talk to a shaman and end up in Peru. – And then some extra money for that trip– – Yeah, but you won’t be able to do any calculations
if that’s how you choose to go about it. – Well, a different kind of calculation– – So to speak. – Yeah. One of my favorite people, Edward Franco,
Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math, great title for a book, said that you were quite a
remarkable intellect to come up with such beautiful, original ideas in terms of unified theory and so on.
But you were working outside academia. So, one question in developing ideas
that are truly original, truly interesting, what’s the difference between inside academia and outside
academia when it comes to developing such ideas? – Oh, it’s a terrible choice, a terrible choice.
So, if you do it inside of academics, you are forced to constantly…
show great loyalty to the consensus and you distinguish yourself with small,
almost microscopic heresies to make your reputation in general.
And you have very competent people and brilliant people who are working together who formed very deep social networks,
and have a very high level of behavior, at least within mathematics and at least technically
within physics, theoretical physics. When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people.
Madmen and these are people who do not usually subscribe
to the consensus position and almost always lose their way.
And the key question is will progress likely come from
someone who is miraculously managed to stay within the system and is able to take on a larger amount
of heresy, that is sort of unthinkable? In which case, that will be fascinating.
Or, is it more likely that somebody will maintain a level of discipline from outside of academics and be able to make
use of the freedom that comes from not having to constantly affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field.
– So you’ve characterized in ways that academia, in this particular sense is declining.
You posted the plot, the older population of the faculty is getting larger.
The younger is getting smaller and so on. So, which direction of the two are you more hopeful about?
– Well, the Baby Boomers can’t hang on forever. – Which is first of all in general true, and second of all in academia–
– But that’s really what this time is about– – Is the Baby Boomers control. – Is we didn’t, we’re used to
like financial bubbles that last a few years in length and then pop. – Yes. – The Baby Boomer bubble
is this really long lived thing and all of the ideology, all of the behavior patterns, the norms, you know,
for example string theory is an almost entirely Baby Boomer phenomena. It was something that Baby Boomers were able to do because
it required a very high level of mathematical ability.
– You don’t think of string theory as an original idea? – Oh, I mean it was original to Veneziano
who probably is older than the Baby Boomers and there are people who are younger than the Baby Boomers who are still doing string theory.
And I’m not saying that nothing discovered within the large string theoretic complex is wrong.
Quite the contrary. A lot of brilliant mathematics and a lot of the structure of physics was elucidated by string theorists.
What do I think of the deliverable nature of this product that will not ship called string theory?
I think that is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and geometrically
talented Baby Boomer physicists so that they can say that they’re working on something within
the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity. Now there are other schemes.
You know, there’s like asymptotic safety. There are other things that you could imagine doing. I don’t think much of any of the major programs,
but to have inflicted this level of loyalty through
a shibboleth, well surely you don’t question x. Well, I question almost everything in the string program,
and that’s why I got out of physics. When you called me physicist, was a great honor, but the reason I didn’t become a physicist
wasn’t that I fell in love with mathematics. As I said, wow, in 1984, 1983, I saw the field going mad,
and I saw that mathematics, which has all sorts of problems, was not going insane.
And so instead of studying things within physics, I thought it was much safer to study the same objects within mathematics.
And there’s a huge price to pay for that. You lose physical intuition. But the point is, is that it wasn’t
a North Korean reeducation camp, either. – Are you hopeful about cracking open
the Einstein Unified Theory in a way that has, in really understanding whether uniting everything
together with quantum theory and so on? – I mean, I’m trying to play this role myself. To do it to the extent of handing it over to the more
responsible, more professional, more competent community.
So, I think that they’re wrong about a great number of their belief structures, but I do believe,
I mean I have a really profound love hate relationship with this group of people. – On the physics side? – Oh yeah.
– ‘Cause the mathematicians actually seem to be much more open minded and– – Well, they are and they aren’t.
They’re open minded about anything that looks like great math. – Right. – Right, they’ll study something that isn’t very important physics,
but if it’s beautiful mathematics then they’ll have, they have great intuition about these things.
As good as the mathematicians are, and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level give them the edge.
The theoretical physics community is bar none, the most profound intellectual community
that we have ever created. It is the number one, there is nobody in second place
as far as I’m concerned. Like, in their spare time, in the spare time they invented molecular biology.
– What was the origin of molecular biology? You’re saying physicists– – Well somebody like Francis Crick. A lot of the early molecular biologists–
– Were physicists? – Yeah, I mean you know, Schrodinger wrote What is Life and that was highly inspirational.
I mean, you have to appreciate that there is no community
like the basic research community in theoretical physics. And it’s not something, I’m highly critical of these guys.
I think that they would just wasted the decades of time with
and your religious devotion to their misconceptualization of where the problems were in physics.
But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse ever witnessed within academics.
– You see it as a collapse or just a lull? – Oh, I’m terrified that we’re about to lose the vitality.
We can’t afford to pay these people. We can’t afford to give them an accelerator just to play
with in case they find something at the next energy level. These people created our economy.
They gave us the RAD Lab and radar. They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II.
They created the semi-conductor and the transistor to power our economy through Moore’s law.
As a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the World Wide Web
and we have the insolence to say, why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars?
No, the question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars?
Right, these guys signed the world’s worst licensing agreement. – Right. – And, if they simply charged
for every time you used a transistor or a URL or enjoyed the peace that they have provided during this period
of time through the terrible weapons that they developed, or your communications devices.
All of the things that power our economy, I really think came out of physics, even to the extent that chemistry came out of physics,
and molecular biology came out of physics. So, first of all you have to know that I’m very critical of this community.
Second of all, it is our most important community. We have neglected it, we’ve abused it,
we don’t take it seriously, we don’t even care to get them to rehab after a couple of generations of failure.
Right, no one, I mean I think the youngest person to have really contributed to the standard model
at a theoretical level was born in 1951, right? Frank Wilczek.
And almost nothing has happened that in theoretical physics
after 1973, ’74, that sent somebody to Stockholm
for theoretical development that predicted experiment. So, we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves.
Now, with that said, these guys have behaved abysmally, in my opinion, because they haven’t owned up
to where they actually are, what problems they’re really facing, how definite they can actually be.
They haven’t shared some of their most brilliant discoveries, which are desperately needed in other fields like gauge theory,
which at least the mathematicians can share, which is an upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz,
and they haven’t shared the importance of renormalization theory, even though this should be standard operating procedure for people across
the sciences dealing with different layers and different levels of phenomena, so– – And by shared you mean communicated in such a way
that it disseminates throughout the different sciences? – These guys are sitting, both theoretical physicists
and mathematicians are sitting on top of a giant stockpile of intellectual gold, right?
They have so many things that have not been manifested anywhere. I was just on Twitter I think
I mentioned the Hoberman switch pitch that shows the self duality of the tetrahedron realizes that it linkage mechanism.
Now this is like a triviality and it makes an amazing toy that’s,
you know, built a market. – Yeah. – Hopefully a fortune for Chuck Hoberman. Well, you have no idea how much great stuff
that these priests have in their monastery. – So, it’s a truly a love and hate relationship for you?
It sounds like it’s more on the love side– – [Eric] This building that we’re in right here. – Yes. – Is the building in which I really put together
the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation through
the Government University Industry Research round table to destroy the bargaining power of American
academics using foreign labor. On microfiche in the base. – Post docs and so on?
– Oh yeah, that was done here in this building. Isn’t that weird? – I’m truly speaking with a revolutionary and a radical–
– No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. At an intellectual level, I am absolutely garden variety.
I’m just straight down the middle. The system that we are in. This University is functionally insane.
– [Lex] Yeah. – Harvard is functionally insane and we don’t understand that when we get these things wrong,
the financial crisis made this very clear. There was a long period where every grownup, everybody with a tie who spoke in baritone tones
with a right degree at the end of their name. – Yeah. – Were talking about how we banished volatility, we were in the great moderation.
Okay, they were all crazy. And who was right? It was like Nassim Taleb. – Right. – Nouriel Roubini.
Now, what happens is is that they claimed the market went crazy. But the market didn’t go crazy.
The market had been crazy and what happened is is that it suddenly went sane. Well that’s where we are with academics.
Academics right now is mad as a hatter and it’s absolutely evident. I can show you graph after graph.
I can show you the internal discussions. I can show you the conspiracies. Harvard’s dealing with one right now over its admissions
policies for people of color who happen to come from Asia. All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going.
What we’re talking about, just while we’re on the topic of revolutionaries, is we’re talking about
the danger of an outbreak of sanity. – Yeah, you’re the guy pointing out
the elephant in the room here and– – The elephant has no clothes.
– Is that how that goes? I was gonna talk a little bit to Joe Rogan about this,
ran out of time, but I think you have some,
just listening to you, you can probably speak really eloquently to academia on the difference between the different fields.
So, do you think there’s a difference between science, engineering and then the humanities in academia,
in terms of tolerance, that they’re willing to tolerate? So, from my perspective I thought computer science
and maybe engineering is more tolerant to radical ideas, but that’s perhaps innocent of me.
‘Cause I always, you know all the battles going on now are a little bit more of the humanities side and gender studies and so on.
– Have you seen the American Mathematical Society’s publication of an essay called Get out the Way.
– I have not, what’s the– – The idea is that white men who hold positions within Universities in mathematics
should vacate their positions so that young black women can take over or something like this.
– That’s in terms of diversity, which I also wanted to ask you about, but in terms of diversity of strictly ideas.
– Oh, sure. – Do you think, ’cause you’re basically saying physics as a community, has become a little bit intolerant to some degree,
to new radical ideas or at least you said that– – But it’s changed a little bit recently.
Which is that even string theory is now admitting, okay, this doesn’t look very promising in the short term.
Right, so the question is what compiles, if you wanna take the computer science metaphor.
What will get you into a journal? Will you spend your life trying to push some paper into a journal or will it be accepted easily?
What do we know about the characteristics of the submitter and what gets taken up and what does not?
All of these fields are experiencing pressure because no field is performing so brilliantly well that it’s
revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking,
in the ways in which we have become accustomed. – But don’t you think, even in theoretical physics,
a lot of times, even with theories like string theory, you could speak to this, it does eventually lead to
what are the ways that this theory would be testable? – Yeah, ultimately, although look,
there’s this thing about Popper and the scientific method that’s a cancer and a disease in the minds of very smart people.
That’s not really how most of the stuff gets worked out, it’s how it gets checked.
– Right, so– – And there is a dialog between theory and experiment. But, everybody should read Paul Dirac’s 1963
Scientific American article where he, you know, it’s very interesting.
He talks about it as if it was about the Schrodinger equation and Schrodinger’s failure to advance his own work because of his failure
to account for some phenomena. The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off, it won’t agree with experiment,
but it doesn’t mean that the theory is actually wrong. But Dirac could as easily have been talking about his own
equation in which he predicted that the electrons should have an anti-particle.
And since the only positively charged particle that was known at the time was the proton, Heisenberg pointed out,
well shouldn’t your anti-particle, the proton, have the same mass as the electron and doesn’t that invalidate your theory?
So, I think that Dirac was actually being, potentially quite sneaky in talking about the fact
that he had been pushed off of his own theory, to some extent, by Heisenberg. But look, we fetishize the scientific method
and Popper and falsification because it protects us from crazy ideas entering the field.
So, you know, it’s a question of balancing type one and type two error and we were pretty maxed out in one direction.
– The opposite of that. Let me say what comforts me. Sort of biology or engineering at the end of the day,
does the thing work? – Yeah. – You can test the crazies away.
Well see now, you’re saying but some ideas are truly crazy and some are actually correct, so.
– Well there’s pre-correct currently crazy. – Yeah. – Right? And so you don’t wanna get rid of everybody
who’s pre-correct and currently crazy. The problem is is that we don’t have standards in general,
for trying to determine who has to be put to the sword in terms of their career
and who has to be protected as some sort of giant time suck pain in the ass who may change everything.
– Do you think that’s possible? Creating a mechanism of those selective– – Well, you’re not gonna like the answer, but here it comes.
– [Lex] Oh, boy. – It has to do with very human elements.
We’re trying to do this at the level of like rules and fairness, it’s not gonna work.
‘Cause the only thing that really understands this,
you ever read The Double Helix? – It’s a book? – Oh, you have to read this book– – Oh, boy. – Not only did Jim Watson
half discover this three dimensional structure of DNA, he was also one hell of a writer before he became an ass.
No, he’s tried – Yes, like he is. – To destroy his own reputation– – I knew about the ass, I didn’t know about the good writer.
– Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living, and as I’ve said before, Jim Watson is too important
a legacy to be left to Jim Watson. That book tells you more about what actually moves the dial.
I mean, there’s another story about him which I don’t agree with, which is that he stole everything from Rosalind Franklin.
I mean, the problems that he had with Rosalind Franklin are real, but we should actually honor that tension
in our history by delving into it, rather than having a simple solution. Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick being a pain in the ass
that everybody secretly knew was super brilliant. And there’s an encounter between Chargaff who came up with
the equimolar relations between the nucleotides, who should’ve gotten the structure of DNA and Watson and Crick,
and you know, he talks about missing a shiver in the heartbeat of biology and this stuff is so gorgeous,
it just makes you tremble even thinking about it. Look, we know very often who is to be feared,
and we need to fund the people that we fear. The people who are wasting our time need
to be excluded from the conversation. You see, and you know, maybe we’ll make some errors
in both directions, but we have known our own people.
We know the pains in the asses that might work out, and we know the people who are really just blowhards who
really have very little to contribute most of the time. It’s not 100%, but you’re not gonna get there with rules.
– Right, it’s using some kind of instinct. I mean, to be honest, I’m gonna make you roll your eyes
for a second, but in the first time I heard that there was large community of people who believe the earth is flat,
actually made me pause and ask myself the question– – Why would there be such a community? – Yeah, is it possible the earth is flat?
So I had to like, wait a minute. I mean, then you go through a thinking process that I think is really healthy.
It ultimately ends up being a geometry thing I think. It’s an interesting thought experiment at the very least.
– Well, see I don’t, I do a different version of it. I say, why is this community stable? – Yeah, that’s a good way to analyze it.
– Interesting that whatever we’ve done has not erased the community. So, you know, they’re taking a long shot bet
that won’t pan out, you know? Maybe we just haven’t thought enough about the rationality of the square root of two
and somebody brilliant will figure it out. Maybe we will eventually land one day on the surface of Jupiter and explore it.
Right, these are crazy things that will never happen. – So, much of social media operates by AI algorithms,
we talked this a little bit, recommending the content you see. So, on this idea of radical thought, how much should AI show
you things you disagree with on Twitter and so on? In the Twitterverse in the–
– I hate this question. – Yeah? – Yeah. – ‘Cause you don’t know the answer? – No, no, no, no.
Look, they’ve pushed out this cognitive Lego to us that will just lead to madness.
It’s good to be challenged with things that you disagree with. You answer is, no. It’s gonna to be challenged with interesting things with
which you currently disagree, but that might be true. I don’t really care about whether or not I disagree
with something or don’t disagree, I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing is being pushed out.
Is it because it’s likely to be true? Is it because, is there some reason? Because I write a computer generator to come up
with an infinite number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at. So, please before you push things at me
that are disagreeable, tell me why. – There is an aspect in which that question is quite dumb,
especially because it’s being used to almost
very generically by these different networks to say, well we’re trying to work this out, but you know, basically how much,
do you see the value of seeing things you don’t like? Not you disagree with, because it’s very difficult to know
exactly what you articulated, which is the stuff that’s important for you to consider that you disagree with.
That’s really hard to figure out. The bottom line is the stuff you don’t like. If you’re a Hillary Clinton supporter,
it might not make you feel good to see anything about Donald Trump. That’s the only thing algorithms can really optimize for currently.
They really can’t– – No, they can do better. – You think so? – No, we’re engaged in some
moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people who
are capable of building Google, Facebook, Twitter are having us in these
incredibly low level discussions. Do they not know any smart people? Do they not have the phone numbers
of people who can elevate these discussions? – They do, but this–
– Please, no, no, no. – They’re optimizing for a different thing and they are pushing those people out of those rooms. – No, they’re optimizing for things we can’t see,
and yes, profit is there. Nobody’s questioning that. But they’re also optimizing for things like political
control or the fact that they’re doing business in Pakistan and so they don’t wanna talk about all the things that they’re going to bending to in Pakistan.
So, we’re involved in a fake discussion. – You think so, you think these conversations
at that depth are happening inside Google? You don’t think they have some basic metrics under user engagements?
– You’re having a fake conversation with us, guys. We know you’re having a fake conversation. I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation.
You know how to cool these units. You know high availability like nobody’s business.
My Gmail never goes down, almost. – So you think just because they can do incredible work on
the software side with infrastructure, they can also deal with some of these difficult questions
about human behavior, human understanding, you’re not, (chuckling). – I mean, I’ve seen the developer’s screens
that people take shots of inside of Google. – [Lex] Yeah. – And I’ve heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple.
We’re not, we’re engaged, they’re engaging us in the wrong conversations.
We are not at this low level. Here’s one of my favorite questions. – Yeah. – Why is every piece
of hardware that I purchase in text base equipped as a listening device?
Where’s my physical shutter to cover my lens? We had this in the 1970s.
They had cameras that had lens caps, you know? How much would it cost to have a security model?
Pay five extra bucks. Why is my indicator light software controlled?
Why when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on by putting it as something that cannot be bypassed?
Why have you setup all of my devices, at some difficulty to yourselves,
as listening devices and we don’t even talk about this. This thing is total fucking bullshit.
– Well, I hope, so. – Wait, wait, wait. – These discussions are happening about privacy, ’cause they’re more difficult than you give ’em credit for–
– It’s not just privacy. – Yeah? – It’s about social control. We’re talking about social control.
Why do I not have controls over my own levers? Just have a really cute UI, where I can switch,
I can dial things or I can at least see what the algorithms are. – You think that there are some
deliberate choices being made here– – There’s emergence and there is intention.
There are two dimensions. The vector does not collapse onto either axis. But the idea that anybody who suggests
that intention is completely absent is a child.
– That’s really beautifully put and like many things you’ve said is gonna make me– – Can I turn this around slightly though?
– Yeah. – I sit down with you and you say that you’re obsessed with my feed. – Uh huh. – I don’t even know what
my feed is, what are you seeing that I’m not? – I was obsessively looking through your feed on Twitter,
’cause it was really enjoyable because there’s the Tom Lehrer element, there’s the humor in it. – By the way that feed is ericrweinstein on Twitter.
– That’s great. – @ericrweinstein. – Yeah. – No, but seriously, why? – Why did I find it enjoyable or what was I seeing?
– What are you looking for? Why are we doing this? What is this podcast about? I know you got all these interesting people.
I’m just some guy who is sort of a podcast guest. – Sort of a podcast, you’re not even wearing a tie.
I mean, – I’m not even wearing a tie. – It’s not even a serious interview.
I was searching for meaning, for happiness, for a dopamine rush, so short term and long term.
– And how are you finding your way to me? What is, I don’t honestly know what I’m doing to reach you.
– The representing ideas which field common sense to me and not many people are speaking.
So it’s kinda like, the Intellectual Dark Web folks, right?
These folks, from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson, to yourself, are saying things where it’s like,
you’re like saying, look there’s an elephant and he’s not wearing any clothes and I say, yeah, yeah,
let’s have more of that conversation. That’s how I’m finding you. – I’m desperate to try to change
the conversation we’re having. I’m very worried we’ve got an election in 2020. I don’t think we can afford four more years of
a misinterpreted message, which is what Donald Trump was, and I don’t want the destruction of our institutions.
They all seem hellbent on destroying themselves. So, I’m trying to save theoretical physics, trying to save the New York Times,
trying to save our various processes and I think it feels delusional to me that this is falling to a tiny group
of people who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out that everything they say
will be misinterpreted and that their lives will be ruined through the process. I mean, I think we’re in an absolutely bananas period
of time and I don’t believe it should fall to such a tiny number of shoulders to shoulder this weight.
– So, I have to ask you on a capitalism side, you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism
or has effects that are, well not unintended, but not what economists would predict
or speak of capitalism creating. I just wanna talk to you about in general,
the effect of even then, artificial intelligence or technology automation taking away jobs and these kinds
of things and what you think is the way to alleviate that. Whether the Andrew Ang presidential candidate with
universal basic income, UBI, what are your thoughts there? How do we fight off the negative effects
of technology that– – All right, you’re a software guy, right? – Yep. – A human being is a worker, is an old idea.
– Yes. – A human being has a worker is a different object, right? – Yes.
– So if you think about object oriented programming as a paradigm, a human being has a worker
and a human being has a soul. We’re talking about the fact that for a period of time, the worker that a human being has,
was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has. However, we have two separate claims
on the value in society. One is as a worker and the other is as a soul,
and the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity, it needs meaning, it needs purpose.
As long as you’re means of support is not highly repetitive,
I think you have a while to go before you need to start worrying. But if what you do is highly repetitive
and it’s not terrible generative, you are in the crosshairs of for loops and while loops and that’s
what computers accel at; repetitive behavior and when I say repetitive I may mean things that have never happened
through combinatorial possibilities, but as long as it has a looped characteristic to it, you’re in trouble.
We are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address
the fact that a worker may not be able to make claims. A relatively undistinguished median member of our society
still has needs to reproduce, needs to dignity
and when capitalism abandons the median individual or the bottom tenth or whatever it’s going to do,
it’s flirting with revolution and what concerns me is that the capitalists aren’t sufficiently
capitalistic to understand this. You really want to court authoritarian control
in our society because you can’t see that people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace
because the marginal product of their labor is too low to feed their dignity as a soul?
So, my great concern is that our free society has to do with the fact that we are self organized.
I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan when Lehman Brothers collapsed and thinking,
who’s gonna tell all these people that they need to show up at work when they don’t have a financial system
to incentivize them to show up at work? So, my complaint is first of all, not with the socialists,
but with the capitalists, which is you guys are being idiots. You’re courting revolution by continuing to harp on the same
old ideas that well, try harder, bootstrap yourself. Yeah, to an extent that works, to an extent.
But we are clearly headed in a place that there’s nothing that ties together our need to contribute and our need
to consume and that may not be provided by capitalism, because it may have been a temporary phenomena.
So, check out my article on anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy.
I think people are late getting the wake up call, and we would be doing a better job saving capitalism
from itself because I don’t want this done under authoritarian control, and the more we insist that
everybody who’s not thriving in our society during their reproductive years in order to have a family,
is failing at a personal level. I mean, what a disgusting thing that we’re saying.
What a horrible message. Who the hell have we become that we’ve so bought in to the Chicago model that we can’t see the humanity
that we’re destroying in that process and I hate the thought of communism, I really do.
My family has flirted with it decades past, it’s a wrong, bad idea, but we are going to need to figure
out how to make sure that those souls are nourished and respected and capitalism better have an answer.
And I’m betting on capitalism, but I gotta tell ya, I’m pretty disappointed with my team. – So you’re still on the capitalism team,
just there’s a theme here– – [Eric] Well, radical capitalism. – Right, hyper capitalism, yeah. – Look, I want, I think hyper capitalism is gonna
have to be coupled to hyper socialism. You need to allow the most productive people to create wonders and you gotta stop bogging them down
with all of these extra nice requirements. You know, nice is dead. Good has a future.
Nice doesn’t have a future because nice ends up with gulags.
– Damn, that’s a good line. Okay, last question. You Tweeted today, a simple, quite insightful equation
saying “Imagine that every unit f of fame you picked up, “s stalkers and h haters”.
So, I imagine s and h are dependent on your path to fame, perhaps a little bit– – Well, it’s not a simple.
I mean, people always take these things literally when you have like 280 characters to explain yourself.
– So you mean that’s not a mathematical– – No, there’s no law. – Oh, okay, all right. – I just, I put the word imagine because I still
have a mathematicians desire for precision. – Yes. – Imagine that this were true. – But there was a beautiful way to imagine
that there is a law that has those variables in it– – [Eric] Yeah, yeah. – And you’ve become quite famous these days,
so how do you yourself optimize that equation with the peculiar kind of fame that you’ve gathered along the way?
– I wanna be kinder. I wanna be kinder to myself, I wanna kinder to others, I wanna be able to have heart,
compassion and these things are really important, and I have a pretty spectrumy kind of approach to analysis.
I’m quite literal. I can go full Rain Man on you at any given moment. No, I can, I can.
It’s facultative autism, if you like, and people are gonna get angry because they want autism to be respected, but.
When you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics, you know, I speak with speech apnea, (stutters),
be right down for dinner, you know? – [Lex] Yeah. – We have to try to integrate ourselves in those tensions between, you know,
it’s sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul. Many of us are optimizing one at the expense of the other.
And I struggle with social media and I struggle with people making threats against our families and I struggle
with just how much pain people are in. And if there’s one message I would like to push out there,
you’re responsible, everybody, all of us, myself included, with struggling.
Struggle mightily because it’s nobody else’s job to do your struggle for you. Now with that said, if you’re struggling and you’re trying,
and you’re trying to figure out how to better yourself and where you’ve failed, where you’ve let down your family, your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff,
give yourself a break, you know? If it’s not working out, I have a lifelong relationship
with failure and success. There’s been no period of my life where both haven’t been present in one form or another.
And, I do wish to say that a lot of the times people think this is glamorous.
I’m about to go, you know, do a show with Sam Harris. – Yeah. – People are gonna listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage.
It’s completely crazy when I’m always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum value
and that’s why I’m doing this podcast, you know, just give yourself a break.
You owe us your struggle. You don’t owe your family or your coworkers or your lovers or your family members success.
As long as you’re in there and you’re picking yourself up, recognize that this new situation with the economy
that doesn’t have the juice to sustain our institutions, has caused the people who’ve risen to the top
of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel. Everybody is lying at the moment.
Nobody is really truth teller. Try to keep your humanity about you. Try to recognize that if you’re failing,
if things aren’t where you want them to be and you’re struggling and you’re trying to figure out what you’re doing wrong, what you could do,
it’s not necessarily all your fault. We are in a global situation. I have not met the people who are honest,
kind, good, successful. Nobody that I’ve met is checking all the boxes.
Nobody’s getting all 10s. So, I just think that’s an important message that doesn’t get pushed out enough.
Either people wanna hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable.
You have to struggle, you have to try. Or they wanna say you’re 100% responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense.
– Beautifully put. Eric, thank you so much for talking today. – Thanks for having me, buddy.