Eric Weinstein is a mathematical physicist, podcaster, and intellectual. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Eric's Twitter: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein
Eric's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ericweinsteinphd
The Portal podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-portal/id1469999563

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:16 - Eddie Van Halen
9:56 - Leonard Cohen
17:52 - Battle between ego and humility
23:08 - Darkness and beauty
29:50 - Jimi Hendrix
32:38 - Good Will Hunting
36:46 - Revolutionary minds
48:19 - Next Elon Musk should come from MIT
52:44 - Love with save the world
58:00 - Are we headed toward a civil war?
1:09:34 - Joe Rogan
1:23:21 - Our political leaders
1:28:41 - Younger people should have more power
1:39:00 - The Portal
2:03:50 - Money
2:05:56 - Roger Penrose
2:13:36 - Jeffrey Epstein
2:32:14 - We need to get off this planet
2:35:11 - An update on Geometric Unity
2:41:03 - Gratitude

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The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, the third time we've spoken on this podcast.

He is the wise turtle, master oogway to my Kung Fu Panda, 1 of my favorite people to talk to in this world.

A complicated and fascinating mind that I'm grateful to have the chance to accompany in exploring this world through conversation on this podcast and on his, the latter called The Portal.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

First is Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability.

Second is Sun Basket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety into my culinary life.

Third is SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across.

I don't like looking at numbers, but somebody should.

And finally, ExpressVPN, The VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet.

Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that wherever this life takes me, I'm drawn to the possibility of having many more conversations with Eric through the years.

I think we have just the right kind of contrasting world views and a deep respect and appreciation of each other's life stories that creates for this magical experience in the realm of conversation that feels like we're always looking for something that we never quite find, but are always better for having tried.

I'm not sure how or why the universe has connected Eric and me, but it did.

And I would be a fool not to trust its judgment and enjoy the journey.

If somehow you like this podcast, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

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

Who's the greatest musician of all time, would you say?

We were just off camera talking about Eddie Van Halen.

It's a weird question, so I'm gonna give you a weird answer.

Okay, Jonathan Richford, the reason I'm picking on him is that he had a quote.

He was the front man of a group called the Modern Lovers.

And his quote was something like, "'We have to be prepared to play music.

"'When our instruments are broken, "'the electricity's out and it's raining.'" something like that.

And I thought that that quote was very interesting because what it said was, you have to be able to strip this thing down farther and farther back to get to something that is intrinsically musical.

So we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity.

And we're talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing.

I was never a Van Halen, the group fan, but I revered Eddie Van Halen's capacity for innovation.

Just, I saw him like, you know, Rodney Mullin, the skateboarder.

I had dreamed of having the 2 of them on the same podcast just to talk about what it's like to totally discontinuously innovate.

And you posted a video of Spanish fly, I think, and saying like, I didn't know the guitar could make those kinds of sounds.

The arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast, and the attacks from the hammer-ons, when they go at light speed as he did, particularly, and the reason I chose that was that I wanted to strip out the electronics because part of the claim will be is that he's a rock musician and a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar to sort of the electrified setup.

You know, his use of the whammy bar, for example, or the Frankenstrat that he built from different pieces, right?

All of those aspects, in my opinion, are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship.

That's why I chose Spanish Fly because everyone, of course, will go to something like Eruption or Running with the Devil, which is the first things that they heard that let them know that there was a new force erupting out of Southern California that was Eddie Van Halen.

It clearly touches your soul on many levels.

Is it deeper than just rocking out in your convertible Corvette 69?

I imagine Eric Weinstein is driving down the California highways blasting some music.

Is it just like being able to be carefree for moments of time, or

is there something more fundamental that connects the theory of everything, and physics, and life, and all of that?

How often do you have the chance, for example, to hear mathematics performed as you do in Bach?

Right, Like something with that kind of precision and elegance that can't really be grasped where, you know, to go back to Leonard Cohen's famous line, the baffled king composing, right?

Such a good song, but it's also like individual verses of that song are insanely important.

The baffled king is how we often make music.

We don't really understand what did we just do that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch, right?

And so it's a very strange thing that you should be able to have, think of it like you're a computer, you've got this weird open music port, you know, port 37.8, you know?

Like it's not even supposed to be there and suddenly somebody starts playing guitar and they're making you feel things.

Or you know, like in particular, particular instruments like the violin, it's so difficult, it's so unforgiving.

And when it gives up its secrets, it just, you know, it wraps its fingers around your heart and won't let go.

Sometimes I talk about head, heart, and loins.

When something can grab your head, heart, and your loins at the same moment and integrate them, There are very few opportunities to live like that.

And if you think about Eddie Van Halen, as far as your head, the musical innovations and the fact that he was drawing directly from the classical canon, really speaks to the idea that maybe rock is what somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it as being, an infinitely extensible medium.

In terms of heart, I always notice the smile on his face.

It's painful to look at an Eddie Van Halen solo now.

Sometimes you'll see the cigarette dripping off the side of his mouth and you're like, that's going to fucking kill you and I'm not even worried about it for you, I'm worried about it for me.

I don't even need to hear you play another note.

I just like knowing that you're in the world, that there is somebody that everyone looks to that nobody, I've never heard a guitarist say, I don't know.

You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius.

There are very few people like that in the world.

And then Loyen's, those leaps, that guy was incredibly good looking, skin-tight pants, super athleticism.

He completely owned the male sexuality of the stage, both being the completely dominant, sort of mythical alpha male, I hate that expression, but there you are, but also this kind of little boy with this mischievous smirk, and the sense that it all came together, how could you not eat that up?

You could just imagine the millions of young teenage boys who are just playing air guitar in their room, just basically dreaming of being that kind of God, the most perfect example of what a human being can be.

It is, and then, as in many of the cases with these bands, you get these multiple talents in the same outfit.

And I think that the original configuration with David Lee Roth, I mean, David Lee Roth is such a hot mess at all times.

I would love you to talk to David Lee Roth.

Like if the, that dance would be just gorgeous.

Probably not because I think he's very, I get the feeling that he's very smart and very dysregulated And I don't know that I could like, like bring him down

Well, I can also get pretty dysregulated, you know?

And so I don't know, I don't know whether it could be magic.

I don't know what you thought of his appearance on Rogan.

I loved it, but Joe and that, and Joe does this sometimes.

Sometimes he just sits back and listens, and he just lets the music play, which works really well.

I think you have a chance to jump into the chaos.

The places you'll go, you may not even talk about music for like hours.

It might just go to this, because he I think lives in Japan, like there's a weird, he's a- He's been in like

He chose to be kind of like, I don't know.

There's depth to that man that hasn't been explored by him either.

The things I feel when I listen to Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, or anything by him really, but that one-

You're doing this alternation between the 2 chords.

So 3 notes at the same time, 1 is called the tonic, or you have the major and the relative minor, and he's alternating between them.

There's only 1 note of difference between those 2 chords.

1 of them would be feeling sad, 1 of them would be more joyous, typically described.

And so by altering 1 note, it's the minimal amount to take you back and forth between joy and happiness as that's encoded in us.

So he starts off with, I heard there was a scene, David played the please the Lord, but you don't really care for music, do you?

That's really interesting because he's using this technique called bathos, right?

So the alternation between the sublime and the guttural or ridiculous or the mundane, right?

Well, the way I hear it, again, a great song allows for different interpretations.

You happen to be asking me, so I'm gonna impart some stuff that probably isn't in the song, but why it speaks to me, and it's what makes it great.

The way I hear it is He doesn't believe the audience.

Then what are you doing listening to this, you stupid idiots?

It goes like this is where he should put the description of where he is in the chord progression, which is the tonic.

And then he hits the fourth and the fifth, which are the 2 other major elements, the subdominant and the dominant, in functional harmony.

So he's describing the chord progression in real time in the lyrics.

There's 2 ways this can come about in other songs.

Like we had this example of, Every Time We Say Goodbye.

No, I think it was a Cole Porter, maybe, or Gershwin, maybe Porter, I don't know.

There is no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor.

Then there's times when it's duplicitous.

So for example, you'll have, I guess my favorite examples of this are Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.

Then what does he do with the lyrics in the tune?

Right, and so the idea is like, oh, okay, that was a head fake.

Right, and another 1 of these, you know, is Nina Simone's Feeling Good.

And sun up in the sky, You know how I feel.

That woman's voice, she doesn't give a damn.

And I feel it, but then what's the, duh-dum, duh-dum.

You're probably in some strip club with some last of your money.

If you think about it, contrast it with Ray Charles, for example.

He goes, well, my room has got 2 windows, But the sunshine never comes through.

It's the same sort of vibe as Nina, but she's claiming that she's in great shape.

So she's like a good case of the unreliable narrator.

Leonard Cohen to me is talking about the unreliable audience that's too cool to be with the performer on stage.

There are things that go with the music like the Cole Porter stuff, there's go against like the Johnny Cash.

I think these are the games that musicians play that the rest of us only notice subliminally.

Then he should say something about the relative minor or the, he's giving you the secret, the baffled king.

In other words, he doesn't know why it works.

Did Pachelbel know why Pachelbel's Canon would work?

Some music is discovered and some music is invented.

And he's talking about a musical discovery.

He's talking about the Pythagorean power of the wave equation and then superimpose.

There's 2 genius intellectual concepts behind music, 1 of which is the wave equation.

Usually we solve it for a one-dimensional medium because we're talking about strings or air columns.

Occasionally you're talking about things like handpans or steel drums or metallophones or gamelans, whatever.

And those have a wave equation too that's much more chaotic.

The other equation is this crazy thing that 2 to the 1912th is almost exactly equal to 3, which is what gave us even temperament.

And so the tension between those 2 things is in fact 1 of these most beautiful stories.

Inside of that system, that formula of the baffled king is a discovery.

The reason he's baffled, it's imagine that you took like a little brush and you started brushing off a pyramid under the sands.

You might think that you created the pyramid by your brushing, but in fact, somebody else did it.

And as creating 1 of the greatest songs of all time, and as he's doing it, he's baffled.

And he's, and it's matter, he's within the song.

And he, Leonard, is baffled, is my contention.

But he knows enough to know that he's baffled, right?

And so the idea is that he is composing, he has the audacity to compose as David.

And then in a later song, which I really wish we would discuss, that's totally dystopic and you will not like it at all, is The Future, which contains this line that I think I used in my episode with Roger Penrose on the portal.

The portal, the portal, the portal, the portal.

He says, I'm the little Jew that wrote the Bible.

So there is this way in which Leonard Cohen, I think, is constantly coming to the idea of being a biblical-like scribe.

And I think this is 1 of the great things that, you know, you see Dylan doing this with all along the watchtower.

You saw Warren Zeevon, who we should talk much more about, doing this with a song called "'I Was in the House When the House Burned Down." Do you know this

Warren Zeevon is 1 of the most important songwriters of our time.

And he's been largely forgotten by this generation.

But you know, Bob Dylan would sing 1 of his songs in tribute.

I've heard Bob Dylan, you know, very small number of songwriters really move him.

Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Warren Zevon.

By the way, Bob Dylan, if you're out there, appear on either 1 of our podcasts.

We need to get your voice into a new medium for a new group.

Honestly, you've been doing an amazing job in this space.

1 of the reasons I'm super excited to do this podcast again is that I've learned some things about what I don't do well.

And I also have sort of struggled with the question, should I do those things better?

Because what if it's, you know, I always use the same example of the fitted sheet when you're trying to put a queen-size fitted sheet on a king-size mattress.

He's like, okay, I got that corner squared away, then you get another corner that pops off and then you go back around.

I wonder whether I can improve my style in the ways in which, you know, I think it's just a recognition of a difference.

You do a better job of getting to the soul of a really top intellectual guest and making them accessible and presenting them as themselves for a huge number of people.

And I'd give my eye tooth to be able to do that.

Do you ever think about this, because I think about what is the greatest conversation I'll ever have?

In a sense, the portal, not to reduce it to anything, but there will be the greatest conversation.

You may have already had it, but it's very possible, if enough people like me can keep twisting your arm to keep doing the portal, please, that there'll be an amazing conversation.

1 of the questions that I ask myself is like, who is the person that I'm especially equipped, for some reason I'm convinced on Putin.

There's something in my head that says I can do this man better than anyone else in this world.

I got this thought in my head about it, I don't know why.

And I'm convinced, but I think the universe works in that way.

The way I would say it is that almost everybody who becomes a Supreme Court justice believes at a very early age they're going to become a Supreme Court justice.

Many people believe at an early age that they can do it, don't get there.

But of those who get there, almost all of them had this sort of, well, I call it pathological self-confidence.

And I do think you have pathological self-confidence and you also have humility.

And most people would hear those as a contradiction.

I think that you would not be able to get away with what you do if you didn't have the humility.

And so I think, you know, the great danger is that your equation becomes unbalanced.

That you either lose the humility or you lose the humility overwhelms the ego and the drive because right now you've got a Mexican standoff in your mind and the rest of us are just benefiting.

My Mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours.

But actually the person who that describes is Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel thinks more, people always say like, what does Peter think about X, Y, and Z, P, and Q?

It's like, well, Do you want communist Peter?

That's why he's successful, is that he's got all these minds fighting each other.

And so when people say, Peter is this or Peter is that, I just laugh.

Because nobody who knows him would describe him as having thoughts at the level that people are claiming.

And I do think that, you know, in my case, you know, there's also pathological epistemic humility.

Like, just, I know how little, I know how little I can do in 1 life.

And on the other hand, I know that if not, it's like Hillel's questions, if I'm not for myself, who will be for me?

At some level, there's a question about if I don't decide that someone is capable and that that somebody is me, if I apply that to everyone else on the planet, then nobody's gonna do anything.

And so I do think that 1 of the things that people like you and I get is, who are you to say that?

Yeah, but it's multiple minds, like you said.

Like this morning, I was feeling so good and confident about I could think no wrong.

And I remember last night clearly thinking that I'm the dumbest human who's ever lived and nothing I've ever said is worth anything.

But no, no, no, but this morning, I was the baddest motherfucker who's ever walked this earth.

I think it was the coffee, I'm not sure, maybe some sleep.

This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages, some of them being alcoholic, others containing caffeine.

I can't share the story behind it, but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge.

So I mean, I should have hit you for coffee because this is a morning, there's a morning show here.

So I put out a call that we get a chance to have this conversation and people ask these wonderful questions.

A few people asked about depression and suicide.

This is a Russian program, so we'll have to go there.

And I think about Leonard Cohen, and 1 of the things that always kind of broke my heart and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just, I don't know, for love in a person's life, is to hear how much depression was a part of Leonard Cohen's life and how much he suffered.

I guess 1 way, I'm not sure where we can go with this question, but do you think about the places that the mind can go?

like where the only escape out Is suicide, for example, that's the darkest version of it?

I really think suicide is a big place in suicidal ideation and self-harm.

It's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans.

And if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves, but we don't know whether that's coming because of a problem in brain chemistry, because of an event in their life, whether evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal, whether or not it might have a religious motivation.

There's too many different forms of self-harm.

It's something like the 10th largest killer, thereabouts.

And I think that you can look at it from different angles.

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Eric Weinstein: On the Nature of Good and Evil, Genius and Madness | Lex Fridman Podcast #134