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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:29 - Aliens and physics
5:14 - Breaking the frame of conversation
6:59 - Time travel across multiple dimensions
13:10 - Is the government in possession of alien spacecraft?
19:33 - Freedom of speech
30:52 - Elon Musk
32:09 - Idealism of every era
35:29 - Non-locality of free speech in the Internet age
41:05 - Glenn Beck
43:00 - Joe Rogan
47:44 - Freedom and fear
49:16 - Jeffrey Epstein
52:56 - Aaron Swartz
58:32 - Jeffrey Epstein and Geometric Unity
1:18:07 - Cancel culture
1:20:09 - Alex Jones
1:29:03 - Curtis Yarvin
1:33:42 - Michael Malice
1:36:02 - Intellectual Dark Web
1:42:54 - Innovation
1:56:13 - Economics
2:03:31 - Cryptocurrency
2:09:39 - Geometric Unity paper
2:26:44 - David Goggins challenge
2:28:07 - Father and son

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The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, his fourth time on the podcast.

Both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind, and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being who I am fortunate to call a friend.

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As a side note, let me ask that whenever we touch difficult topics in this or other conversations that you listen with an open mind and forgive me or the guest for a misstep in an imperfectly thought out statement.

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And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

You often talk about getting off this planet.

And I think you don't often talk about extra terrestrial life, intelligent life out there.

Do you wonder about this kind of thing, about intelligent civilizations out there?

I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way.

In a certain sense, I do find that speculating about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens is kind of a recreation for when things aren't going very well.

At least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives.

So I worry about, for example, the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion.

You can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend, so then you just take up an interest in simulation theory because that's something like what you do for your job coding.

I do think that in some sense, the issue of aliens is a really interesting 1 but has been spoiled by too much sort of recreational escapism.

The key question that I find is, let's assume that it is possible to look out at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds and then go visit them.

If that is possible, it's almost certainly possible through some as yet unknown or not accepted theory of physics beyond Einstein.

And I mean it doesn't have to be that way but probably is.

If that theory exists there would be a percentage of the world that have life, in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way, that would have encountered the ability to escape soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom at a minimum and whatever they have that is probably analogous to the cell on that world.

So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing that arises, probably not carbon-based, probably doesn't have DNA, but that something that fits the pattern of Darwinian theory, which is descent with variation, differential success.

And thereby constantly improving and so on, that through time there'll be a trajectory where there'll be something increasingly complex and fascinating and beautiful like us humans, but much more.

That can also off-gas whatever entropy it creates to give an illusion that you're defeating thermodynamics.

So whatever these things are, probably has an analog of the bilipid layer so that cells can get rid of the chaos on 1 side of the barrier and keep order on the other.

Whatever these things are that create life, assuming that there is a theory to be found that allows that civilization to diversify, we would have to imagine that such a civilization might have taken an interest in its concept of the universe and have come here.

They would have a deep understanding of the physics of the universe sufficient to have arrived here.

Well, there's 2 questions, whether they could arrive physically and whether their information could be sent here and whether they could gain information from us.

It's possible that they would have a way of looking into our world without actually reaching it.

I don't know, but yes, If my hope, which is that we can escape this world, can be realized, if that's feasible, then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true and that somebody else should be here.

My purpose when I come on to your show and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you.

It's to give you better audio and video because I think we've been on an incredible roll.

And so I am trying to honor you by being as disagreeable about frame breaking as possible.

I think some of your listeners don't understand that it's actually a sign of respect as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic, which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames and that these are sort of offerings to get the conversation started.

So let me try to break that frame and give you something different.

I think what's going on here is that I can prove effectively that we're not thinking about this in very deep terms.

As soon as I say we've got to get off this planet, the number of people who assume that I'm talking about faster than light travel is very high.

And faster than light travel assumes some sort of Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken by some small adjustment.

It shows me that our failure to imagine what could be being said is profound.

We don't have an idea of all of the different ways in which we might be able to visit distant worlds.

All we think about is, okay, it must be Einsteinian space times and then some means of exceeding the speed limit.

And it's just, it's fascinating to me that we don't really have, we've lost the ability to just realize we don't know the framework.

So 1 of the things I think about a lot is worlds with more than 1 temporal dimension.

It's very hard to think about more than 1 temporal dimension.

So that's a really strong mental exercise of breaking the framework in which we think?

Because most of the frameworks would have a single temporal dimension, right?

Well, first of all, most of the frameworks in which we think would have no temporal dimension, would have pure, like in mathematics, the differential geometry that Riemann came up with in the 1800s.

We don't usually talk about what we would call split signature metrics, or Lorentzian signature.

In fact, if it weren't for relativity, this would be the most obscure topic out there.

Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature and then there's this 1 freakish case of relativity theory in physics that uses this 1 time and the rest spatial dimensions.

So it's usually momentary and just looking at space.

Yes, we have these 3 kinds of equations that are very important to us.

We have elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic, right?

And so the idea is if I'm chewing gum after eating garlic bread, When I open my mouth and I've got chewing gum between my lips, maybe it's gonna form an elliptic object called a minimal surface.

Then when I pop that and blow through it, you're gonna hear a noise that's gonna travel to you by a wave equation, which is gonna be hyperbolic.

But then the garlic breath is gonna diffuse towards you and you're eventually gonna be very upset with me according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic.

So those are the 3 basic paradigms for most of the work that we do.

And a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is elliptic, whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case.

And I don't even know what to do about more than 1 temporal dimension because I think almost no 1 studies that.

I can't believe you just captured much of modern physics in the example of chewing gum.

I have an off-color 1 which I chose not to share, but hopefully the kids at home can imagine.

Okay, so that is the place where we come from.

Now if we want to arrive at a possibility of breaking the frameworks with 2 versus 0 temporal dimensions, how do we even begin to think about that?

Well, let's think about it as you and I getting together in New York City, okay?

So if you tell me, Eric, I wanna meet you in New York City, go to the corner of, I don't know, 34th Street and 3rd Avenue and you'll find a building on the northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor.

Right, so what do we have, 3rd Avenue, that's 1 coordinate, 34th Street, that's a second

coordinate and go up to the 17th floor, right?

So when we have 3rd Avenue, that's 1 coordinate, 34th Street,

that's a second coordinate, and go up to the 17th.

All right, well now, imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a particular height in a building and it's all flat land, but I'm gonna give you 2 temporal chords.

And 12 noon at the corner of 34th and 3rd.

And presumably that's just specifying a single point in those 2 different dimensions, but then being able to travel along those dimensions.

I'm very concerned, Lex, that you're going through life without a wristwatch.

That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch.

This guy is funnier than basically any human on

Lex, that has been in my family for months.

Now what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman is now in a position to live in 2 spatial and 2 temporal dimensions unlike the rest of us.

I clearly am only fit for 4 spatial dimensions, so I'm frozen, whereas you can double move.

which is funny because this is set in Austin time, so it's 4 p.m., and this is set in Los Angeles time.

Well, but that's just with an affine shift in mod 12.

But my point is, wouldn't that be interesting if there were 2 separate time scales and you had to coordinate both of those, but you didn't have to worry about what floor of the building because everything was on the ground floor.

Okay, That is the confusion that we're having.

And if you do 1 more show, then they're gonna put a watch on your ankle and you're only gonna have 1 spatial dimension that you can move around.

But my claim is that all of these are actually sectors of my theory in case we're interested in that, which is geometric unity, there is a 2-2 sector and a

And all of these sectors have some physical reality.

But that's the kind of thinking that we don't do.

When I say we have to get off this planet, people imagine, oh, okay, it's just Einstein plus some ability to break the law.

By the way, even though you did this for humor's sake, I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin.

But he was given a Super Bowl ring to look at and he, instead of just looking at it, put it on his finger and walked away with it.

So in the same way, I will, if you don't mind, walk away with this vid bit and taking the entirety of your life story with it because there's all these steps on it.

Right, but that's what we're talking about.

We're talking about, you wanna get into aliens, let's have an interesting alien conversation.

Let's stop having the typical free will conversation, the typical alien conversation, the typical AGI morality conversation.

It's like we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves because we're not making progress.

Time to have better versions of all these conversations.

Is there some version of the alien conversation that could incorporate the breaking of frameworks?

I mean, the key question would be, we've had the Pentagon release multiple videos of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us.

I just think it's also really fascinating to talk about the fact that those of us who were trained to call BS on all of this stuff, just had the rug pulled out from under us by the Pentagon choosing to do this.

You've opened the door for every stupid theory known to man.

Okay, now we're gonna have to listen to, well, hey, the Pentagon used to deny it, then it turned out there were UFOs, dude.

Whoever is in charge of lying to the public, they need a cost function that incorporates the damage and trust, Because I held this line that this was all garbage and all BS, now I don't know what to think.

There's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion, the breaking of frameworks, that involves the release of videos from the Pentagon, which is almost like another dimension that trust in itself, or the nature of truth and information is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling constantly, that is messing with my head to think about, because, I mean, do you, like, because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that into your study of the nature of reality.

It's like the constant shifting of the notation, the tools we use to communicate that reality.

And so like, what am I supposed to think about these videos?

I'm tired of these people, just completely tired of

The people on the Pentagon side or the people who are interpreting this stuff on the Pentagon side?

I'm tired of the authorities playing games with what we can know.

The fact that you and I don't, do you have a security clearance?

Some level of it for, because I was funding for DARPA for

You know, I am going to release whatever theory I have.

And my guess is that there is 0 interest from our own government.

And so the Chinese will find out about it the same time our government does.

Because Lord knows what they do in these buildings.

I watch crazy people walk in and out of the intelligence community, walk in and out of DARPA, and I think, wow, you're talking to that person?

We don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.

Do you think it's possible there's, the government is in possession of something deeply fundamental to our understanding of the world that they're not releasing?

So this is 1 of the famous distractions that people play with, the narrative.

Of alien life forms, spacecraft in possession, that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft.

I don't think the government really exists at the moment.

I believe, and this is not an idea that was original to me, there was a guy named Michael Teitelbaum who used to be at the Sloan Foundation, and at some point I pointed out that the US government had completely contradictory objectives when it came to the military and science.

And 1 branch said this, 1 branch said that.

I said, I don't understand, which is true, what does the government want?

He said, what makes you think that the people in those 2 offices have ever coordinated?

What is it that allows each office to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office?

And that's when I first started to understand that there are periods where the government coheres, and then there are periods where the coherence just decays.

And I think that that's been going on since 1945.

That there have been a few places where there's been increased coherence, but in general everything is just getting less and less coherent.

And that what war did was focus us on the need to have a government of people and mission, capacity, technology, commitment, ideology.

And then as soon as that was gone, different people, those who'd been through World War II had 1 set of beliefs, those born in the 1950s, or late 40s by the time they got to Woodstock, they didn't buy any

So coherence is the complete opposite of like, of bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy.

So coherence is efficient, functional government.

Because when you say there's no government, meaning there's no emergent function from a collection of individuals, It's just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices without any kind of efficient communication with each other on a single mission.

And so a government that is truly at the epitome of what a government is supposed to be is when a bunch of people working together.

Are we about the absence of a national culture so that we can all just do our own thing?

I've called this thing the USAN, the United States of Absolutely Nothing.

These are all different visions for our country.

So it's possible that there's a alien spacecraft somewhere and there's like 20 people that know about it and then they're kind of, it like as you communicate further and further into the offices that information dissipates, it gets distorted in some kind of way and then it's completely lost.

The power, the possibility of that information is lost.

We bought a house and I had this idea that I wanted to find out what all the switches did.

And I quickly found out that your house doesn't keep updating its plans.

As people do modifications, they just do the modifications and they don't actually record why they were doing what they were doing or what things lead to.

So there are all sorts of bizarre, like there's a switch in my house that says privacy.

Does it turn on an electromagnetic field that there's some lead shielding go over the house?

We have a system in which the people who've inherited these structures have no idea why their grandparents built them.

I'd be funny if there's a freedom of speech switch that you could also control.

because what they figured out is is that if they can just make sure that we don't have any public options for communication, then hey, every thing that we say to each other goes to a private company, private companies can do whatever they want.

And this is like 1 of the greatest moves that we didn't really notice.

Electronic and digital speech makes every other kind of speech irrelevant and because there is no public option Guess what?

There's always somebody named Sundar or Jack or Mark who controls whether or not you could speak and what it appears to be that is being said and whose stuff is weighted more highly than others.

And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite, Lord knows what is going on.

People are so busy making money that they are not actually upholding any of the values.

So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally against, it has this kind of libertarian, free, progressive sheen to it when it goes to Burning Man.

And then it quickly just imposes rules on all of the rest of us as to what we can say to each other if we're not part of the inner elite.

So what do you think the ideal of the freedom of speech means?

I keep getting lectured on social media by people who have no idea how much power the Supreme Court has to abstract things.

Right now, you have the concept of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

And the spirit of the law would have to say that our speech that matters is free, at least at the level of ideas.

I don't claim that I have the right to endanger your life with speech or to reveal your private information.

So I really am not opining about directed speech intended to smear you and that's a different kettle of fish.

And maybe I have some rights to do that, but I don't think that they're infinite.

What I am saying is that the freedom of speech for ideas is essential that the court abstract it and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are, because it really matters which abstraction you use.

The case that I really like is search and seizure.

If I have private data that I entered in my house that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house.

But I view, is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter of my house that I have the right to protect?

Or does my password extend the perimeter of my house to the data on the server that is located outside of my house.

These are court, our choices for the court and the court is supposed to pretend that they can divine the true intent of the framers, But all of the sort of, and I've taken to calling this the problem of internet hyenas, people with ready-made answers and LOLs and you're such a moron.

These folks love to remind you, it's a private company, dude, it can do whatever it wants.

No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are.

And just the way, for example, the Griswold decision found that there was a penumbra because there was too little in the Constitution, therefore there were all sorts of things implied that couldn't be in the document.

Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now that says Jack cannot do it over he wants.

It's really, so you say the courts, but it's also us, people who think about the world, It's you.

But the courts don't do this, we're toast.

Sure, but I don't feel like going down the drain.

Here's what I'm thinking about, because it's tricky how far it should extend.

Don't you think the interpretation of the law?

I think I'm trying to say something very simple, and it's just not gonna be popular for a while.

Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication.

And so, I can go to a public park and I can shout if I get a permit.

Even there, I think it was in the late 1980s in Atlanta, we came up with free speech zones where you can't protest at a convention, but you can go to a park 23 miles out and they'll fence off a little area where you can have your free speech.

No, speech is dangerous, ideas are dangerous.

And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of, that is very different.

But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous.

And people will die as a result of free speech.

The idea that 1 life is too much is preposterous.

Like why did we send, if 1 life is preposterous, why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy?

So 1 thing that I was clearly bothered by, and maybe you can be my therapist as well.

This is a little bit of a miscommunication on both of our parts then.

I was really bothered by Amazon banning Parler from AWS because my assumption was that the infrastructure, I drew a distinction between AWS, the infrastructure on which competing platforms could be created is different than the actual platforms.

So at the standard of the ideal of freedom of speech, I in my mind, in a shallow way perhaps, applied differently to AWS than I did to Twitter.

It felt that we've created a more dangerous world, that freedoms were violated by banning Parler from AWS, which I saw as the computing infrastructure which enables the competition of tools, the competition of frameworks of communication.

all, let me give you the internet hyena answer.

I don't understand, dude, just build your own Amazon.

Yes, well, so that's a very shallow statement, but it's also 1 that has some legitimacy.

We can't completely dismiss it because there's levels to this game.

Yes and no, but if you really wanted to chase that down, 1 of the great things about a person-to-person conversation as opposed to like, let's have 30 of our closest friends, whenever we have a conversation with 30 of our closest friends, you know what happens?

Well, 1 of my conversational techniques you mentioned you pushed back is, first, this childlike naivety and curiosity, but also- Real or simulated?

All right, so in this paradigm, how could you not see this coming?

I mean, I did a show with Ashley Matthews, who's the woman behind Riley Reid, and specifically about this.

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Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #163