Eric Weinstein: Geometric Unity and the Call for New Ideas & Institutions | Lex Fridman Podcast #88

The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, the second time we've spoken on this podcast. He's a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of the Portal podcast, a part of which he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of geometric unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts to arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics. This conversation was recorded recently in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis, I'm sending love your way. Stay strong. We're in this together. We'll beat this thing. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter lexfridman, spelled F R I D M A n. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use Code Lex Podcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App does fractional share trading, let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes to create the abstraction of the fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel. So big props to the Cash App engineers for solving a hard problem that in the end provides an easy interface that takes a step up to the next layer of abstraction of the stock market, making trading more accessible to new investors and diversification much easier. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store, Google Play and use Code Lex podcast, you get $10. And Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. Do you see a connection between World War II and and the crisis we're living through right now?

Sure. The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these abstractions, like everyone, should just do exactly what he or she wants to do for himself and leave everyone else alone. None of these abstractions work in a global crisis, and this is just a reminder that we didn't somehow put all that behind us.

When I hear stories about my grandfather who was in the army and so the Soviet Union, where most people die when you're in the army, there's a brotherhood. That happens. There's A love that happens. Do you think that's something we're going to see here?

We're not there. I mean, what the Soviet Union went through, I mean, the enormity of the war on the Russian doorstep, this is different.

What we're going through now is not.

We can't talk about Stalingrad and Covid in the same breath yet. We're not ready. And the sort of, you know, just the sense of like the Great Patriotic War and the way in which I was very moved by the Soviet custom of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day. It's like the happiest day of your life. You have to say thank you to the people who made it possible. We're not there. We're just restarting history. I've called this on the ROGAN program. I called it the great nap. The 75 years with very little by historical standards in terms of really profound disruption.

Wouldn't you call it the great nap? Meaning lack of deep global tragedy?

Well, lack of realized global tragedy. So I think the development, for example, of the hydrogen bomb was something that happened during the great nap. And that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel fear, didn't know anxiety. But it was to say that most of the violent potential of the human species was not realized. It was in the form of potential energy. And this is the thing that I've sort of taken issue with, with the description of Steven Pinker's optimism is the. If you look at the realized kinetic variables, things have been getting much better for a long time, which is the great nap. But it's not as if our fragility has not grown, our dependence on electronic systems, our vulnerability to disruption. And so all sorts of things have gotten much better. Other things have gotten much worse, and the destructive potential has skyrocketed.

Is tragedy the only way we wake up from the big nap?

Well, no. You could also have jubilation about positive things, but it's harder to get people's attention.

Can you give an example of a big global positive thing that could happen?

I think that when, for example, just historically speaking, HIV went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with for a very long period of time. It would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday. Like all at once you knew that things had changed. And so the bleed in somewhat kills the sort of the Wednesday effect where it all happens on a particular day at a particular moment. I think if you look at the stock market here, there's a very clear moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus. I think that with respect to positives, the moon landing was the best example of a positive that happened at a particular time. Or recapitulating the Soviet American link up in terms of Skylab and Soyuz.

Right.

Like, that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting in orbit. And so, yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful and amazing happens, you know, but it's just there are fewer of them. That's why, as much as I can't imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event when you have like 30,000 people waiting and, you know, like she says, yes, it's pretty exciting. So I think that we shouldn't discount that.

So how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of the global suffering that we're going to experience with this crisis?

I can't figure this one out. I'm just not smart enough. Something is going weirdly wrong. They're almost like two separate storylines in one storyline. We aren't taking things nearly seriously enough. We see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses. We hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage. And that's a very terrifying story. On the other hand, there's this other story which says there are tons of ventilators someplace. We've got lots of masks, but they haven't been released. We've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used. And it's very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling that they both must be true simultaneously and they can't both be true in any kind of standard way. And I don't know whether it's just that I'm dumb, but I can't get one or the other story to quiet down. So I think, weirdly, this is much more serious than we had understood it. And it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the same time. And that we're not being given the tools to actually understand. Oh, here's how to interpret the data. Or here, the issue with the personal protective equipment is actually a jurisdictional battle or a question of who pays for it, rather than a question of whether it's present or absent. I don't understand the details of it, but something is wildly off in our ability to understand where we are.

So that's policy, that's institutions. Do you think about the quiet suffering of millions of people that have lost their job. Is this a temporary thing? I mean, my ear is not to the suffering of those people who have lost their job or the 50%, possibly of small businesses that are going to go bankrupt. Do you think about that quiet suffering and how that might arise itself?

Could be. Not quiet too. I mean, it could be a depression. This could go from recession to depression, and depression could go to armed conflict and then to war. So it's not a very abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where we can begin with quiet suffering and anxiety and all of these sorts of things and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress and all sorts of things. But look, anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in a. I mean, think about this as an incredible experiment. Imagine that you proposed, hey, I want to do a bunch of research. Let's figure out what changes in our emissions, emissions profiles for our carbon footprints when we're all indoors, or what happens to traffic patterns or what happens to the vulnerability of retail sales as Amazon gets stronger, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I believe that in many of those situations we're running an incredible experiment. And am I worried for us all? Yes, there are some bright spots, one of which is that when you're ordered to stay indoors, people are gonna feel entitled. And the usual thing that people are going to hit when they hear that they've lost your job. You know, there's this kind of tough love attitude that you see, particularly in the United States, like, oh, you lost your job, poor baby. Well, go retrain, get another one. I think there's going to be a lot less appetite for that because we've been asked to sacrifice, to risk, to act collectively. And that's the interesting thing. What does that reawaken in us? Maybe the idea that we actually are nations and that your fellow countrymen may start to mean something to more people. It certainly means something to people in the military. But I wonder how many people who aren't in the military start to think about this as like, oh, yeah, we are kind of running separate experiments, and we, we are not China.

So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come. From my perspective, we are a part of experiment, but I don't feel like we have access to the full data, the full data of the experiment. We're just like little mice.

Yeah.

In a large.

Does this one make sense to you, Lex?

I'm, I'm romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to World War II. So I keep connecting to Historical events and making sense of them through that way. Or reading the Plague by Camus, like almost kind of telling narratives and stories. But I'm not hearing the suffering that people are going through because I think that's quiet. Everybody's numb currently. They're not realizing what it means to have lost your job and to have lost your business. There's kind of a. I'm afraid how that fear will materialize itself once the numbness wears out. And especially if this lasts for many months and if it's connected to the incompetence of the CDC and the WHO and our government and perhaps the election process. You know, my biggest fear is that the elections get delayed or something like that. So the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have. That turns to panic, that turns to anger. That anger.

Can I just play with that for a little bit? Sure. What if, in fact, all of that structure that you grew up thinking about, and again, you grew up in two places, right? So when you were inside the U.S. we tend to look at all of these things as museum pieces. Like, how often do we amend the Constitution anymore? And in some sense, if you think about the Jewish tradition of Simcha Torah, you've got this beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn in calligraphy. That's very valuable. And it's very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered. And so one day a year, we dance with the Torah and we hold this incredibly vulnerable document up and we treat it as if it was Ginger Rogers being led by Fred Astaire. Well, that is how you become part of your country. In fact, maybe the election will be delayed. Maybe extraordinary powers will be used. Maybe any one of a number of things will indicate that you're actually living through history. This isn't a museum piece that you were handed by your great great grandparents.

But you're kind of suggesting that there might be like a community thing that pops up, like, as opposed to an angry revolution. It might have a positive effect of.

Well, for example, are you telling me that if the right person stood up and called for us to sacrifice PPE for our nurses and our MDs who are on the front lines, that people wouldn't reach down deep in their own supply that they've been stocking and carefully storing them, just say, here, take it, like right now, an actual leader would use this time to bring out the heroic character. And I'm going to just go wildly patriotic because I freaking love this Country. We've got this dormant population in the US that loves leadership and country and pride in our freedom and not being told what to do. And we still have this thing that binds us together. And all of them, the merchants of division, just be gone.

I totally agree with you. There's a. I think there is a deep hunger for that leadership. Why hasn't that. Why hasn't one?

Because we don't have the right Surgeon General. We have a guy saying, you know, come on, guys, don't buy masks. They don't really work for you. Save them for our healthcare professionals. No, you can't do that. You have to say, you know what? These masks actually do work. And they more work to protect other people from you, but they would work for you. They'll keep you somewhat safer if you wear them. Here's the deal. You've got somebody who's taking huge amounts of viral load all the time because the patients are shedding. Do you want to protect that person who's volunteered to be on the front line, who's up sleepless nights? You just change the message. You stop lying to people. You just.

Yeah.

You level with them. It's like. It's bad.

Absolutely. But that's. That's a little bit specific. So you. You have to be just honest about the facts of the situation. Yes, but I think you were referring to something bigger than just that. Yeah, it's inspiring. Like, you know, rewriting the Constitution, sort of rethinking how we work as a nation.

Yeah. I think you should probably, you know, amend the Constitution once or twice in a lifetime so that you don't get this distance from the foundational documents. And part of the problem is that we've got two generations on top that feel very connected to the US they feel bought in, and we've got three generations below. It's a little bit like watching your parents riding the tricycle that they were supposed to pass on to you. And it's like, you're now too old to ride a tricycle. And they're still whooping it up, ringing the bell with the streamers coming off the handlebars. And you're just thinking, do you guys never get bored? Do you never pass a torch? Do you really want it? We had five septuagenarians, all born in the 40s, running for president of the United States when Klobuchar dropped out. The youngest was Warren. We had Warren, Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Trump from, like, 1949 to 1941, all who had been the oldest president at inauguration and nobody says grandma and grandpa, you're embarrassing us.

Except Joe Rogan. Let me put it on you. You have a big platform. You're somewhat of an intelligent, eloquent guy. What role do you somewhat. What role do you play? Why aren't you that leader? I mean, I would argue that you're in ways becoming that leader.

So I haven't taken enough risk. Is that your idea? What should I do or say at the moment?

No, you're a little bit. No, you have taken quite a big risks and we'll. We'll talk about it.

All right.

But you're also on the outside shooting in, meaning you're dismantling the institution from the outside as opposed to becoming the institution.

Do you remember that thing you brought up when you were on the View?

The View?

I'm sorry, when you were on Oprah.

I didn't get the invite.

I'm sorry. When you were on Bill Maher's program, what was that thing you were saying? They don't know we're here. They may watch us. They may quietly slip us a direct message, but they pretend that this Internet thing is some dangerous place where only lunatics play.

Well, who has the bigger platform? The portal or Bill Maher's program or the View? Bill Maher and the View in terms of viewership or in terms of what's the metric of size?

Well, first of all, the key thing is take a newspaper and even imagine that it's completely fake. Okay. And then it has very little in the way of circulation yet. Imagine that it's a hundred year old paper and that it's still part of this game, this internal game of media. The key point is that those sources that have that kind of mark of respectability to the institutional structures matter in a way that even if I say something on a very large platform, that makes a lot of sense, if it's outside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative or Jin, it sort of doesn't matter to the institutions. So the game is, if it happens outside of the club, we can pretend that it never happened.

How can you get the credibility and the authority from outside the gated institutional narrative?

Well, first of all, you and I both share institutional credibility coming from our associations. So we were both at mit? Yes. Were you at Harvard at any point?

Nope.

Okay, well.

And lived in Harvard Square.

So did I. But at some level, the issue isn't whether you have credentials. In that sense, the key question is can you be trusted to file a flight plan and not deviate from that flight plan. When you are in an interview situation, will you stick to the talking points? I will not. And that's why you're not going to be allowed in the general conversation, which amplifies these sentiments.

But I'm still trying to.

So your point would be, is that let's say both. So you've done how many Joe Rogan?

Four.

I've done four, too. Right. So both of us are somewhat frequent guests. The show is huge. You know the power as well as I do. And people are going to watch this conversation. Huge number. Watched our last one, by the way. I want to thank you for that one. That was a terrific, terrific conversation. Really did change my life, Lex.

My life.

You're a brilliant interviewer, so thank you.

Thank you, Eric. You changed my life too, that you gave me a chance.

No, no, no. I'm so glad I did that one. What I would say is that we keep mistaking how big the audience is for whether or not you have the kiss. And the kiss is a different thing.

Kiss, what does that stand for?

Well, it's not an acronym yet. Okay, thank you for asking. It's a question of are you part of the interoperable institution? Friendly discussion. And that's the discussion which we ultimately have to break into.

But that's what I'm trying to get at is how does Eric Weinstein become the President of the United States?

I shouldn't become the President of the United States? Not interested. Thank you very much for asking.

Okay, great. Get into a leadership position where I guess I don't know what that means, but where you can inspire millions of people to inspire the sense of community, inspire the. The kind of actions required to overcome hardship, the kind of hardship that we may be experiencing. To inspire people to work hard and face the difficult, hard facts of the realities we're living through. All those kinds of things that you're talking about, that leader, you know, can that leader emerge from the current institutions? Or alternatively, can it also emerge from the outside? I guess that's what I was asking.

So my belief is, is that this is the last hurrah for the elderly centrist kleptocrats.

Can you define each of those terms?

Okay, elderly, I mean, people who were born at least a year before I was. That's a joke. You can laugh. No, because I'm born at the cusp of the Gen X boomer divide. Centrist. They're pretending. You know, there are two parties, Democrat and Republican Party, in the United States. I think it's easier to think of the mainstream of both of them as part of an aggregate party that I sometimes call the looting party, which gets us to kleptocracy, which is ruled by thieves. And the great temptation has been to treat the US Like a trough. And you just have to get yours because it's not like we're doing anything productive. So everybody's sort of looting the family mansion and somebody stole the silver, and somebody's cutting the pictures out of the frames. Roughly speaking, we're watching our elders live it up in a way that doesn't make sense to the rest of us.

Okay, so if it's the last hurrah, this is the time for leaders to step up.

No, we're not ready yet. We're not ready.

Let's disagree.

I call out. You know, the head of the CDC should resign. Should resign. The surgeon general should resign. Trump should resign. Pelosi should resign. De Blasio should resign.

They're not going to resign.

I understand that. So that's why. So we'll wait.

No, but that's not how revolutions work. You don't wait for people to resign. You step up and inspire the alternative.

Do you remember the Russian Revolution of 1907? It's before my time, but there wasn't a Russian Revolution of 1907.

So you're thinking we're in 1907.

I'm saying we're too early.

But we got this Spanish flu, came in 1718. So I would argue that there's a lot of parallels there.

World War I, I think it's not time yet. Like John Prine, the. The songwriter just died of COVID That was a pretty big.

Really? Yeah. By the way, you. Yes, of course, I. Every time we do this, we discover our. Our mutual appreciation of obscure, brilliant, witty songwriter.

Well, he's really. He's really quite good. Right?

He's. He's really good.

Yeah.

He died.

My understanding is that he passed recently due to complications of corona. So we haven't had enough. Large enough shocking deaths yet. Picturesque deaths. Deaths of a family that couldn't get treatment. There are stories that will come and break our hearts, and we have not had enough of those. The visuals haven't come in, but I think they're coming.

Well, we'll find out, but you have to be there. You have to be there when they come.

But we didn't get the visual, for example, of falling man from 9 11. Right. So the outside world did, but Americans were not. It was thought that we would be too delicate. So just the way you remember Pulitzer Prize winning photographs from the Vietnam era. You don't easily remember the photographs from all sorts of things that have happened since because something changed in our media. We are insensate. We. We cannot feel or experience our own lives and the tragedy that would animate us to action.

Yeah, but I think there again, I think there's going to be that suffering that's going to build and build and build in terms of businesses, mom and pop shops that close. And I think for myself, I think often that I'm being weak and I feel like I should be doing something. I should be becoming a leader on a small scale.

You can't. This is not World War II and this is not Soviet Russia.

Why not? Why not?

Because our internal programming, the malware that sits between our ears, is much different than the propagandized malware of the Soviet era. I mean, people were both very indoctrinated and also knew that some level it was bs they had a double mind. I don't know, there must be a great word in Russian for being able to think both of those things simultaneously.

You don't think people are actually sick of the partisanship, sick of incompetence?

Yeah, but I called for revolt the other day on Joe Rogan. People found it quixotic.

Well, because I think you're not. I think revolt is different. I think ask like, okay, I'm really angry.

I'm furious. I cannot stand that this is my country at the moment. I am embarrassed.

So let's build a better one. Yeah, that's the.

I'm in.

Okay, so, well, okay, but like, that's something I.

So let's take over a few universities. Let's start running a different experiment at some of our better universities. Like when I did this experiment and I said, if this were 40 years ago, the median age, I believe, of a university president was 51. That would have the person in Gen X and we'd have a bunch of millennial presidents, a bunch of more than half Gen x. It's almost 100% baby boom at this moment. And how did that happen? We can get into how they changed retirement, but this generation above us does not feel or even the older generation silent generation. I had Roger Penrose on my program.

Excellent conversation.

Thank you. Really appreciate that. And I asked him a question that was very important to me. I said, look, you're in your late 80s. Is there anyone you could point to as a successor that we should be watching? We can get excited. I said, here's an opportunity to pass the baton. He Said, well, let me hold off on that. I was like, oh, is it ever the right moment to point to somebody younger than you to keep your flame alive after you're gone? And also, I don't know whether I'm just going to admit to this. People treat me like I'm crazy for caring about the world after I'm dead or wanting to be remembered after you're gone. Well, what does it matter to you? You're gone. It's this deeply sort of secular, somatic perspective on everything where we don't. You know that phrase. As time goes by, he says, it's still the same old story. A fight for love and glory, a case of duoden. I don't think people imagined then that there wouldn't be a story about fighting for love and glory. And like we are so out of practice about fighting, you know, rivals for love and fighting for glory in something bigger than yourself.

But the hunger is there.

Well, that was the point then, right? The whole idea is that Rick was, you know, he was like Han Solo of his time. He's just like, I stick my neck out for nobody. You know, it's like, oh, come on, Rick, you know, you're just pretending you actually have a big soul, right? And so at some level, that's the question. Do we have a big soul or is it just all bullshit?

See, I think there's huge Manhattan Project style projects, whether you talk about physical infrastructure or going to Mars, you know, the SpaceX, NASA efforts, or huge, huge scientific efforts.

Well, we need to get back into the institutions and we need to remove the weak leadership that we have. Weak leaders and the weak leaders need to be removed and they need to seat people more dangerous than the people who are currently sitting in a lot.

Of those chairs or build new institutions.

Good luck.

Well, so one of the nice things from the Internet is, for example, somebody like you can have a bigger voice than almost anybody at the particular institutions we're talking about.

That's true. But the thing is, I might say something. You can count on the fact that the, you know, provost at Princeton isn't going to say anything.

What do you mean? Too afraid?

Well, if that person were to give an interview. How are things going in research at Princeton? Well, I'm hesitant to say it, but they're perhaps as good as they've ever been. And I think they're going to get better. Oh, is that right? All fields? Yep. I don't see a weak one. It's just like, okay, great, who are you and what are you even Saying we're just used to total nonsense 24 7.

Yeah. What do you think might be a beautiful thing that comes out of this? Like what? Is there a hope that. Like a little inkling, a little fire of hope you have about our time right now?

Yeah. I think one thing is coming to understand that the freaks, weirdos, mutants, and other ne' er do wells, sometimes referred to as grifters. I like that one. Grifters and gadflys were very often the earliest people on the coronavirus. That's a really interesting question. Why was that? And it seems to be that they had already paid such a social price that they weren't going to be beaten up by being told that, oh, my God, you're xenophobic, you just hate China, or, wow, you sound like a conspiracy theorist. So if you'd already paid those prices, you were free to think about this. And everyone in an institutional framework was terrified that they didn't want to be seen as the alarmist, the Chicken Little. And so that's why you have this confidence where, you know, de Blasio says, get on with your lives, get back in there and celebrate Chinese New Year in Chinatown. Despite coronavirus, it's like, okay, really? So you just always thought everything would automatically be okay if you adapted. Sorry, if you adopted that posture.

So you think this time reveals the weakness of our institutions and reveals the strength of our gadflies and the weirdos and the.

No, not necessarily the strength, but the value of freedom. Like, a different way of saying it would be, wow, even your gadflys and your grifters were able to beat your institutional folks because your institutional folks were playing with a giant mental handicap. So just imagine, like we were in the Story of Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut, and our smartest people were all subjected to. To distracting noises every seven seconds. Well, they would be functionally much dumber because they couldn't continue a thought through all the disturbance. So in some sense, that's a little bit like what belonging to an institution is that if you have to make a public statement, of course the surgeon General is going to be the worst because they're just playing with too much of a handicap. There are too many institutional players, like, don't screw us up. And so the person has to say something wrong. We're going to back propagate a falsehood. And this is very interesting. Some of my socially oriented friends say, eric, I don't understand what you're on about. Of course masks work. But you know what? They're trying to do. They're trying to get us not to buy up the masks for the doctors. And I think. Okay, so you imagine that we can just create scientific fiction at will so that you can run whatever social program you want. This is what I, you know, my point is get out of my lab. Get out of the lab. You don't belong in the lab. You're not meant for the lab. You're constitutionally incapable of being around a lab. You need to leave the lab.

You think the CDC and who knew that masks work? And we're trying to sort of imagine that people are kind of stupid and they would buy masks in excess if they were told that masks work. Is. Is that like. Because this does seem to be a particularly clear example of mistakes made.

You're asking me this question?

Yeah.

No, you're not. What do you think, Lex?

Well, I actually probably disagree with you a little bit. Great.

Let's do it.

I think it's not so easy to be honest with the populace when the danger of panic is always around the corner. So I think the kind of honesty you exhibit appeals to a certain class of brave intellectual minds. That appeals to me, but I don't know from the perspective of who. I don't know if it's so obvious that they should be honest 100% of the time with people.

I'm not saying you should be perfectly transparent and 100% honest. I'm saying that the quality of your lies has to be very high and it has to be public spirited. There's a big difference between. So I'm not a child about this. I'm not saying that when you're at war, for example, you turn over all of your plans to the enemy because it's important that you're transparent. With 360 degree visibility? Far from it. What I'm saying is something has been forgotten and I forgot who it was who told it to me, but it was a fellow graduate student in the Harvard math department. And he said, you know, I learned one thing, being out in the workforce, because he was one of the few people who had had a work life in the department as a grad student. And he said, you can be friends with your boss, but if you're going to be friends with your boss, you have to be doing a good job at work. And there's an analog here, which is if you're going to be reasonably honest with the population, you have to be doing a good job at work as the surgeon General or as the head of the cdc. So if you're doing a terrible job. You're supposed to resign. And then the next person is supposed to say, look, I'm not going to lie to you. I inherited the situation. It was in a bit of disarray, but I had several requirements before I agreed to step in and take the job because I needed to know I could turn it around. I needed to know that I had clear lines of authority. I needed to know that I had the resources available in order to rectify the problem. And I needed to know that I had the ability and the freedom to level with the American people directly as I saw fit. All of my wishes were granted. And that's why I'm happy here on Monday morning. I've got my sleeves rolled up. Boy, do we got a lot to do. So please come back in two weeks and then ask me how I'm doing then. And I hope to have something to show you. That's how you do it.

So why is that excellence and basic competence missing the big net?

You see, you come from multiple traditions where it was very important to remember things. The Soviet tradition made sure that you remembered the sacrifices that came in that war. In the Jewish tradition, we're doing this on Passover, right?

Yeah.

Okay, well, every year we tell one simple story. Well, why can't it be different every year? Maybe we could have a rotating series of seven stories. Because it's the one story that you need. It's like you work with the Men in Black group, right? And it's the last suit that you'll ever need. This is the last story that you ever need. Don't think I fell for your neuralyzer last time. In any event, we tell one story because it's the get out of Dodge story. There's a time when you need to not wait for the. The bread to rise. And that's the thing, which is, even if you live through a great nap, you deserve to know what it feels like to have to leave everything that has become comfortable and unworkable.

It's sad that you need that tragedy, I imagine, to have the tradition of remembering. It's sad to. To think that because things have been nice and comfortable means that we can't have great, competent leaders. Which is kind of the implied statement, like, can we have great leaders who take big risks, who are. Who inspire hard work, who deal with difficult truth even though things have been comfortable?

Well, we know what those people sound like. I mean, you know, if, for example, Jocko Willink suddenly threw his hat into the ring, everyone would say, okay, right, Party's over. It's time to get up at 4:30 and really work hard and we've got to get back into fighting shape and.

Yeah, but Jocko is a very special. I think that whole group of people by profession put themselves in the way of in, into hardship on a daily basis.