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

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. Quick mention of our sponsors Indeed hiring site theragun, Muscle Recovery Device, Wine Access Online wine Store, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. 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. To have any chance at truth, I think we have to take risks and make mistakes in conversation and then learn from those mistakes. Please try not to close your mind and heart to others because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea. Try to assume that the people in this conversation, or just people in general, are good but not perfect and far from it, but always striving to add a bit more love into the world in whatever way we know how. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman. 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 extraterrestrial 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 one, 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 unless 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 worlds 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 will 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. Right. So whatever these things are probably has an analog of the bilipid layer so that cells can get rid of the chaos on one 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 come here, they would have a deep understanding of the physics of the universe sufficient to have arrived here.

Well, there's two 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 is, 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. First of all, I want to say this. My purpose when I come on to your show and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you. I can sit inside all of those. It's to give you better audio and video because I think we've been on an incredible role. I really love what you do. 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. Beautiful. 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. And I think that that's fascinating. 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 and what does it even mean. So one of the things I think about a lot is worlds with more than one temporal dimension. It's very hard to think about more than one 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 one freakish case of relativity theory in physics that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions. Fascinating.

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

Yes. You know, we have these three kinds of equations that are very important to us. We have elliptic, hyperbolic and parabolic. Right. And so the idea is, if. 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 going to form an elliptic object called a minimal surface. Then when I pop that and blow through it, you're going to hear a noise that's going to travel to you by a wave equation, which is going to be hyperbolic, but then the garlic breath is going to diffuse towards you and you're eventually going to be very upset with me according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic. So those are the three 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 one temporal dimension because I think almost no one studies that.

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

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

Okay, so, okay, that is the place where we come from. Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility of breaking the frameworks with two versus zero 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 want to 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? Third Avenue, that's one coordinate, 34th street, that's the second coordinate. And go up to the 17th. And what time is that? Oh, 12 noon. All right, well, now imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a particular height in a building. It's all flat land. But I'm going to give you two temporal cords. So meet me at 5pm and 12 noon at the corner of 34th and 3rd. That gets to be too mind blowing. I've got two separate watches, and presumably.

That'S just specifying a single point in those two different dimensions, but then being able to travel along those dimensions.

Let me see your right hand. You have no watch on that? No. Okay. I'm very concerned, Lex, that you're going through life without a wristwatch. That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch. I want you to wear it.

This guy is funnier than basically any human on Earth.

Lex, that has been in my family for months. It's a Fitbit. Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman is now in a position to live in two spatial and two temporal dimensions. Unlike the rest of us, I clearly am only fit for four. Four spatial dimensions. So I'm frozen. Whereas you can double move.

I can double move. Which is funny because this is set in Austin time. So it's 4pm 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 two separate timescales 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 floor. Okay? That is the confusion that we're having. And if you do one more show, then they're going to put a watch on your ankle, and you're only going to have one 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 3, 1 and a 1, 3 and a 0, 4 and a 4, 0. And all of these sectors have some physical reality. We happen to live in a 1, 3 sector, 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.

Am I going to get whacked?

No, not quite. But he was given a Super bowl ring to. To look at, and he, instead of just looking at it, put it on his finger and walked away with it.

Robert Kraft.

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

Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.

And where have I been?

Exactly right. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about, you want to 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?

Well, I think so. I mean, the key question would be, we've had the Pentagon release multiple videos of strange UFO 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. And you know what the effect of that is? You've opened the door for every stupid theory known to man. My Aunt saw a ghost. Okay, now we're going to 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 do like, because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that into your study of the nature of reality is like the constant shifting of, of the notation, the tools we use to communicate that reality. And so like, what am I supposed to think about these videos? Is it, is it a complete distraction? Is it a kind of cosmic joke?

I don't know. But you know what? I'm tired of these people, just completely.

Tired of these, the, the, the people on the Pentagon side or the people who are interpreting this stuff on the Pentagon side.

I'm tired, entirely 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 funded for DARPA for a while.

I don't have a security clearance. You know, I am going to release whatever theory I have. And my guess is, is that there is zero interest from our own government. And so the Chinese will find out about at 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. That's really fascinating to me. We don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.

Complete lack of transparency. Do you think it's possible the government is in possession of something deeply fundamental to understanding of the world that they're not releasing? So this is one, one thing is this is one of the famous distractions that people play with the narrative.

Assume that that were true of alien.

Life forms, spacecraft in possession. That the government is in possession of alien spacecraft.

Assume that we're narrative. Yeah, 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, 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 one branch said this. One branch said that. I said, I don't understand. Which is true. What does the government want? He said, you think there's a government? And I said, what do you mean? He said, what makes you think that the people in those two 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. 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, a people, a mission, capacity, technology, commitment, ideology. And then as soon as that was gone, you know, different people. Those who'd been through World War II had one set of beliefs. Those born in the 1950s, you know, or late 40s. By the time they got to Woodstock, they didn't buy any of that.

So coherence is the. Is it 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, what are we about?

Are we about freedom? Are we about growth? Are we about decency and fairness? 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 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. I don't know what privacy is. Does it turn on an electromagnetic field that does some lead shielding go over the house? That's what we have. 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, then it would be perfect metaphor.

Well, that's different, because what they figured out 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 through a private company. Private companies can do whatever they want. And this is like one 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 can speak and what it appears to be that is being said, and whose stuff is weighted more highly than others. It's an absolute nightmare. 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. 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?

Well, this is very interesting. 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 a 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. 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 the. 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 are 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 whatever he wants.

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

It's you, it's the courts. But the courts don't do this. We're toast.

But we can still think about it.

I mean, sure, but I, 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. I mean, that's an ongoing conversation, don't you think? The interpretation of the law.

I think I'm trying to say something very simple and it's just not going to be popular for a while. Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication. Print or shouting in a public park. And so, you know, 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. You bet you can go to a park 20, 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. We are a country about danger and risk. And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of that is very different. So forget a lot of that stuff. But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous and people will die as a result of free speech. The idea that one life is too much is preposterous. Like, why did we send. If one life is preposterous, why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy? I just don't get this.

So one thing that I was clearly bothered by, and maybe you could be my therapist as well, I thought you were mine. This is a little bit of a miscommunication on both of our parts then, because who's paying who for this? 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 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. What do you think about this?

First of all, let me give you the Internet hyena answer. I understand, dude, just build your own Amazon.

Yeah, right. Yes. Well, so that's a very shallow statement, but it's also one 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. One 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? It's like passing light through a prism. Every person says something interesting and as a result, it's always muddled, like nothing ever resolves.

Well, one of my conversational techniques you mentioned, you pushed back is first is childlike naivety and curiosity, but also real or simulated? Real, I'm afraid.

40% real. All right, so in this paradigm. Yeah. 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. It was about the idea that if I move away from politics and go towards sexual, I know that there's always a move to use the infrastructure to shut down sex workers. And in this case, we had Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration. We have a positive passion for people who want to solve problems that they don't like this company, they don't like that company. Payday loans would be another one. And so you have legal companies that are harassed by our financial system that you can't, you know, as Riley Reed. Ashley couldn't get a mailchimp account, according to her, if I understand her correctly. And this idea that you charge these people higher rates because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards, even if their chargebacks are low. Yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment. There's something about everybody who shows up at Davos. They get drunk in the Swiss Alps and then they come back home and they coordinate, and they coordinate things like Build Back Better. We don't really understand what Build back better is, but my guess is that Build back better has to do with extremism in America. How do we shut down the Republican Party as the source of extremism? Now, I do think the Republican Party was cut very extreme under Trump, and I do believe that that was responsive to how extreme the Democratic Party got under Clinton first and then Obama and then Hillary. And in all of these circumstances, it's amazing how much we want to wield these things as weapons. Well, our extremism is fine because we pretend that antifa doesn't exist and we don't report what goes on in Portland. But your extremism, my God, that's disgusting. This is the completely ridiculous place that we're in. And by the way, our friends in part are coked up on tech money, and they don't appear to hold the courage of their convictions at a political level because it's not in keeping with shareholder value. At some level, shareholder value is the ultimate shield with. With which everyone can cloak themselves.

Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, and I'm not sure it was a good financial decision for Twitter.

Right.

Perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong.

Well, are you thinking locally, are you thinking if Twitter refused to. Well, if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump, what is the odds that the full force of the antitrust division might find them? I don't know.

Oh, I see. I see. So there's a complicated thing.

Well, there's a. Look, these guys are all having a discussion in very practical terms. You know, you can say, you can imagine the sorts of conversation. Jack, Mark, Slender. We're really glad you're all here. We're all trying to sing from the same hymnal. And row in the same direction. We understand free speech, we're completely committed to it, but we have to draw along with extremism. Guys, we just need, we need, we need to make sure we're all on the same page.

Well, they use the term violence too, and they, I think, over apply it. So basically anybody, I'm telling you, I'm. I say dumb things to, to incentivize thoughtful conversation.

Well, whatever these things are, there is no trace. Like, how old are you, Lex? You're in your mid-30s?

Yeah. To late 40s?

Mid, late 20s to late 40s? Yeah. Somewhere in there.

That's the demographic.

I do think that partially what's happened is that your group has never seen functional institutions. These institutions have been so compromised for so long, you've probably never seen an adult. Sometimes I think Elon looks like an adult. I know that he has a wild lifestyle, but I also see him looking like an adult.

What does an adult look like exactly?

Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things, speaks carefully, thinks about the future beyond their own lifespan. Somebody who has pretty good idea of how to get things done, isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions, is more focused on breaking new ground than playing rent seeking games. I mean, I really had a positive. I was so completely chaste. When Elon Musk ended up as the world's richest person, he was like, well, that's interesting. Back to work. It's just like, that's what an adult would do, that's what a grownup would do. And it just made weirdly I said something about isn't it amazing that the world's richest person knows what a Lagrangian is? And he made a terrible Lagrange joke about potentials. But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult. And I can tell you that the Internet hyenas will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is for pumping his stock price, talking his book and all this stuff. Shut up.

So looking at the world seriously and rigorously, you're saying that the people who are running tech companies or running the mediums on which we can exercise the ideal of free speech are not adults?

I think not. I think first of all, a lot of them are Silicon Valley utopian businessmen where you talk a utopian line and you use it. You've heard my take, which is that the idealism of every era is the COVID story of its greatest thefts. And I believe that in many ways the idealism of Silicon Valley, about connecting the world, a world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera is really about the software eating the world. As Marc Andreessen likes to say it. There are all these legacy properties and by simply being a bad tech version of something that previously existed, like a newspaper, you could immediately start to dwarf that by aggregating newspapers in their digital versions because digital is so much more powerful as a result. Yes, we have lots of man children wandering around what once was the Bay Area and is now Austin and Miami and other places, maybe Singapore, that all of these people, these are friends of ours and they're brilliant with respect to a certain amount of stuff, but none of them can get off the drip. It's amazing that none of them have FU money. We've got billionaires who don't have FU money.

Okay. I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence, and not just Jack Dorsey, by everybody that was banning people. And then this word violence was used as a kind of just like extremism and so on to without much reason behind it. You think it's impossible for Jack Dorsey, anybody else to be, as you said, an adult, a grown up and reason?

Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grown up.

It seems like he is. Yeah, he's. He's as under pressures as you've discussed.

He.

It seems that he's been on the verge of almost being quite serious and transparent and real.

I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went. And I worry that that must be something behind the scenes that I can't.

See from my perspective. What I think is the stress, the burden of that when people are screaming at you.

Jack is a Zen monk. He really is. Yeah. Jack is an incredibly impressive person intellectually, morally, spiritually, at least for a couple of meetings. I don't know him very well, but I'm very impressed by the person I met and I don't know where that person is and that terrifies me.

But do you think somebody could step up in that way?

No.

So it does. Can. Does a human being have the capacity to be transparent about the reasoning behind the banning? Or do you think all banning, eventually. All banning of people from mediums of communication is eventually destructive or it's impossible for human beings to reason with ourselves about it?

Well, let's, let's see what the problem is. So my phone has been on airplane mode. I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to take a picture of Lex Fridman now. If I can, I'm going to tweet that picture out.

Great.

But here's the weird part about it. Yeah. That picture sitting with Lex today.

This ladies and gentlemen, is called the Sausage is made.

Okay. In so doing, yes. I have just sent a picture of you and a tiny piece of text all over the planet that has arrived at if statistics tell the truth, just under half a million different accounts.

And then more from sharing and so on.

Well, some of those accounts are dead. We don't really know how many places it went. But the key issue with that tweet is that that is a non local phenomenon. Yes. So I just broadcasted to an entire planet. Somebody in Uganda is reading that at the same time as somebody in Uruguay. There is no known solution to have so many people with the ability to communicate non locally. Because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech inside of the Constitution. Friction, locality. There were all sorts of other aspects to speech. So if you think about speech as a bundle.

I like this.

Then it got unbundled. And some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on to retard the impact of speech aren't present. And we don't have the courage to say, I wonder if the First Amendment really applies in the modern era in the same way. Or we have to work through an abstraction. Either we probably have to amend the Constitution or we have to abstract it properly. And that issue is not something we're facing up to. I watch us constantly look backwards. We don't seem to try to come up with new ideas and new theories. Nobody really imagines that we're going to be able to wisely amend the Constitution anymore inside of the United States. Many people abroad will say, why are these guys talking about the U.S. it's a U.S. centric program. Well, that's because nobody knows where this program lives. The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be in a physical place together is also bizarre. It could be anywhere. It doesn't really matter that it happens to be here. So the difference between logical, between physical, local, non local, frictional, non frictional, it's the same thing with firearms. Nobody imagine that the Gatling gun was going to be present when you had to reload a musket.

And that's fascinating to think about. I mean, you're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom that seems so foundational to this nation, to what made this nation great and perhaps much of the world that is great, made it great, is changing completely. Can we try to reason through how the ideal Freedom of speech is to be changed. I guess I'm struggling. It feels really wrong. Perhaps because I wasn't paying attention to it. It feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump from Twitter to ban not just the president, that's really wrong to me, but this particular human for being divisive. But then when there is an incitement of violence, that is an overused claim. But perhaps there was actual brewing of local violence happening. So one of the things I know was happening on Parler is people were scheduling meetings together in physical space. So you're now going. Going back from this dynamic social, large scale. People from Uganda, people from all over the world being able to communicate. You're now mapping that into now back meeting in the physical space. That is similar to what the founding.

But if the violence were digital, if ransomware suddenly was unleashed.

True.

The key issue is the abstractions. So what was freedom of speech as a bundle?

And now it's.

And then how do we abstract the bundle into the digital era?

Do you think we just need to raise the question and talk about it? Do you have. Do you have ideas?

Because sure, I have ideas, but the key point is that I'm not even welcome in mainstream media. I've never seen you on mainstream media. Do you do mainstream media?

No.

So we exist in part of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story, which I've called the gated institutional narrative. And the institutions pretend that they plug their fingers in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of msnbc. Talking to CNN about what was in the New York Times as covered by the Washington Post. And so that's effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they, you know, the undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper. Okay, well, that's very different than mma.

You've recently been on Glenn Beck's program.

Yeah.

And there was this kind of. One of the things you've talked about is being able to have this conversation. I don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside the mainstream media, but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews.

You're right.

Having a nuanced or just like a respectful conversation that's grounded in mutual.

But we can't have the reality because the main model is. Is the center, both left and right, is in the process of stealing all the wealth that we built up. And they've organized the extremes into two LARPing teams that I've called Magistan and Wokistan. And then you have Everybody who isn't part of that complex, all seven of us, the number of us who are able to earn a living looking at all of these mad people playing this game. There's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks are trying to look at price action. And somebody says, this doesn't make any sense. And somebody will say, it's just the local stealing from each other. And that's really what we have. We have. We've got the leaders of Magistan and Wokistan championing these two teams is sponsored by the center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver and cut the paintings out of the frames. That's what you and I are looking at. So when you ask me, do you have any ideas about the abstraction for free speech, I've never met Mark Zuckerberg. I've never met Sundar Pichai. I never met Larry Page. I was once in a room with Sergey Brin. I've never spoken to Elon Musk. I hang out with Peter Thiel. But we have a very deep relationship. But I don't really speak to that many other people, sort of at this level. We're not having any kind of smart conversation at a national level. In fact, it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox in which we could play together. There's no place that we actually talk except long form podcasting. And by the way, they've found, you see what's going on with like, Alex Stamos and the Hoover Institution. We've, you know, there's a loophole left. Long form podcasting allows people to speak at levels above daytime cnn. It's like, well, why do you think they're not watching daytime cnn?

But, you know, that's, that's just silly journalism. They currently have no power to displace podcasting. That's why it's so powerful. RSS feed. I mean, that's why the big challenge with Joe Rogan and Spotify is like, there's this dance that's fascinating to see is Joe Rogan is not part of the system. And then he's also un cancelable. And there's this tension that's happening.

Well, listen to Howard Stern, though. Howard Stern became much less relevant. So if they can't control Joe by bringing him in house, the key question is, is he going to continue? Like, you know, this Joe says this thing about FU money. Yeah. Joe's one of the only people with FU money who's actually said fu. Yeah. I don't understand this. I don't have FU money.

What exactly can we break apart FU money? Because I always thought I've been fortunate enough to always have FU money in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary in the United States.

This is the stoic point, which is you can live on rice and beans. You're uncancellable because you're always rich relative to your needs. Right.

Isn't that FU fundamental? FU money? Why do you say that tech billionaires don't have FU money?

When you need to hire private security to protect your family, how do you protect your two children?

I don't have those yet.

Bingo. Yeah. My point is that FU money insulates everything that you care about. It's not just about you.

So you're saying as the level of responsibility grows the amount of money required for fu.

We have a war going on. The war is on. Academic freedom. Academic freedom used to be present in the system as a. In terms of the idea we. We trust our elite. Now we have an idea like, you want to be the elite, you know, you want to lord above us. That's like, first of all, there's like a populist, anti elitist thing. Then there's the idea that we're going to defer tenure for forever. Then we're going to tell people, stay in your lane. Your tenure is only good for your own particular tiny micro subject. Then we're going to also control your grants and we'll be able to load up your teaching load if we don't like who you are. And we'll make your life absolutely impossible. We lost academic freedom and we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster. And then we lost funding so that people were confident that they would have the ability to do research no matter what they said. And as a result, what you find is a world in which there's no ability to get people to say, no, I'm not going to sign your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath. I won't sign any loyalty oath. Get the hell out of my office. F you.

F you. And you're connecting money to that?

Well, my point is that academic freedom is. The whole idea behind it, was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire on a much smaller salary. Right. Okay, we've lost that. Yeah. The only reason, in part, that I wanted to go into academics as a profession as opposed to wanting to do physical or mathematical research. The great prize was freedom. Ralph Gomery of the Sloan foundation, previously of IBM Research, pointed at, he says, if you lose freedom, you lose the only thing we had to offer. Top minds. Top minds value their intellectual freedom and their physical and economic security at a different level than other human beings. And so people say, you know, I don't understand, dude. You have the ability to do X, Y, and Z. What's the problem? It's like, well, I value my ability to raise the middle finger as an American practically above everything else.

I want to talk to you about freedom here in the context of something you've mentioned, which one way to take away freedom is to put a human being into a cage to create constraints. The other one that worries me is something that I think you've spoken to Twitter a little bit on Twitter is we bleed freedom by kind of slowly scaring you into not doing, not expressing the full spectrum of.