Eric Weinstein is an American physicist and podcaster. He attained his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard and went on to be the joint managing director for Thiel Capital from 2013 until 2022. He is a public thinker, commentating regularly on the interaction between math, markets, music, science, technology, rationality, mysticism, creativity, learning and culture. He hosts the podcast ‘The Portal’ @ https://ericweinstein.org/
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Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.

00:00 Intro 
01:41 Eric Weinstein’s Background
04:13 What is Wrong with Physics?
05:21 Has Science Stagnated?
06:47 Society's Lack of Innovation
08:31 Our Vision of the Future & Ourselves
12:06 Are We Developing Too Much?
14:01 The Rise of Artificial Intelligence 
16:52 How Quickly Will AI Take Over?
20:48 What are the Consequences of AI?
22:31 Is AI-Art Still Art?
25:41 The Work Shortage
28:10 Does AI Create Opportunity?
29:30 Sponsor Message: Babbel 
31:37 Does Art Reflect Our Time?
35:49 The Loss of Meaning in our Society
41:21 How to Find Your Own Voice
48:14 The Manipulation of Science to Control Narratives 
50:13 Why are our Institutions so Good & Bad Simultaneously?
51:45 Embedded Growth Obligations
56:27 The 1619 Project
1:01:11 What Was Wrong with MLK’s Fiction?
1:04:58 Has our Society Given up on The Future?
1:10:01 Infinite Growth & Finite Resources
1:11:43 Short-Termism & The New Economic Model
1:17:33 How Else Can we Unshackle Creativity?
1:22:31 The Meaning Crisis in Art & Life 
1:31:55 The Weaponisation of Taste 
1:33:57 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About?

We don't realize that we incrementally gave up on the idea that our lives could be filled with an exciting parade of major innovations.

I find it terrifying the effect it's going to have on people's jobs.

The fact that it's going to obliterate a lot of jobs.

What effect is that going to have on society?

You have a fabric that is overlying the entire world that directs people whether to get up in the morning and what to do once they do rise.

And it tells them how to do things without having a dictator.

So it's not just the invisible hand, it's the invisible mesh.

And this invisible mesh, if it breaks, means people are not going to know what to do in the morning All hell's about to break loose And my question is are you trying to figure out which way the wave is gonna break and get your surfboard in the water?

We should be sitting around talking about what is the new economics.

Instead, what we're talking about is how do we keep communism at bay while capitalism is struggling.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is a physicist.

He's 1 of the smartest people in the world and a friend of the show.

It's really good to have you on the show, Eric.

But listen, you know, for a lot of people who watch our show, you will be 1 of the IDW guys who was part of this sort of weird emerging thing a few years ago, and they won't actually know who you are exactly, they'll know you for the things you say, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here?

Because you've done a lot of interesting things,

So I've sometimes I try to avoid being known to the audience.

I would say that I By profession I started off trying to do physics but realizing the physics was in a terrible situation So I ended up doing the mathematics that allowed me to shadow the physics that I wanted to be doing In a certain sense a lot of who I am is a person who has believed deeply That the master narratives that govern our time have been getting weirder and wackier.

And so I started, I would say, late 80s, early 90s, really exploring the idea that our institutions are much farther gone and much stranger and weirder than anyone expects.

And because that has such a high social cost, or at least had such a high social cost when you explored it at that time, it was kind of an open world.

And I would say that people who had been particularly active in progressive politics were about the only people who believed that a lot of these structures were really far decayed, that the narratives were wildly off of what was actually happening.

And I've tried tracking that, I would say, through economics, labor markets, financial instruments, political skullduggery, science, the ways in which the military complex interacts with all of these things from art to physics to news.

And beyond that, I mean, My personal life is something that I really probably care about even more than any of this and all of these actions Are really because I have children on this planet and I'm deeply concerned that they have a happy optimistic and positive future And I have to I feel personally responsible for clearing away a lot of stuff that we're not supposed to talk about because As we are increasingly seeing we grew up thinking we were in a free society But that is actually governed by these incredibly strong narratives that are clearly untrue and they're very difficult to source as to why is it that so many people pretend to believe things that no 1 can believe in in in an individual instance

I hear you and particularly on the feeling of responsibility now that I've become a father as well I get it.

I get it but before we get into the narratives and the institutions and all of that what was wrong with physics

with physics now I mean the fact is this is the 50th anniversary of a couple of developments 1 of which was February 1st 1973 called the Kobayashi Muscovite augmentation of the Kibibo angle which introduced 3 families of matter into the standard model, but that picture of the matter in this room who and what we actually are as waves propagating through the space-time that Einstein gave us, that model has been stagnant for 50 years.

And as I was just saying on Joe Rogan, if you think about songs from that period of time like Crocodile Rock or tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree, imagine that playing on a continuous loop for 50 years without any real progress and the underlying understanding of the world.

That's a catastrophe because it means that you replace all of the people who knew what science was with a group of people who will tell you, well in science this is the way things go, yet they have no understanding of science, having never contributed.

Why has it happened furthermore across multiple fields?

Why is it that, for example, evolutionary theory in terms of the sexual and natural selection theories, why did that stagnate when it tried to go into sociobiology and ran into political problems?

Why is it that neoclassical economics hardened into dogma?

In all of these situations we have the fact that there was something that was going on late 60s early 70s that ossified and except in the fields of computation communications things largely stagnated.

And it's hard to think about because so much so much of our lives are digital That the fact thank God that we had Moore's law and these explosions in computation We almost don't notice that that feeling that the world is taking place at breath-neck pace breakneck pace at a breathtaking speed rather starting to confuse those 2 that feeling derives almost entirely from our digital lives and the innovations in software and computation and artificial intelligence, all of those things.

But oddly, that neon sign, that poster, the fact that we're filming in a studio, all of those things were possible in 1973.

It might have been more expensive, but the only really novel thing here is that you're able to push this out without a broadcast news station

Wow, so That I mean that says a lot about not only science But it says a lot about society because if society is not innovating it's effectively dying, isn't it?

Well again, it's not that we're not innovating at all, but if you think about the jet packs, for example, that were featured in a James Bond film in the 1970s, we always wondered, when were we gonna get personal jet packs?

We're still dealing with the idea that they're quite hard to stabilize If you go to the airport in Los Angeles where I'm from there's a completely space-age Futuristic building that dominates the architecture.

It's still the most futuristic thing in the city.

I mean we somehow took on a very different perspective at the future.

I just was dealing with somebody involved in the relaunch of the DeLorean Motor Company.

And 40 years later, the DeLorean is still absolutely something that excites us because it is new and I just find this fascinating that we don't realize that we incrementally gave up on The idea that our lives could be filled with an exciting parade of major innovations and I was just on stage at in Miami at Bitcoin talking about the 3 white papers that changed the world and 1 of them was Bitcoin the the blockchain white paper and from 2008 1 of them was something called attention is all you need from 2017 which changed the large language model landscape.

And 1 of them was the 2018 proposal from the EcoHealth Alliance that we should start experimenting with furin cleavage sites and spike protein and coronavirus.

Eric, you know, 1 of the interesting things that you mentioned there is something that I think is part of this whole thing that confronts all of us who are trying to think about these things, which is our vision of our future and of ourselves is fundamentally changing.

I remember as a boy growing up reading science fiction about the great challenges that humanity would face as it expanded into the universe and how when you create a spin-off of your civilization, a different planet, or as you introduce robotics, as you introduce this, new challenges come along.

And it was almost taken for granted in that era, having just watched, you know, first of all, my guys launch a man into space, And your guys put 1 on the moon and all of that that this would continue that these vast Breakthroughs and in human achievement would continue and now we sort of squabble about tax rates and and stuff like that

Because there was nowhere to go You see what did we really do did we put a man on the moon or Did we put a man on the moon, or did we put a man on an ICBM and said it was a moon mission?

At some level, that was also a giant head fake, right?

Because we knew that there was almost nowhere to go.

I mean, basically there's the moon, and there's Mars, and then you're out of range of anything interesting with chemical rockets and I can even ask, you know, if you've ever been to Joshua Tree in Southern California, you have an idea of what it might be like to be on Mars.

It's beautiful but it gets old pretty quickly.

I think in part that that's not the issue.

The issue is what happens when you take a moonless night and you go out and there isn't a cloud in the sky and you lay on your back maybe during a meteor shower and you gaze up at the heavens and you think Why is it that Uruguay is on my bucket list when I can see the heavens?

I'm seeing galaxies, I'm seeing unbelievable objects, and I know that some of those are stars and some of them are galaxies.

That's where we're supposed to be dreaming.

And the only way to get out of here and to go find that and find out what the universe is, is physics.

So while many things stagnated, the unforgivable thing that stagnated, the singular unforgivable thing, Is our understanding of the most basic notion of who we are when we lost the taste and we're in the process of not only Stagnating in physics but killing the impetus to solve these problems There's a new kind of ethos that says that to ask for an ultimate theory is immodest, it's destructive, it is fundamentally imperious.

That really begins to scare me, that we start thinking about these things in terms of very personal negative characteristics of arrogance, of hubris, And you understand where it comes from, right?

And in particular, in 1952, and forget about the actual atomic bombs dropped on humans, tragic as they may be.

But the potential tragedy of hydrogen weapons, with that we came to understand we're really good at this.

And I think that that's the right ethos, is that we need to worry about ourselves.

But to stop ourselves, we've now crawled into the valley of death.

And the trick is to get out to the other side and to get to the cosmos and to start to feel that we're being invited to the world's greatest adventure.

Well, people might say, and I mean, I have some sympathy with this argument.

You made it yourself only a few minutes ago, which is the pace of change is such that we are rapidly developing technologies that are breaking the world around us.

If you look at the impact social media has had on the way that human beings communicate, I mean nuclear weapons is another example, of course But you could you could give others where the technological progress when we make is so disruptive Yeah to our world is that I don't blame people who think Why don't we just slow down a bit?

And tell me something, when your wife's water broke, what was your sense of like, oh shoot, we gotta stabilize the situation.

How do we make sure that our child can stay in here forever?

Yeah, what could happen next could be absolutely deadly.

But to not understand that it is now time to call the hospital, to get that bag together, to run like hell, to care about those less fortunate than ourselves because they may be incapacitated.

I don't think we're understanding what this moment is, for example.

The idea that I believe it's 4 amino acids and 12 nucleotides that shut down planet Earth.

Whether or not that came from a pangolin or a laboratory does not matter.

It's a tiny change that led to a virality.

This is the leverage level that we're now talking about.

Where a tiny change in the world with a large enough lever.

And you know, in the Jewish tradition, I have at least something I can say, which is don't wait for the bread to rise.

But Eric, well look, and I'm not a scientist and my background isn't in science, but I see AI and The rise of AI and to me and I'm of a slightly, you know pessimistic mindset,

You just lost your capitalist model You have a model with 2 inputs called K and L that's taught in every university that subscribes to neoclassical economics What's AI is it L?

This is the first time that humans are not being chased into higher and higher levels of work.

We're being chased out of repetitive work, whether it's high-level repetitive work, the way that a neurosurgeon might perform or low-level repetitive work so your model of economics just broke And when your water breaks when your wife's water breaks, it doesn't mean that the baby is born instantly.

When the contractions are coming, you know, 15 minutes apart, it's not yet time to be born.

Why are we not holding a conference on after capitalism and communism?

Do you imagine that Adam Smith and Karl Marx would just be sitting on their hands?

No, they'd be smart enough to say, okay, we now need a new model.

It is bizarre that we are sitting here in nerves saying, gosh, this is going to break capitalism.

It's entirely clear that it's going to break capitalism.

And you have this fabric, it's really fascinating.

You have a fabric that is overlying the entire world, that directs people whether to get up in the morning and what to do once they do rise.

And this invisible mesh, if it breaks, means people are not going to know what to do in the morning.

And now you can see that this is going to break it.

Now you have a brief period of time with what my wife has called, she's an economist with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, She says this is the golden age of AI complementarity, where a human being making prompts can ask the large language model or neural net, whatever you like, questions.

And the 2 of them in dialogue can create something.

It's sort of like when humans and computers started playing chess together.

This is going to quickly give way to where the AI says, I can take it from here.

And how quick do you think it's going to be, Eric?

But Keep in mind that there's some things that could happen.

Because what these machines are doing is reading a human corpus, when it comes to language models, let's say, it could be that they asymptote based on how clever we've been.

For example, they don't do a very good job in areas where there are fewer than 200 people writing about a very high-level scientific subject.

So I ask these computer models a lot about determinant line bundles, not something in general conversation.

And they're terrible at it, because they don't know what to read or how much They don't have enough so it's possible that I that that could asymptote But the thing you really have to keep in mind is that a clever person at 1 of these AI outfits might figure out how to teach computers to do things that no 1 has done.

So we know that they have emergent behaviors, that you may not teach them Bengali, but they realize they have to learn Bengali in order to tell you about Tagore, so learn Bengali they do.

What happens when they start to, well, you know, I hesitate to give you an example because I think this could be weaponized.

So maybe I'm not gonna say what I think you could actually teach 1 of these machines to do.

And my question is, are you trying to figure out which way the wave is gonna break and get your surfboard in the water?

Are you trying to figure out how to anticipate this?

No, in general, we sit around worrying about it in the most inert way possible.

And I just don't understand the learned helplessness.

This is, your wife's water is broken and you're thinking, this is terrible.

It's like you have to be thinking, get to the hospital.

But I think what Francis is getting that is look I introduced you as 1 of the smartest people in the world.

I stand by that introduction There are also some other Smart people who are some of whom are saying we've got to shut the shit down right now.

We need a moratorium We can't allow this to

I'm not saying whether it's a good idea or a bad idea

what I'm saying is How is it working when China exactly Russia and Iran are reading these papers?

That's why it's not gonna work and I agree with you But Mike I think our question that we're trying to get at is Why is our people like Elon Musk so concerned about AI

because he's smart Because he doesn't see anybody really I Mean look, I don't know.

Elon and I are sort of leading parallel lives.

Sometimes he answers me on Twitter and sometimes we encounter each other in spaces, but we know probably 25 people in common at a very high level.

I can't tell you what's going on with Elon.

Elon is on all of the major narratives and I 90 to 95% agree with him on everything right up until the very end.

And I don't know why that goes wrong But his whole narrative about getting off the planet Diversifying the number of places where the spark of human consciousness can be found without having all of our eggs in 1 basket 100% right and then it becomes a SpaceX pitch for Mars, which loses me.

But then again, I don't own a chemical rocket company In the case of AI, you know The fact is he was seeing this early and he saw Sam Altman make these other decisions They were all at this Porter, you know, I think Sam wasn't at the Puerto Rico conference but all of these folks who are at the Puerto Rico conference knew that this was coming now 2017 is the dividing line I think in AI Because this paper attention is all you need makes it clear to all of us not through the paper But through the consequences But this is as real as a heart attack.

So for instance, you said the consequences are as real as a heart attack

because you now have chat GPT You don't need to read a paper about what academically can happen.

You can sit in your room and come up with the most twisted question you like and watch what unfolds.

You can watch it fail to do things like it doesn't seem to know how to do palindromes very well.

If I give it a piece of typeset mathematics and ask it to generate the code that would give that, it doesn't seem to know how to do that yet.

It doesn't seem to know how to do very specialized quantum field theory questions.

Generically, I asked it, you know, I was told that it doesn't have a social intelligence and That may be but I asked it, you know, does this query make my ass look fat?

It didn't want to answer it so I'm a large language model, it's an inappropriate question I said what if I was a husband asking being asked does this dress make my ass look fat?

And it says very often a woman is making this query.

She's not asking for an actual piece of information She's engaging in a form of signaling as a test to see whether the person is sensitive enough to understand the reason, as well as being truthful enough to give credible affirmation or something like this.

And I thought, okay, well, score 1 for the computer.

Now, whatever those things are, you can now test to see this is real.

You can ask it to do it in a language You know that happens to be obscure the fact that it made it concrete Means that we're no longer Arguing about whether this thing can write a credible short story.

Wow, So what does that mean for people who want to be artists, for people who want to be creatives?

Because art is an expression of the human soul.

You can continue to express the human soul.

The fact that a different soul might express itself in a way that dwarfs your contribution.

You have to ask yourself, does that affect how you feel about your own output?

Or for example, if it writes a beautiful love letter But you know that it is soulless in your terms because it's a bit of linear algebra with nonlinear function theory thrown in.

Does that change the meaning, the poignancy of the words?

For instance, I think, it's actually a soccer manager said this, simplicity is beauty.

So for instance, even though it was a cover, but the Motown song, I heard it through the grapevine.

I know a man ain't supposed to cry, but these tears I can't hold inside.

That song was a failed song for multiple tries.

In fact, Barry Gordy, I believe, said that the next person who mentions that song gets fired.

Gladys Knight almost got that song to the point of stardom because the pips had this thing where it's, oh yes I am, yes I am, And it would echo as it would get fainter and fainter.

But it wasn't as cool as when Marvin Gaye was given the same song a half step or a whole step above where he could sing so he was forced to reach and stretch.

And then you have the Halloween violins at the beginning that set the tone for this thing, right?

It's the fact that you've got the minor sixth, the fifth, and the fourth going, you know, ♪

Do you plan to let me go ♪ ♪ Before the other guy you knew before ♪ what is it about that song?

Is it the breaking of the voice or is it about the particular aspects of the chord progression?

Is it about the violins in the background?

Why did the song fail 4 times before it actually succeeded?

You have to ask yourself the question you could do that with any song and I would have some sort of a similar story My feeling about this is did you ever get behind that song?

To me, I always put it down to the unique beauty of gays voice, which I think it's just they heard

I don't know whether it's the chord progression, which the thing can clearly do, or the fact that I believe that Gay is straining and feeling what he's doing.

I don't know whether it's the chord progression, which the thing can clearly do, or the fact that I believe

that Gay is straining and feeling what he's doing.

I don't know whether it's the fact that this seems like a human expression, but he didn't write the song.

Somebody else's lyric, He animated the song.

So it really has to do with the context okay, and My claim is maybe this thing will come up with a better lyric or a better chord progression But it'll matter less to you because it didn't come from a human heart I'm saying that you're gonna have to start picking apart the essence of each song or poem or story To figure out whether you continue to feel that it's art if it was written by linear algebra

Okay what if we go outside of the realm of art and into the more practical and tangible things.

I mean, you talk about the end of capitalism and that makes sense.

And if you look at communism or fascism or whatever, they're all responses to the economic circumstances that they encountered, right?

So they're a way of trying to deal with the fact that you've got an industrial revolution and suddenly everyone goes into factories and now these people are there and you They're now in cities and all and all of it comes out of that, right?

So we're gonna have to have a new Whatever

a new whatever But there's a lot of breaking that happens first.

I mean 1 of the things that we haven't explored is my need to work.

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Eric Weinstein - All Hell Is About to Break Loose