Eric Weinstein: Jeffrey Epstein Was A Front! The Collapse Has Already Started!

0:00 Jeffrey Epstein was a product of at least one element of the intelligence community. I would bet money on it. The CIA, FBI. I don't know who ran him, but he knew a tremendous amount about my scientific work in ways that he wasn't supposed to. Very powerful people told me I needed to meet him. He certainly was not a financeier in any standard sense. That was a cover story. I need to know what this thing was. And I want to know why people don't investigate it. I want to know why nobody asks for the filings. But I think more than anything, we don't trust our scientists because our scientists are the most powerful people in our society. So, do you think science is being controlled so that it can be used in a way that's beneficial? Let's put it this way. Eric Weinstein is a renowned mathematician and one of the most fearless and provocative thinkers of our time. He dissects the failures of science,

0:45 exposes elite networks, and proposes bold new theories that could save humanity. So, top of mind for me at the moment is the apocalypse and tropical fruit. I'm not kidding. You're looking at the end, man. Do you really think this is the start of the end? Of course it is. Look at how much has happened in the last month. And the big problem is that we share one atmosphere. All of humanity's eggs are in one basket. So, what needs to happen to get me a future? So, I think Elon is 100% right. Got to get to another sphere. But he's being a complete when it comes to science and he's being a total hero when it comes to engineering. But you can't engineer your way to the stars with the science we have. The physics opens the universe to you. But we have a real problem. A new idea in physics changes the balance of power in the world. The desire of our government is to get the science to give

1:32 us as much power as possible. But then they castrate the scientists, belittle them, destroy their families, their lives, their ability to earn because our government isn't good enough to keep its own secrets. Do you think my employer was a special informant to the FBI? There's a doctrine that says physicists don't have free speech. They're stopping the world's most important group from making progress. Physics is the only thing that's going to get your future. So, let's talk about this. I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do

2:18 double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you. [Music] Eric, you are a particularly captivating individual for the very fact that you grace so many different intellectual subjects. As we sit here now having this conversation, I want to know what subjects at this moment in in time are occupying most of your thoughts and most of your thinking. We have uh a strong listenership here and I think the responsibility that I have meeting someone like you is to understand what we should be talking about. So top of mind for me at the moment is

3:05 tropical fruit and physics. I'm not kidding. Tropical fruit and physics. Yeah. Yeah, but that's just because you're catching me on a particular day. Okay. And uh my my local um 99 Ranch Market ran out of Rambutan, which I'm addicted to. No, I have serious issues with tropical fruit. I'm I'm completely obsessed by it. What about this week? What What's been occupying most of your thoughts this week? Well, the apocalypse and physics. Why' you say the apocalypse? Um and what do you mean by the apocalypse? Well, we're we're becoming a nerd to to the apocalypse. We just watched hypersonic missiles flam into a modern city on TV, and we're watching one of the world's most

3:51 remarkable civilizations, the Persians, take uh direct hits from both Israel and the US. And I'm just beside myself. I mean, this is incredibly dramatic if if you think about, you know, just the idea of the Jews and the Persians are both still here. And, you know, one of the things that I find really just painful is that I care about certain certain cultures that I know well more than others. And these are two of my absolute favorites. What's what's going on at this moment in time? because it feels like there's more conflict than there's ever been. And I don't know whether that's just a bias that I have at this moment, but or whether I'm looking at the wrong social

4:37 media algorithm, but it feels like the world isn't is tense. Well, you're too you're too young for the Cold War. So, I don't know how old you are. 32. Yeah. So, you you you really missed I grew up in a different world where things were tense because there were two players and you know, it was more or less the US and the Soviets. And then we decided it one of the dumbest things we ever came up with. A very smart man came up with the dumbest one of the dumbest ideas which was the end of history. And you know the the postworld war I order is here to stop us from using the technologies that came out of this. And I you know I talk about this a lot. There was a six-month period between November of 52 and April of 53 where we

5:23 unlocked first the power of the nucleus because we could fuse hydrogen and the other thing we were able to do was uh figure out the threedimensional structure of nucleic acid in the form of the double helix. And suddenly in in no time flat we had access to the two most powerful levers uh humanity has ever had. perhaps ever will. And so we're just not in a position to deal with this. And the remarkable thing, what does that mean, sorry, in terms of you said we had access to the two most remarkable things? Well, the hydrogen bomb is not something that has ever been used by anyone against an enemy. This is the first full scale test of a

6:09 hydrogen device. If the reaction goes, we're in the thermonuclear era. 3 2 1. So we're we're awaiting its first use in war. We we we did use fision devices, but we didn't use fusion devices, and they're completely different scales. So the Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only two situations in which a nuke has ever been used against a a population, civilian or otherwise. And we don't know for example whether or not I don't know um at least co had its origins in a bioweapons program. So at some level we're playing with levers and tools that are so powerful.

6:56 Do you realize that the the key ingredient that made COVID so unique was a four amino acid sequence inserted into spike protein. So that's 12 nucleotides coding for four amino acids shut down planet earth for a couple of years. That's how powerful this is, you know, and the very few things that have this kind of leverage. In 2017, we had a discovery, a white paper called attention is all you need. And oddly, many of us dealing with AI and LLMs and talking that language don't even realize there's a paper that you can read that changed everything. uh it's eight authors out of Google I think um and that opened up AI uh Satoshi in 2008 2009 with the the

7:45 solution to the double distributed double spend problem where you could effectively port um conservation laws from the physical world into the digital world giving us digital gold. Uh but just as a as a beginning, these ideas that have such high leverage are making us powerful beyond any previous world with no attendant increase in our wisdom, in our ability to use and wield these things. And right now you're seeing the face where we're unveiling what does drone warfare look like in FPV? What is FPV? first person where you know where you're looking through the lens of the drone as it

8:31 slams into a personnel carrier. You know, maybe maybe you've seen this on Telegram where you're just watching individuals being menaced by mechanical flying birds equipped to kill them. So, we didn't know what drone warfare looked like. This is the beginning of drone warfare. We didn't know what hypersonic missiles look like when they slam into a population center. I was just in Tel Aviv. Yeah. Couple months ago. And I was in, you know, shelters because the Houthis and some of the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza were letting off missiles, but not like this. Persians really, you know, and by the way, they're choosing, I think, to not inflict maximal damage. I don't I don't

9:17 think that they they could have gotten the body count uh a lot higher if they'd wanted to. They're trying to speak the language of violence in a very measured fashion. So, is this a particularly tense moment or is it just the bias that I have because I've not been through these things before? Is there something different? You're look I can't even believe the question. You're looking at the end, man. This is the beginning. This is a slow roll out of a completely different world. You've been in We've all been in a completely artificially stagnant bubble for decades. My entire life up until now has been in a bubble. The only people who have seen real life are extremely old.

10:05 Who are those people that have seen real life? Well, I would say people who went through the depression, World War II, you know, in China, people who went through Ma's great leap forward, but most of us have no idea of what like a real pandemic like a Spanish flu or black plague is like. We don't know what uh Poland went through where they lost, you know, I don't know, 20 25% of their population to war. Look at the stat statistics on the battle of Stalenrad. We don't really understand. We've we we've just our whole life has been in a bubble. You said I'm looking at the end. Yeah. Remember all the talk about the singularity? Like Ray Curtzswhil, we're heading to the singularity. What is the singularity going to be like?

10:50 You're in it. This is this is now you're looking at the disintegration of NATO. You're looking at people who don't know how to maintain the systems that were engineered by their great-grandparents after World War II. That order that, you know, you're from the UK. If you think about how how the UK woke up to the idea that they had built into their heads that we are the masters of the world. So you you saw the beginning of the end of this concept of the British Empire. That moment is coming for the US and it may be that it's coming for Israel or it may be that it's

11:37 coming for Iran. See, in 1967, the Israelis felt invincible in the Six-Day War. And then in 1973, they had the Yom Kipper war, and all the people that they were, you know, priding themselves as having beaten, these ferocious enemies that were arrayed against them woke up on Yom Kapor in 1973 and bloodied the Israelis and they surprised them. So, the Israelis underestimated their enemy and that changed the entire character of the country. It went from being a triumphal state that felt that David could defeat Goliath to realizing that Goliath was quite powerful. And you know, the same thing is going to happen here. You you saw the celebration that Trump, you know, had dealt this blow to the Iranian nuclear facilities. You you

12:23 watch the Persians come back. It's going to we're starting to realize what the boundaries are as people are more bold in trying things. Maybe Xi's going to try to cross the Taiwan Strait. I don't know. But the era of stasis where very little happened over very long periods of time is over. So you think this is the start of escalation? This is the start of the undoing of the postworld war II order. The idea that the postworld war II order is still in place is astounding. So what happens next? We either scare the crap out of ourselves and come to our senses or we don't. We scare the crap out of ourselves and come to our senses or we don't. Hm. And what does that look like? Scaring the crap out of ourselves. Well, I don't know. How did you feel about the hypersonic missiles? Like, and

13:09 we started this and I'm talking about tropical fruit because I'm trying to figure out whether I I should buy a jackf fruit and stink up my wife's kitchen, you know? And on the other hand, I just saw hypersonic missiles slam into the buildings I was just in for meetings in Tel Aviv. There's a a nuclear threat that weirdly hangs over us. And I almost feel at some deep level we all understand and feel that threat that there's these nine or 10 countries around the world that have the ability to basically wipe out all of us at any moment. I feel like that's almost within us all. That knowing is within us all. I totally disagree. Really? Yeah. I think about nothing else sometimes and I still don't believe I don't believe it. There's a difference between knowing something in your head and knowing something embodied.

13:55 Yeah. I don't know if we're able to distinguish whether we know it in our head or whether it's embodied unconsciously to the point that it's changing how we act. Do you know what I mean? Because I'm I'm now aware that there's nine country and I'm also aware of that really it's one individual's decision as to whether those nuclear bombs were to fly. So there's a part of me that's I don't know maybe in suspended disbelief or at a deeper level feels an angst but nobody knows what to do with it. And this is part of what what Elon is all about, which is that I am convinced that everybody else needs to be talking about this much more and I need to be talking about this much less. I talk about this all the time. You know, people are always I want to survive more than anything else. There's

14:40 so many things that I love about this place and I don't like the idea that we're all trapped here with one atmosphere with nine individuals if you like who could all wake up on the wrong side of the bed and say, "Uh, today's the day." Part of what I'm so exercised about with respect to the apocalypse is how many things I want to save. I mean, this city just went up in flames. It's very, it focuses the mind. How many things can I save in one car load if I know that the police are not going to let me come back to my home? Do you save photos? Do you save musical instruments? Do you save financial records? What what is it that you save? You know, it was a very focusing question. We're already

15:25 over it. We can't even remember the fires. On that point of the things that give us meaning, yeah, in our lives, where do you think we're at as a society in terms of our feelings of meaning and purpose and connectedness to maybe something transcendent or I was mulling over this idea the other day. I actually posted it on on my LinkedIn page of all places. I said that um I think we need to ladder up to things to feel like anchored and content in life. like we you know we lad we start with ourselves and we ladder up to family then community then maybe a mission or a purpose and then maybe to something transcendent and it feels like it because of the design of our lives and the optimization of it we we're increasingly lading up to just ourselves. Yeah. I think even in my life I'm wondering whether there's like a layer missing like which is the religious layer or a

16:12 spiritual layer. Do you pray? It's a good question. You come over Friday night and pray with us. I'd say I do pray. That's pretty weak. But it's not a it's not the way that I see prayer on in movies and stuff. So that's the thing, right? We have this idea that somebody puts their hands together and they just believe. Yeah. But a lot of time when you're praying, you don't really believe. You're not sure that you're doing anything sensible. You you feel ridiculous. Mhm. And that's true. Even if you're a believer. Do you think we need religion? Yeah. Said the atheist. Are you an atheist? Yeah. But I take religion super seriously. I don't think we're meant to live without it.

16:59 That's an interesting conundrum. I don't think so. Everybody gets hung up on it. I sort of wonder what their problem is. Please explain. So, you believe that we aren't meant to live without religion. We're meant to be orientated by something transcendent, but you don't believe that it's real. I think that, you know, there's this great trick that I learned when I was scuba diving, which is that your your need to breathe is triggered by the buildup of CO2 in your lungs. And there are all sorts of things you can do to decrease your need to breathe. One is you can hyperventilate. And you can get rid of all of the CO2 that's residual. You can also inerture your lungs to CO2 by smoking. You can also breathe out the precious air that

17:46 your instincts tell you to hold in. You can do all these things and then you can go super deep. You can equal learn how to equalize the pressure in your ears by holding your nose and and these techniques. And suddenly you're far deeper than you've ever been. And you're exploring the rocks and the fishes and there's a turtle and there's an eel and you get a message. You're out of air. And you look up and you see, I am really far from the surface. This is terrifying. That's what happens when you unhook the proximate which is air hunger from the ultimate which is the need to breathe. So thirst is proximate to dehydration. Hunger is proximate to the need for nourishment.

18:31 In part, religion and prayer is there to keep us from unhooking all of these protective things and just turning life into a hoot. You can have a hoot without religion, but if everybody has a hoot, the whole society collapses. Some point I think a president of the United States may have said that people who defend this country were suckers. Something like that. And I thought, "God damn you." Maybe it's true even, but how many families have have received a a flag draped coffin and felt pride like we lost something precious, but we

19:17 are part of the American tapestry in a way that few families can be. And when we outsmart ourselves, when we unhook all of these things, you know, every single young woman has an idea about what the opportunity cost of not going on only fans is before. We didn't know what the opportunity cost. There was no measurement of it. We're becoming too sophisticated. We've got too much information. We're deranging ourselves. We're having a blast. and we're completely undoing all of the superructure of the world. The number of people who don't have children or want children or my kids make fun of me. I just go around

20:04 telling people to make babies and it's the most normal thing in the world. I meet parents who don't harass their own children to get married and have families. Like what are you doing? the superructures of the world. Yeah. One being family family. Yeah. Traditions. Yeah. Things that ground that connect you to. And what are the symptoms of that unhooking from the superructures of the world? How much do you care about things? How much do you care about people saying your name four generations out? Me? Yeah. You. You're probably asking the wrong person because I just don't think legacy matters because I'm going to be dead. That's right. But you're I'm asking all

20:50 of you who believe that. Yeah. That is so sad. It is so weird that no one cares about their legacy because they don't see a future. So what I'm trying to say is I'm desperate to get you a future so that you care. What needs to happen to get me a future? Something remarkable. Something utterly remarkable because it's not it's not going that way. And that's what that's what the physics part is. Like I talk about physics constantly. Physics is the only thing that's going to get to your future. And how how well right now the big problem is that we share one atmosphere. Yeah. So everything that can all the really bad things whether it's pathogens like imagine something

21:37 coidlike but far worse or climate or uh radiation. All of these things don't know anything about borders. To an extent there's a southern and a northern hemisphere that are separate but even that's not a great border. So, we can draw all the borders on land that we want, but we still have basically one or two atmospheres. And I would really say one. And we've now gotten powerful enough to really screw it up, right? And so, through nukes or through carbon emissions, all three of those things. Okay? Right? Everything that you care about is on one sphere with one one atmosphere. And I think Elon is 100% right. We got

22:23 to get to another sphere. I can't believe that he's focused on Mars. I mean, by by sure, focus on the moon, focus on Mars, focus on chemical rockets, but throw a couple billion towards physics for God's sakes. So, let us get it. Let us get serious about exploring the cosmos. This is our womb. This is not our home. We're You know, you know that song, Closing Time? No, I don't. Closing time. Uh, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. I think it's about birth. Yeah, it's time to be born. You can't stay here. This is completely obvious to me and I am the only person who who talks this

23:08 way and so I sound like a lunatic and I get tired of it. But the real reason it, you know, it's about the mangoes, it's about the rambutan, it's about the music, it's about all the things that I love. So why would you want to leave? I want to take it with us and I want to see what else is out there and I want to meet people. Why don't you just stay here and fix this planet? Cuz you can't. The odds of fixing one sphere for a permanent future. You've already talked about you don't care about the future. I don't have children yet either. So I don't Yeah, I don't have that. But I My children don't have children and their children don't have children and I care about them and they're not even here. We've got some time left here though.

23:53 Well, we did. If you looked what's happened in the last month, it's coming undone. Pakistan and India. Do you really think this is the start of the end? I I have no idea where I am. Of course it is. The World War II order was keeping it. It's like control rods keeping the world from going super critical. Can't we just put the rods back together? Have you looked at who we had an election with Donald Trump versus Kla Harris in the US? Tell me what's going on in the UK. What are we doing in the mayoral race for for New York? I don't know if you're

24:40 watching what I'm watching. Look at the mess that's going on in Gaza. Russia is nuclear. Israel is presumably nuclear. Pakistan and India are nuclear. The US is nuclear. Iran is almost nuclear. China's pissed off about Iran because it was trying to make a play through the region. North Korea is watching. Oh, and look at the UK in turmoil. UK is a very nuclear country. To say nothing of France. This is not going to go well. We just we and by the way look at how much is happening with AI, right? Everything was really stagnant. So I I have this famous challenge that I give

25:27 people which is go into a room and subtract the screens and forget about style. How do you know you're not in 1973? Like drones are the beginning. Imagine I needed a refill on my coffee and you know you did something and a drone brought me a coffee to not interrupt the flow. That would we know we weren't in 73 but in general drones aren't a big part of our lives. These robots I've never seen a human robot actually doing anything other than on YouTube where it's like doing the mashed potato. Mhm. So in general yeah things were just really stagnant for a really long time. And during that period of stagnation, we we had this crazy narrative which is like the dizzying pace of change is

26:14 making it almost impossible to keep up while things were incredibly stagnant. And so it just shows you sort of this weird way in which our our minds can be programmed to completely ignore what we're experiencing. Is there not a chance that we'll just continue to Okay, if you want to go with chance, look, until until you're worried about your great great grandchildren. I don't want to have this conversation with you. I want you to start caring about that. I want you to go to church. You you're heir to a great tradition. One of the most important traditions in the world has to be Christianity because both Judaism and Islam are screwed up over the law. We're legal traditions.

27:01 Christianity, not so much. And I think I first time somebody crystallized that for me was Sam Harris. It's a really important point, but you're heir to an incredibly powerful and important tradition. And if we don't have a Christian substrate, we're in real trouble because all of our society is based on on an assumption of a Christian substrate. You're advising me to be Christian in tradition but not in necessarily in belief. Well, this is the thing. You're alienated because you think that you have to be a believer in order to go in. Otherwise, you're faking it. Yeah. Get over yourself. That's not how it works. That's true. That's me just me being honest. I do think that if I went to a church and I I sung and I I prayed and stuff and I didn't believe I would that I'd be like it'd be it'd be fake.

27:49 Okay. Do do you imagine that all those people who go to church are just sitting there 100% sure that there's a there's a Jesus to pray to? Do you know any Christians? Yeah. Yeah. They're not like that. They sneak off and do bad things. If they were confident that Jesus was watching everything that they were doing and they were constantly talking about how they sin, I'm a sinner. Right? It's a very complicated, interesting piece of kit. And my claim is that, you know, I said the Lord's Prayer as part of going to high school. I sat in a church, a chapel at a high

28:37 school in LA that had a stained glass window with an American soldier trampling a Nazi flag into the stained glass window. was amazing. How does this link to me? I was about to say, can't don't you have faith that we'll just be able to kind of keep this? It feels like a bit of a standoff. So, you're the one with the faith. I'm the one who's nervous. You look, you're the believer. I'm not going to trust that. No, no. I'm going to get my hands dirty and try to do something about it. Do you know what? I think in part it's because as you said I've been alive for 32 years and through that time has been relative peace especially in the western world. So it's all I've ever known. So I I'm born with this assumption that this is just kind of how it goes. That there's always threat but we kind of figure it out. Come to the Pacific Palisades. It looks

29:24 like Gaza. Yeah. Yeah. I've got some friends that lost their houses there. You know checked out Lahina in uh West Maui recently. No. It's an absolute disaster. Is AI a protagonist in this story? Is it? Sure. In what in what respect? Well, what do you what do you think about it? We're going through going through a wild revolution at the moment and I just hear people saying the dumbest things about it. What do I think about I'm scared I might say something dumb now, but Well, let's try because I'm going to say something dumb. I think well I look at both sides of the coin and I look at the opportunity and the and the threat. My concern when I hear about the CEOs of the biggest aerial companies in the

30:10 world talking about this fast takeoff is that the transition will be too quick for us to adjust. And when they say fast takeoff, they mean that AGI like arrives and it the rate of its learning accelerates so quickly that it really um disrupts the need for human beings to do a lot of the sort of jobs we're doing today that are centered on intelligence. Which jobs require intelligence? Pretty much all of them these days because we've had the industrial revolution where we've outsourced a lot of the labor to machines. But I don't think so really. Yeah, I think a large portion of our conversation was actually an LLM. We didn't actually get to the stuff outside of the LLM. You and I are two chat bots for the most part. You're a

30:56 good one. Thank you. I'm on a huge I'm on a huge platform again, you know, but my claim is is that that's the really disturbing part that more or less we're LLMs. More or less we don't do a single intelligent thing all day long. And the reason that they're able to mimic us is because we don't realize that intelligence is a last resort for us. We try to automate like, you know, if you think about greetings, your assistant was very kind. I got out of a black car that you guys sent around and I was greeted with the phrase, "There he is, the man, the myth." And I knew what was coming next, the legend. Right? because that is a sort of humorous way of giving an intimate greeting, but it's still an LLM.

31:44 And I'm not saying that your assistant is an LLM. I'm saying that more or less what we do all day long is LLM interactions. Hey buddy, how are you? Good. Good. Things have been really busy. How about you? Well, I got some travel coming up. Kind of excited about it, but I have to get through some work first. I understand. That's an entirely scripted conversation. That's why I'm trying to say that I want to do podcasting that is outside of the LLM model. I don't want to do just dangerous, stupid stuff, but I want to talk about things that I've never explored where I don't have something, you know, ready. Do you think AI will ever break out of the the LLM or will it expand? I think the LLMs will.

32:30 I don't see I think that waiting for AGI as the problem is a is a bad idea. I think the problems are going to get here far before AGI. I think even that the AGI expectation is something we're trained to do. Do you think AGI is coming? Do you think we'll survive AGI? Will AGBI be good or bad? All of that's pre-programmed into you. Why do you Why are you waiting for AGI? Did you not alpha fold three? Did you Did you track that? Do you know about this? Is that Was that the chess game? the well it's the chess game that became the protein folding game. All right. You want to talk about great games? Protein folding. Now that's a game. I have no no knowledge of this at all. Okay. What do you know about proteins? Very little. Okay. Think about proteins as tiny machines. Yeah.

33:15 That there's copying machine. There's a a scissors and a shearing machine. There's a a light making machine. All sorts of things. And all of those machines are weirdly coded. Imagine that you had like a a children's show and uh a bunch of girl superheroes. They all had necklaces with uh 20 different kinds of beads around their neck. And so when they needed a machine, they'd take off the necklace, they'd throw it into a thing called a ribosome, the ribosome would take these 20 kinds of pearls and suddenly it would build you a car or a spaceship or a gun or who knows what. Well, that's that's that's the story of DNA, RNA, and uh and protein. The only thing is, isn't it weird that a

34:01 linear sequence suddenly crumples up into a three-dimensional object that does something? So, for example, I don't have you ever seen um these Turkish rabbits that glow in the dark? No. Okay. So, they took green fluorescent protein out of jellyfish. Yeah. and they uh spliced them into the nucleic acids of rabbits and the Turks bred all of these glow-in-the-dark bunnies. And what that is is a structure. So there's there's something called secondary structure and protein where sometimes you get these spirals called alpha helyses. And then sometimes you get a two-dimensional sheet that's made from taking uh a switchback in in strings of amino acids. And then if you wrap that around, you don't have a beta

34:47 sheet, you have a beta barrel. And these beta barrels are the glow-in-the-dark aspect of green fluorescent protein. Okay? And what we didn't know was how a series of acts and G's could code for sequences of amino acids could form three-dimensional structures. So if you just read DNA, you didn't know, well, that's going to be a a sports car. Yeah. Alphold figured it out. For the most part, like to a to an enormous extent, humans were stuck there. And what does that mean? It means that you could uh I don't know, you could target your enemies that have particular regions uh on their cell surfaces and you could come up with proteins that only attach to them and attack. It could mean anything. Could

35:32 mean nanoobots. I don't know what it means, but my point is is that that's already here and you're not focused on it. And you're thinking AGI. And the funny part is is that's your LLM that got programmed to wait for AGI. Well, I heard, you know, people that I think are very smart, much smarter than me talk about the Don't listen to them. Elon, sure. I mean, he he says that it's our biggest existential threat is a AI. Elon has become the outsourcing for much of our intelligence. And if Elon means anything to you, he's really saying to you, "Don't listen to me. Do something remarkable." He's saying, "Where is everybody? Why is

36:20 there only one Elon? There used to be lots of them?" Why is there only one Elon? Yeah, not the right question. Where where did all the other Elons go? Same question, is it not? No, I think that the why is there only one Elon makes Elon feel more singular. You know, if you ever get a chance to go to Capidokia or Bryce National Park in Utah, you see what happens, which is that you'll have a stone that was resting on the soil and suddenly the wind starts to erode everything except the compactified soil right under that stone and you get what's called a fairy chimney or a hood. And so the claim is is that sometimes you get these isolated structures And the key point is everything else

37:06 eroded away. We're supposed to have tons of Elon and everybody else got taken out. What or who took them out? Look at how much trouble Elon has being Elon. Look, we keep hearing about him. You know, he's on drugs. Great. take drugs. No, I'm not kidding. Do you know how many amazing people take drugs? If you care about jazz, jazz is a whole, you know, it's a history of drugs. Whenever I'm listening to Ray Charles, I'm hearing heroin. Okay. What are they doing at Burning Man?

37:52 They're trying to live luxuriously under oppression simultaneously luxuriously and as dirty and disgusting as you'll ever be. Hopefully, they're having tons of eye-opening, mind-bending experiences chasing some way of getting out of the LLM. And you know, my feeling about this is it's not even honest. I I I believe that Elon, for example, does understand that population and growth is really important, but I also think he just enjoys making babies. And in in a weird way, this idea of I'm going to have an empire of my children is a forbidden concept. Try explaining that to HR.

38:38 You know, it's like, what did you say at work? So, the key point is Elon is barely able to be Elon. Do you think we're overestimating the impact AI is going to have? Because people, you know, a lot of people see as this really fundamentally transformative. No. You don't think we're underestimating it? I think it's going to be I I I think that what AI means to us is is bizarre. We've we've come up with this whole script about AGI and it's going to take everything we do that's repetitive is on the chopping block. And since almost everything we do is repetitive, we don't need to get to AGI. We just need to do things where lots of people

39:23 create lots of repetitive data and then we tokenize it. We train the AI on the tokens and then for the most part it says, you know, it it doesn't matter. It can be a photograph. It can be music. Whatever it is, amino acids, just give me a large enough data set and let me add it and, you know, take a hike for for a little while. I'll train on it and then I'll know how to do that. You know what? It's bad at things that where there isn't much data. So I I just I just found out about these orphan proteins where like everybody's got a different version of hemoglobin. Mhm. But you know the the quadinary structure of he hemoglobin is these four hem groups you know four different proteins around a central element. What happens

40:10 when you have a protein that has no analog anywhere else? The the system doesn't have the ability to learn it. If if I train you on the blues and you find out what a 12 bar blues progression is, then you find out that there's a variation where this, you know, the second bar goes to the fourth rather than just staying on the one for four bars. And then sometimes the fourth bar has a seven in it to create tension. Okay? So, it's going to learn every single form of the blues like that. And because there's a large corpus of that stuff, it's going to get really good at blues music, you know, as a but if you take something that basically never happens, it's not going to have an easy ability to train and give you more. So I think that AI is almost certainly going to transform

40:57 the economy because everything that we we know how to do through education creates repetitive behaviors. We don't know how to educate for creativity and genius. We know how to educate for doing higher level things. So radiology is a great example. Radiologists are, you know, some of the first uh in the crosshairs. I'm going to stare at some imaging and I'm going to say, I think that's a tumor. I think that's benign. And it's going to say, just give me give me give me all of these tokens. Like, well, they're x-rays. They're cats. No, no, they're just tokens. So, yeah. It's going to start to automate away every repetitive behavior and then what's going to be left is the tiny

41:43 number of things that aren't really highly repetitive or things where we really care that a human does it. Very interesting what's happened with chess. I don't know if you've been following chess. I loosely understand it mainly because I've spoken to a lot of AI experts and they often reference chess as as an example where it was one of the first things that humans did that we really cared about that fell. So they've been longer in the AI tractor beam than any of the rest of us in some sense. How did it fall? Through Deep Blue and IBM and Gary Kasparov. But does that mean that people people aren't interested in chess anymore? What are you saying? No, no, no. That's the whole point. So Magnus Carlson, the greatest chess

42:30 player of our time and perhaps of all time, was on Joe Rogan and Joe asked him the simple question, can your phone beat you? He's like, yeah, easily. So the point is, we can't compete with, I don't know, Stockfish or what, whatever the top chess programs of our time. I don't know anymore. But nobody cares about those programs except for AI experts. We care about the drama of, you know, Anan versus Carlson, two humans, two humans, because it's about us. We're we're very narcissistic in this way. And so there was a period, and you know, this is something that my wife uh tried to popularize. So she said this

43:16 thing about the golden age of AI complimentarity where the AIs aren't good enough to take over from us but they're amazing tools and so there's a period where we're teamed up you know the prompt engineering revolution they're not good enough to come up with their own prompts and a great example of this that she and I have been talking about is the cyborg chess era which is a period where humans and the AI I could form teams that would do better, but at some point the AI just looks at the human and says, "You're just holding me back." You've got two children. Yeah. When they're thinking about their career prospects with all that you think and know and believe about the future that we're heading towards, what what kind of

44:02 career advice would you be giving to them? Oh, I've given them terrible career advice. I give I gave them somewhat different career advice. So to my son, my my advice was do the hardest most technical thing you possibly can do and be prepared to use that ability, that facility in different ways than you're you're honing it. But train yourself with my daughter. Um I think she cares deeply about people and you know there's a typical male female divide. And I'm not, by the way, I'm not going to talk overly much about them because I try to keep them out. But she is uh you know somebody who is taking the same level of analytic ability but putting it in the service of

44:49 the law and trying to help people who are you know really unfortunate. She's very idealistic. And so at some level the law is not going to allow us to have AI lawyers for quite some time. It's not going to trust anything. We we've got jury uh trials and and judges and a legal system that's written into our founding documents. To the average person, I would say get your board in the water and prepare to paddle like all get out. The tsunami of a lifetime is coming and nothing your elders have seen is going to prepare. There's no good advice to give that's specific. Let's put it this way. But one of the things when people tell me about their moving from one city to another, I

45:36 have a phrase that nobody likes, which is every place is over. Oh, I'm moving to Austin. Yeah, it's over. Miami, it's over. Nashville, over. You know, all these places are over. And every occupation that is named is over. I'm going to be a dentist, radiologist, accountant, teacher. These are all over. whatever is coming. Get flexible. Get good. Get good on a bunch of different stuff. Learn how to think across disciplines. I have no idea what what's going to be left for us. But, you know, somebody's going to come out on top.

46:23 And I I hate to tell people that you should try to come out on top. I don't think it's healthy to have everyone trying to be world class. I think you should be able to just have a life. Now, I have a golden retriever. I don't know that it's the greatest golden retriever in the world. Sometimes I think it is, but it does a lot of dumb stuff. But he's my golden retriever. I just don't think it I think that this mania for optimization. Like if you look at your own videos, you'll find some of the best performing videos are this is how to succeed. This is how to get anyone you want. This is how to get out of a bad situation. People just want capacity. But for what?

47:09 Okay, you've optimized your day. You've optimized your health. Your social media is optimized. Now what? Now what? I don't know what should be then say you know is it the is it time to just one would say well now I one would incorrectly say well now I can play with my golden retriever and then one would say well you should have been playing with your golden retriever the whole time let me put it a little differently through some bizarre accident I've gotten a chance to meet incredible people that I don't even talk about who I've met you You know, I've got a chance to see the world. I haven't seen South America, but I've seen most the other

47:56 continents other than the Antarctic. I've had a really rich life. Take somebody who hasn't had those opportunities, but they got a chance to have three kids. I'm not sure I wouldn't trade places. I so enjoyed raising my children. And it's available to everyone. It's such a strange thing that we're talking about optimization, all this stuff. I I get to think about the the substrate of the universe, theoretical physics. I dream about visiting the stars. I dream about multiple dimensions of time, meeting aliens, all sorts of things.

48:45 I still think having kids was like unbeatable. I'm so sad that it's over. I'm so sad that they moved out. I cannot believe that I was dumb enough to live in a society that doesn't believe in having your kids with you your whole life. The idea that we look at places where kids live at home as backwards is beyond me. And shout out to uh the entire Indian subcontinent, you know. It's just like family is everything. They drive me crazy. But it it's just meaning is available for you. And again, you know, every time I get a chance to

49:32 eat a rambutan, it's one of my favorite fruits. Mangoes, rambutans, jackf fruit, sithafal if you can get custard apple. The amount of pleasure I get. I've never had a good custard apple in the entire time I've lived in the US. Not one. I've had a frozen one imported from Taiwan. You get this cheramoya. Just get out of here chairoya. You're not good. Great custard apple. Great sith follow. What a pleasure to be on this earth. and it's available to almost anyone. I just think that you can find meaning, you know, for God's sakes, go to Spotify if you have a a connection, if you can afford a connection to Spotify and put

50:17 in Pablo Casal's version of the Boach Cello Suites. You're as rich as you need to be. I've flown private. I'd much prefer to listen to Pablo Casal playing the the jealous suites in economy than to be to be to be deprived of real luxury. I don't know. I just to me meaning is everywhere. I can't swing a cat without hitting meaning. Have you always been like that or is that something that you've cultivated? the point about being able to swing a cat and find meaning. So many people that would be listening now could swing a a 100 mile stick and wouldn't hit meaning in their lives. But you seem to be able to find it in the the purer

51:02 things, the more simple things. And I'm wondering if that's something that we can all cultivate with a change of perspective or if it's just the way that you've always been. Why is Joe Rogan such a big deal? You ever listen to Joe Rogan talk about pugilism? Two gentlemen beating the crap out of each other as poetry, as chess. I could listen to Joe talk about MMA for days. Yeah. You know, the story of Mighty Mouse, the guy trapped in some, I don't know, flyweight division with unbelievable skills who never gets to meet a formidable enemy, you know?

51:48 Do you think that's a privilege? Do you think that there's a privilege in being able to craft a story? Because so much of the meaning you're describing there comes from these great stories. And not everybody is able to craft the story upon seeing something. You probably look at this item in front of me, this glass, and create a story about it that drives meaning that makes you feel something. I worry about its manufacturer. How is it that we got a surface of revolution? What is what is the industrial process? How do I take a picture of this and get a a photograph of the machine that made it. You know that fly that has been buzzing around us this entire interview? Yeah. Do you remember when Obama had a fly? Yeah. And he caught it in Wow. Yeah. The confidence of that man. See, I'd try that and I'd miss and I'd screw it up in front of millions of

52:33 people, you know? It's like I I took so much meaning away from that fly. Were you trying to or is that just a sort of pre We all did. Not everyone. Some people would have gone. How was it that you knew exactly what I was talking about? Because he captured a moment. He was the girl in the red dress. You know, there's this thing that women say, not every woman can wear red. Well, not every man can grab a fly with confidence. I I think I think we all see this. I think we all see beauty everywhere. You remember that movie American Beauty with the the plastic bag that gets in the air funnel going up?

53:21 And the key point is the ability just to see beauty wherever you find it. You know, everything behind you means something to me. The letter B uh is strange to me that there's only one phonetic alphabet and that every phonetic alphabet is descended from it, you know. I I I basically view everything as a hyperlink. I just want to click on the world and see what it goes to. Not everybody does though. But we do. They don't make the step is what I'm saying. Because people would see the bee and nothing would cross their, you know, it's funny. There's an absolutely horrible account that has been just dogging me for years trying to make my life miserable.

54:07 And a social media account. Yeah. Doesn't matter. Yeah. And the person said, "You know, one thing I just never understand is he's not he's not hawking a book. He He's just talking. Why Why are his numbers high?" The answer is everybody cares about this stuff. They want an invitation. One of the funniest things that gets said about me on social media is he goes on forever and he never says anything and then like I look at the word clouds of things that I' I've talked about and people are just googling everything incessantly. You know, if you didn't know who Pablo Cassals was, now you do. Now you know what a real chis sounds like. Um

54:55 I don't know. I just I can't believe that I'm so far through this life that there's so little left. I can't believe this doesn't go on forever. My people just got hit and you know you want to talk about the river and the sea, that river is not the Jordan River and that sea is not the Mediterranean. The Arab world stretches from the Atlantic with Morocco right up to the what is it Shhat Alabia

55:42 waterway that divides Iraq from Iran. And I don't think this is stable. There is no way in which we should be fighting like this. This is ridiculous. Trump Trump used the F-word. I mean, he's getting taking a ton of crap. Why would you use the F word? Well, isn't it interesting that people view Trump as so tacky? You know, he's he's got this Queen's sort of bluster. He doesn't doesn't of uh finalist clubs at Harvard or Skull and Bones or whatever.

56:31 No, Trump doesn't use the F-word for a reason. That he needs it once in a blue moon and it better mean something. And he said this to Iran and he said this to Israel. These two two countries have been fighting for so long. They don't know what the [ __ ] they're doing. He didn't make a mistake. The rest of the world has just forgotten how to calibrate. What do you see Trump in? How is he clothed? He's almost always in a suit and tie and he almost never says the f- word. And it's carefully calibrated to get everybody's attention. And we're so asleep that we don't even hear it. This is World War II and it's already

57:17 started. Biden was there in the Oval Office. non-compassment meant and I was being told don't worry there's a a committee that has replaced him because I was talking about the fact that he can't be president. I I just don't know what we're doing. I'm so mystified by everybody else. You know, it's like Elon makes sense to me. I'm not Elon. I'm very different person, but at least Elon makes sense to me. Not 100% but 98% Elon makes sense to me. It's everybody else that I'm completely confused about. What part of what Elon is saying makes

58:02 so much sense to you? Oh jeez. Everything. One, we have to have babies. We have to keep going. Two, we it can't all be about problems. You have to be excited to be alive every morning. You have to work your ass off your whole life. You want to know one of the most beautiful things that ever happened? Somebody telling Elon that he was the world's richest human being. He said, "Huh, it's interesting." Okay, back to work. Amazing, right? There's no reward that he can't have more of by stopping work and enjoying his wealth except doing stuff. And

58:51 I was born in this country. My parents were born in this country. My grandparents on one side were not, but my grandparents on the other side were. Elon is so American. That cowboy spirit that it he does all sorts of stuff I can't stand. I don't want to see one more of those Pepe memes ever. I really don't. What the [ __ ] is his problem? Okay, I don't know him at all, but Elon at his best is is the United States. You know, anything is possible here. And we and we just waste our lives on

59:36 interpersonal drama. He wastes his life to an enormous extent as a troll. I cannot. That's the part of him that I don't understand is one why he's not focused 100% on physics. I think he sees it as going through grock and AI. He doesn't want to trust humans. I think he sees Mars as energizing to engineers and the stars are innovating to engineers because the science there's no amount of engine you can't engineer your way to the stars with the science we have. But he's he's being a complete [ __ ] when it comes to science and he's being a total hero when it comes to engineering. Um, but he is the quintessential American. A business is only as good as the people

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1:01:09 and terms and conditions apply. A second ago you said you can't believe it doesn't go on forever. Yeah. You or the universe or I can't believe my story doesn't go on forever. Look, I've never died before so I have no experience with it. So as far as I know, I've always been alive and it'll always go on that way. But there's another thing that, you know, I I've talked about occasionally, which is I'm not the most publicspirited human being. You know, I I am somebody who will take the last the last rambutan, you know, and I know that you're not supposed to do that in almost any culture on earth, but sometimes it just sitting there bothers me. Okay? So, I'm not the I'm not the classiest person on earth,

1:01:56 but I'll tell you something. If you have a kid and you have a choice about eating the ramatan yourself or giving the rambatan to your child, this it's a no-brainer. You you're going to enjoy the ramatan so much more if you give it to your kid and you'll see. And that's the way in which this goes on forever. That's great. I mean, just how many young people do I have to yell at? I don't know if I want to have kids. I don't want to bring anyone into this horrible world. Why do you have kids? It bothers you. I can see it personally bothers you. Do you have any idea how much hate there is right now for Israel?

1:02:43 Do you have any idea how destabilizing this action against Iran was? Do you have any idea how many people have suffered for how long under the mullers? We are being cheated of Persia. I'm not talking about Iran for the Persians. I'm talking about we are cheated of Persia. The entire planet, one of the greatest societies on earth taken off the line. I look You're catching me on the wrong week. I I don't want to dwell on it.

1:03:29 This is just incredibly irresponsible. We're not going to survive this. Israel is certainly not going to survive this. If the Abbramic world does not get its head out of its ass, if the Christian world does not start to stand up for itself without becoming this Christ is king nightmare. You know, I was in Tel Aviv before this all happened and I I just said it from the stage. Make the Middle East Christian again. Does nobody understand their role is sort of my question. How can you have Bethlehem without a strong Christian presence?

1:04:14 Have you ever been to the Church of the Holy Supplr? No. Can I give you another assignment? Yeah. Get off your ass and go. You got the money. Walk the stations of the cross. And for God's sakes, stop with the issue about belief. You can pray like the rest of us. We're not sure if we're praying. We're not sure if the thing is hooked up and anyone's listening. You have the right to go back even with doubt, even with knowledge. And you have the right to believe about a tomorrow, you know, where where you're not going to be, but people are going to be mentioning your name. When you say that your your people are under attack, who are you referencing as

1:05:00 your people? I would in general there's several groups of people that I would describe as my people. The Jews would be one, dyslexics would be another, Americans would be another, scientists would be another. It depends on on what these things think. But right now, I'm thinking about the Jews and I'm thinking about the fact that the social media businesses have lost complete control of uh the bot farms and we're just seeing this unbel I I I feel like I'm living through the 1930s again. I I we've seen this movie before. It doesn't end well. You know what happened in Gaza is an unbelievable tragedy.

1:05:47 And that tragedy was partially architected by the United States of America shoving a two-state solution down the throats of Palestinian Arabs who absolutely do not want a two-state solution and the creation in part of the situation where Israel has a hand, the US has a hand, the Palestinian Arabs have a hand. the creation of Hamas and and the promotion of this just unbelievable genius Senoir, the leader of Hamas, who is continuing to best BB Netanyahu from the grave. You know, it's just an amazing feat.

1:06:32 Nobody reads anymore, as you know. Um, there's an old Sherlock Holmes story called The Problem at Thor Bridge. You ever heard of it? No. So, you're British. Um, Sherlock Holmes gets called in on a case in which um there's a murder and the murder is traced the murder is traced to this gentleman who still exists. Uh what Sherlock Holmes figures out is that it's not a murder, it's a suicide in which the gun will fall into the river at Thor Bridge because it's tied to a weight and the

1:07:19 person uses the suicide to frame someone else. You know, it's just one of these genius little vignettes. And that's what Senoir was. He was a a genius. He he knew he was going to die. Who was Sinoir? Sinoir is the person who who's committed suicide. Sinir's suicide was an IDF assisted suicide. I wrote about this almost instantly after the October 7th invasion. It didn't make any sense that Gaza would undertake such an act against Israel given the asymmetry. And what this mirrored was that before the 1990s. So you think Sinoir committed suicide to then cause the people of Gaza to invade Israel on

1:08:04 No. Senoir would be happy enough for all the Gazins to die. And so what he did was he architected a situation in which Israel would be compelled to respond using the wrong tools. He tricked Israel. And you know, I I'm very confident to to talk about this because if you check my old tweets, I say IDF assisted suicide and monken by proxy and zukwang, right? And I said these are the concepts. Familiarize yourself because Israel is going to invade Gaza and I knew what was going to happen because took me like why would you do this? It doesn't make sense from first order logic, but third and fourth order

1:08:51 logic, you're like, "Oh, of course it makes sense." This is hybrid war. The most important thing for Senoir is video. Why? Look at the effect of the video. The video of Gaza has turned the world to an extent against Israel that's sort of inconceivable. There's a doctrine called hybrid warfare and I think it came out of the US in the early 2000s and it says that the kinetic component of warfare, the killing, the actual shooting and the planes and the bombs and all this kind of stuff is

1:09:37 not the major component. The social media is really important. The video is important. The mimedic complex is important. And Israel has an advantage over the Gazan Arabs in kinetic warfare. And Senoir knew that. He was like, "Brilliant. All we need to do is force Israel to come after us." And this is this thing I was going to say before the 1990s we had a spate of killings of policemen firing on people who had pulled toy guns on them. And we would we would say things and I remember this like whatever you do don't point a toy gun at a policeman. You're it's don't you realize what's

1:10:22 going to happen? And then somebody coined the phrase police assisted suicide. The policeman is the instrument. That's what I knew was going to happen. And for better or for worse, BB just couldn't figure out where he was. And BB was dumber and Senoir was smarter. Is there any way back from here? Because you said this is World War II. Well, the the way there is, but it's slim and it's evaporating. I mean, almost everything depends on Saudi Arabia and the and the Iranians, the Persians. If the Persians didn't take this opportunity to rise up against their

1:11:07 oppressors, I don't know what they're waiting for. Yes, you're going to get killed in some numbers, but you have to figure out whether you're interested in tyranny or not. So, the Persians are absolutely falling down on the ground on the job, not rising up against the mullers. This is a coordinated moment. Like, you know, there's there's a moment for a prison break. This would be it. Who are the mullers in this city? the Ayatollas, the government. Yeah. The the theocratic government of Iran. So, the rulers of Iran, basically, the people that are Okay. So, I don't know if if if you know a ton of Persians. They're varied in their religiosity, but there's a you know, there's an underground gay scene in Thrron. There's super hyperodern people just like you and me who can't

1:11:53 stand these guys. And so, you're saying that if they rise up, they would that would be one of the parts of the solution. The other thing is Saudi Arabia and and I have to be very measured and careful here. Um, you can't fantasize about the Middle East becoming Western Europe overnight. Every time we do this, we make a terrible mistake. When you have a modernizer like MBS in Saudi Arabia, who's the ruler of Saudi Arabia, right? Deacto. He can't suddenly become a modern person. So, you know, if if we end up talking about Kosogible and murders and murdered journalists and all this stuff, the whole conversation will derail. But he's a modernizer. And there was a moment where he needed

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