Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with zev
weinstein
a young man with a brilliant bold and
hopeful mind
that i had the great fortune of talking
to on a recent afternoon
he happens to be eric weinstein's son
but i invited zev not because of that
but because i got a chance to listen to
him speak on a few occasions
and was captivated by how deeply he
thought about this world
at such a young age and i thought that
it might be fun to
explore this world of ours together with
him for time through this conversation
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as a side note let me say that zev
acknowledges
the fear associated with participating
public discourse
and is brave enough to join in at a
young age
to push forward to change his mind
publicly to learn to articulate
difficult
nuanced ideas and grow from the
conversations that follow in this
i hope he leads the next generation of
minds that is joining and steering the
collective intelligence
of this big ant colony we think of as
our human
civilization if you enjoy this thing
subscribe on youtube review it on
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on patreon
i'll connect with me on twitter lex
friedman
and now here's my conversation with zev
weinstein you've said that
philosophy becomes more dangerous in
difficult times
what do you mean by that interestingly i
think i mean
two things by that and i think firstly i
should
clarify when i say philosophy i sort of
mean in a
very traditional sense just thinking
ideation
and that could be reconsidering
our notions of self in a very
traditional sense which we consider
philosophy or that could be like
technological
uh innovation i think it's important to
recognize all of these as
philosophies that we can not question
whether
it's important to promote thought i
think the other thing i should
clarify is when i say difficult times i
mean
times when nothing is growing and so
the risk for real conflict is much
greater because people are incentivized
to
fight over the things which already
exist
i think when times are not difficult
the people with the greatest power are
usually the people who are very creative
generating a lot
and that really requires ideation or
philosophy
of some sort i think when times become
stagnant the important successful people
become
the people who are very good at
protecting their own
pieces of the pie and taking others um
i think that those people have to be
very opposed to any sort of thinking
that could restructure
society are conventions about who
should succeed and so firstly
i mean by that that it becomes much more
dangerous
dangerous for a person to think
deeply and question during a time
when the important people or those
concerned with
making sure no one rocks the boat you
know one example of this would be
like socrates and his execution because
everyone was happy enough to sit through
his questions before
uh there was war and poverty and
distress and afterwards it just became
too dangerous the other thing i mean by
that is that
the consequences of thinking deeply
carry much greater potential for real
catastrophe
when everyone is desperate so
like for example you know the communist
manifesto was probably much more
dangerous
during early 1900s russia than it was
during the 1848 revolutions because
i think people were in much worse shape
and desperate people are very willing to
dive into anything
new that might bring the future without
fully calculating whatever the
consequences or risks
might be so it is both more dangerous
for a person to have
creative ideas and those ideas are more
dangerous
when when times are tough
and by dangerous you mean it challenges
the people with power who don't who want
to maintain that power
in times of stagnation when there's not
much growth innovation
creativity all that kind of stuff right
and we know
that if nothing new is created people
have promises that they've made about
what will be paid to whom
what debt structure is the only
possibility if stagnation lasts for
long enough is really some kind of great
conflict
great war because people have to take
from others to make good on their own
promises so we know that by denying any
sort of
grand ideation we are accepting that
there will be some kind of great
catastrophe
and so we have to understand that
philosophy is
the most important uh
when we've seen too much stagnation for
too long
it is also very dangerous
and it's dangerous for the people who
are doing it and it's dangerous
for the people who believe it but it's
kind of our only way out
ever and again by philosophy you mean
the bigger this is not academic
philosophy or this kind of uh
games played in the in the space of just
like moral philosophy and all those
metaphysics all that kind of stuff you
mean just thinking deeply about this
world
thinking from first principles i think
your like twitter
line involves something about like
trying to piece everything together in
first principles
so that's that's fundamentally what uh
being philosophical about this world is
and that's
where the people who are thinking deeply
about this world are the ones who are
feeding who are the catalysts of this
growth in society and so on
yeah i i mean i also think that the real
implication
of moral philosophy
can be something that most would
consider like a real political
uh implication so i think all philosophy
really
ties together uh because there has to be
some sort of
grand structure to all thought and how
it relates
do you think this growth
and innovation and improvement can last
forever we've seen some incredible
you know the things that humans have
been able to accomplish over the past
several hundred years is just i mean awe
inspiring and every moment in that
in that history it almost seemed like
no more could be done like we've we've
solved all the problems that are to be
solved
and there's just historically there's
all these kind of ridiculous like bill
gates style quotes
or like it's obvious that we've uh
this new cool thing is not going to take
off
and yet it does and and so there's
there's a feeling
of the same kind of pattern that we see
in moore's law there's constant growth
and different technologies
in the modern day era in any kind of
automation over the past 100 years
do you think it's possible that we'll
keep growing this way
if we give power to the philosophers of
our society
i think the only way that we can keep
growing this way is if we give
power to real thinkers and there's no
guarantee that that will work but we
sort of don't have
any other choice and i think you're
entirely right that this
period of both understanding the
universe
at a rate which has has never been seen
before and
invention and creativity
that these past hundred years have been
sort of
uncharacteristic uh for the level of
growth
that we've seen not in all of history
we've never seen anything
like this and i think a lot of our
a lot of our promises rest on
this sort of thing continuing i think
that's very
that's very dangerous but the one thing
that can get us out of this is
philosophy and being ready to radically
restructure all of our notions about
what should be what is
i think that's very important so you
think deeply about this world
you are clearly this embodiment of a
think of a philosopher
your dad is also one such guy eric
weinstein
do you just do you have big
disagreements with him on this topic in
particular
i think now people should know he also
happens to be in the room
but uh the mics can't pick him up so he
can uh heckle it doesn't even matter
but do you have disagreements with him
on this point let me
um try to summarize this argument that
we were actually
based a lot of our american society
on the belief that things will keep
growing and yet
it seems that however you break it apart
maybe from an economics perspective
that they're not growing currently and
so that's where a lot of our troubles
are
at do you have the same sense that
things there's a stagnation period
that we're living through over the past
couple of decades i think
stagnation modern stagnation is
completely
undeniable particularly scientifically
and i think there have been a few fields
where tremendous
progress has been made very recently i
think
my dad might feel that uh
there is sort of an inevitability to
the ending of this period and
i'm not so certain so certain that uh
the fall of this great time is
completely inevitable because i don't
know
what thoughts we're capable of producing
what we're
able to reconsider i think we really
have to be open to the
possibility that uh all of our standard
frameworks where you know like he will
talk about
embedded growth obligations if we
continue within the same
framework then we're very susceptible to
the dangers of whatever these
embedded growth obligations are i think
if we break the frameworks we have no
reason to believe that the problems
we're experiencing
with our current frameworks will will
follow us and i think that's the
importance of radical thought is
we don't know what the solution is but
if there is a solution it will be born
from some very fundamental
thinking and so i've i have great hope
so you have
optimism about sort of the power of a
single radical idea or a single radical
thinker
to break our frameworks and
uh break us out of this like uh spiral
down
due to whatever the the economic forces
that are
creating uh this current stagnation yeah
i'm very very hopeful the optimism of
youth
well i share uh i share your optimism so
let me let me come back to something
you've also talked about you have very
little stuff out there currently
but the things you have out there your
thoughts
you could just tell how deeply you think
about this world and one of the things
you mentioned
is as you learn about
this world is that you as you read as
you sort of uh
go through different experiences that
you
um that you're open to changing your
mind
how often do you find yourself changing
your mind do you think
zev from 10 years into the future will
look back at like at this conversation
we're having now
and uh disagree completely with
everything you just said
it's entirely possible and that's one of
the things that scares me
so much about appearing publicly
i think that the internet can be very
intolerant of inconsistency and
i am entirely prepared to be very
inconsistent because
i know that whatever beliefs i have
when subjected to scrutiny may change
because
that's that's really the only way to to
form your truest
most fundamental conceptions about the
world around you
and it would take an infinite amount of
time to subject every single one of your
beliefs to scrutiny and so that's a a
process that
must follow me throughout my entire life
and i know that means that my opinions
and
perspectives are always to be
changing i'm prepared to accept that
about myself
whether other people are prepared to
accept that my uh
public opinions may may change and
vary greatly over time is something i i
don't know i don't know how tolerant the
the world will be but i'm very prepared
to change
anything i i believe in if i think
deeply enough about it or a good enough
argument is
made so that i i might reconsider well
that's there certainly is currently an
intolerance and that's what the one of
the problems of our age there's an
intolerance towards change
and i'll also ask you about labels you
talked about so we like to bend each
other into different categories
blue or red or whatever the different
categorization is
but it seems like the task before you
as a young person defining our future is
to make
a tolerance of change the the norm
doing this podcast for example and then
changing your mind one or two years
later
and doing so publicly without a big
dramatic thing
or maybe changing it on a daily basis uh
and just being open about it and being
transparent about your thought process
maybe
that is the beacon of hope for the
philosophical
way uh the path of the philosopher
so that's your task in in a sense is to
change your mind openly
and bravely you know you're right and
maybe
i will just have to endure some sort of
criticism
for doing that but i think that's very
important i think this ties back to
this previous facet of our conversation
where we were
discussing if uh you know thinkers would
win
over systems that are devoted to
preventing radical thought
or if uh you know
who will win the the systems or the or
the thinkers i think it's crucial
that my generation uh
take up a hand in this fight and i think
it's important that i'm
a part of that because i know that i
have some opportunity
to um
there is i think it is my obligation as
a member of a
generation whose only real hope is to
think outside of a system
because whatever systems exist are
collapsing i think it is really my my
obligation to try to
play some role whatever role i can and
being an instrument uh in in that change
are you uh as a young mind do you have a
sense of fear
about just like how afraid were you to
do this
podcast conversation do you have a sense
of fear of thinking publicly
yeah i i don't even think that that fear
is irrational
it's very difficult to exist publicly in
any form
now because it's very easy for anyone to
take
cheap shots at something which is
difficult
and as i said the people who are
trying to have the difficult ideas and
conversations
are perhaps putting others in in actual
danger because everyone is so desperate
that they're they're
they might be they might be willing to
to try anything
so um there's a certain amount of
responsibility which
one has to take going before the public
and there is a certain amount of uh
ridicule which will be completely
unwarranted that
anyone must endure for it
um and i think that it means that the
one has to be afraid because they could
both
ruin the world and be ruined by the
world in in
an unwarranted and undeserved fashion
um i would like
to believe in myself enough to try to
accept this as a task
because i think people need to try or
there's no getting out of this and
we will end in some kind of crazy
brilliant war
awfully put you've said also that uh in
these times we can't have labels because
it holds us
holds us back maybe we've already talked
about a little bit
but this idea of labels is really
interesting uh why do you think
labels hold us back well
i think many underestimate the extent to
which
language and communication
really impacts and shapes the ideas
and thoughts which are being
communicated and i think
if we're willing to accept uh imperfect
labels
uh to categorize particular people or
thoughts
in some sense we are corrupting
an abstraction in order to represent it
and communicate about it
and i think as we've discussed those
abstractions are particularly
important when everything is on fire um
we should not be sacrificing
uh grand thought for the ability to
express it i think everyone should work
much harder including myself to really
be thinking abstractly in
abstract terms instead of using concrete
terms to
discuss abstraction while ruining it
slightly
yeah it's uh it's kind of a skill
actually so one
one really difficult example
of in this uh in the recent time that
maybe you can comment on
uh if you have been thinking about it is
just politics
and there's a lot of labels in politics
that
it takes a lot of skill to be able to
communicate difficult ideas
without labels being attached to you
that's something i've been sort of
thinking about a lot
in uh trying to express for example how
much i love various aspects
of the foundational ideas of this
country like freedom
and just saying i love america
as a simple statement i love the ideas
that we're finding to america
will often in the current time well
people will try
to desperately try to attach a label to
me for example for saying i love america
that i'm
a republican a donald trump supporter
and it takes
elegance and grace and skill to like
to like avoid those labels so that
people can actually listen to the
contents of your words
versus uh the summarization that results
from just the
the labels that they can pin on you are
you cognizant of the skill required
there
of being able to communicate without
being branded the republican or democrat
in this particular
set of conversations i'm sure there's
other dangerous labels that could be
attached
i don't think there's any way of
avoiding that right now
it might not be anyone's best effort to
really try i think the thing i can say
which will
most speak to that which i truly believe
is that participating
in modern conventional politics
is not being inherently political in a
generative
sense it's it's this it's this repeated
trope where politics now is not about
creating new political ideologies it's
about defending ideologies which already
exists so that everyone can keep what
they have
and that's where all of the the name
calling and
the labeling really comes in it's an
attempt
to constrict whatever
may be generated to standard
conversations and discussions so that
arguments can be strawmanned and
defeated and people can keep what they
have because everyone's
very very scared
i want to be very political but not
in a standard political sense where i'm
defending a particular party or
place on a on a spectrum i would like to
play some role in inventing new
spectrums and i think that's most
important
politically because above
most else politics is about
real power and conventional politicians
have
real power uh and that power will
find terrible outlets if new spectrums
for that power to live are not invented
so
so you're not afraid of politics
political discourse
at the deepest richest uh level
of what political discourse is supposed
to mean actually i'm i'm very afraid of
it but
once again we we have no it's not
paralyzing for you
that you feel like it's a responsibility
you're ready to take it on yes
this is a good sign this is uh you're a
special human
okay let's talk uh maybe fun maybe
profound
uh we talked about philosopher's
philosophy
uh who's your favorite philosopher who
like somebody
in your current time been either
influential
or you just enjoy uh
his her ideas or writing or anything
like that
weirdly i'll i'll give an answer which
sort of doesn't have much to do with
whom i might imagine myself to be i like
thomas aquinas at the moment i think
he's very inspirational to me
given what we're going through and
that's not because his
particular ideas of
religion or god or unmoved movers
are particularly uh inspirational
to me and they i don't even think they
were necessarily right
um but he was
introducing aspects of the scientific
method
during one of the darkest periods in
human history when we had lost all
hope and reason and ability to think
logically
so i think he was really something of
a light in the dark and i think we need
to look to people
like that at the moment the other reason
why
i think i need to uh need to learn from
him
is that even though he was doing
something which really needed
needed to be done and uh introducing
scientific thought and reason to
a time that that lacked it um
he was not saying anything that
would have been offensive to whatever
powers were
in play during his time he was writing
about
you know the importance of of faith in
god and how we could
prove it and so it's important to
remember
i suppose that having
ideas that shape the world and which
bring the world closer to what we can
prove
it's supposed to be and how it's
supposed to work does not always take
some sort of grand contradiction
of whatever is in play and
the most courageous thing to do may not
always be the most
helpful thing to do and i think
it's it's very easy for anyone with
uh ideas about how everything is is
broken to become
very cynical and say oh the system man
they're they're all wrong
yeah um i think it takes
another kind of discipline to be a
person with
real ideas and to
make the world better without stepping
on anyone's toes or
contradicting anyone i have real respect
for that so being able to be
when it's within your principles to
operate within the current system of
thought
yeah and not not offend anyone not
say anything outlandish but
introduce the method by which progress
must be achieved i think that takes a
kind of
maturity which is found very rarely
uh now and i really look to him for
inspiration despite whatever
disagreements i may have with the
my new details of his philosophy yeah it
takes a lot of
skill a lot of character and yeah
deep thinking to be able to operate
within the system
when needed and having the fortitude
and just the boldness to step outside
and to burn the system down when needed
but rarely
and opportune moments that would
actually have
impact i mean it's ultimately about
impact within the society that you live
in
not just making a statement that has no
impact
yeah and we were talking about how
dangerous
it is to do real philosophy at
dangerous broken times
he was going through the most broken
time in history
and he questioned
the the methods which made a
broken system uh able to survive
and he was so skilled and so graceful
that he became a saint
in that tradition and there's something
for me to really
learn from there do you draw any
inspiration have any interest in the
sort of more modern philosophers
maybe the existentialists i mean
nietzsche is one of the
the early ones do you have thoughts
on the guy in general or any of the
other existentialists well
with regard to nietzsche i think i think
yates might have said that he's the
worst you know he was it was certainly
filled with
with passionate intensity um
is that a compliment he was the worst
or uh or her criticism yates said this
has this big line the the best lack all
conviction the worst are filled with
passing passionate intensity um
so um
i think nietzsche was was
destroyed by the the horrors of
everything that uh
that went on around him and i think he
never really
recovered from it i think that's because
if you think about nietzsche's
philosophy he was very opposed to any
sort of
acceptance of what one had one should
always envy those who have more
and use that envy to uh to fuel their
their growth and become you know
accept whatever the the human condition
and desires are
and use use those desires to want more
and more and
and make use of your greed i think
it's very difficult to be
truly happy if
the thing which you uh
the thing which you pride yourself most
on
is uh never being satisfied and i think
nietzsche was never satisfied and that
was the
the danger of his philosophy i think
also with his
immoralism you know there is no good or
evil
i sort of disagree with that on a pretty
fundamental
basis i think that um
our notion of morality is by no means
subjective it's really the proxy for
the fitness of a society i think
whatever we consider ethical like don't
steal
don't murder don't do this
societies have a very difficult time
running it's very hard to run a
civilization when
everyone is stealing from everyone else
and people are
murdering each other and committing
these things which
we would consider uh atrocities so
i think we also we know this because
i think very similar notions of morality
have
evolved convergently from different
traditions i think
good is a proxy for a
civilization's fitness and
the good news is that that means that
evil in being anathema to that good
uh must therefore be uh
the opposite of stable in whatever way
that it's evil
and that means that good will always be
more stable than
evil and the only way evil can really
win is like if everyone dies
so um so wait uh can you say can you say
that again good is a proxy for society's
uh
what good is a proxy for the stability
and fitness of the civilization i
believe
and you know that's a good definition
thank you so you're throwing some bombs
today okay all right
okay um this is exciting sorry sorry
interrupt your uh
flow there but just a good damn good one
thank you
uh so in that sense that's kind of
optimistic view that
if by definition good is a proxy for
stability then it's going to be stable
unless the entire world just blows
itself up so good wins in the end by
definition
yeah or uh no actually well
good wins unless it all goes to
uh complete destruction beauty that's a
beautifully put
thank you on the topic of um
sort of you know good in evil being
human illusions
you've said that uh more broadly than
that about truth
that it is easier in some ways to be
unified under truth
because it is universal than it is to be
unified under belief which at times can
be completely subjective
so what is the nature of truth to you
can can we understand the world
objectively or is
most of what we can understand about the
world is just
uh subjective opinions that we kind of
all
agree on in these little collectives and
over time it kind of evolves
completely detached from objective
reality i think
this is the greatest argument for
objectivity
uh is that something that is
objectively true cannot be true to me
and
untrue to to you you can feel that it's
that it's untrue but that would be uh
unproductive
and create unnecessary tension
and conflict i think this is
one reason for the importance of science
as a tool for
stability if science is
the search for truth
um and truth can never really be
i shouldn't say that truth should never
be an engine
of conflict because no two people should
disagree on something which is
objectively true then in some sense
search for truth
is searching for a common ground
where we can all exist and
live without contradicting or attacking
each other
do you ever hope that there is a lot of
common ground to be discovered
sure i mean if we continue
scientifically
uh we are discovering truth and in that
discovering common ground on which we
can all agree that's that's one reason
why i think
uh caring about science if you have a
culture which cares very deeply about
science
that's a culture which is not
necessarily bound to
injure unwarranted internal
conflict i think that's one reason that
i'm so passionate about science is its
search for universal ground let me just
throw out an example
of a modern day philosophical thinker
will keep your uh
dad eric weinstein out of the picture
for a sec
but he does happen to be an example of
one but jordan peterson is an example of
another
somebody who thinks deeply about this
world um
his ideas are by certain percent of the
population sort of speaking of truth
are labeled as dangerous
why do you think his ideas or just ideas
of these kinds of deep thinkers
in general are labeled as dangerous in
our modern world
is it similar to what you've been
discussing that
in difficult times philosophers become
dangerous
was there something specific about these
particular thinkers in our time
well i think jordan peterson is very
anti-establishment in a lot of his
uh beliefs he's an unconventional
thinker and i think we need
regardless of whatever uh jordan's
particular
views and beliefs are and if they uh
bring about
more danger than uh truth or
uh if if they don't it's very important
to have
fundamental thinkers who exist outside
of
a conventional framework so
do i think that he's dangerous
i think by existing outside of
a system which is known he is dangerous
and i think we have to
in some sense we have to welcome danger
in that
capacity because it will be our only way
out of this so i'm
regardless of whether his beliefs are
right or wrong i am
pretty adamant about the fact that we
need to support
um thought which may rescue us and that
thought can
appear radical or dangerous at times but
ultimately if you allow for it
this is kind of the difficult discussion
of free speech and so on
is ultimately difficult
ideas will pave the way for progress
yeah and i'd actually i'd like to to
slow you down there because
i think like one of the issues we were
discussing
previously was the fact that language
often destroys our ability to
think um when we're talking about
whether his
ideas are a radical i don't know if we
if we mean radical in the traditional
sense of having to
to do with the root of a problem or
in the more modern sense of being um
very extreme and i think that's
completely
by design i think
fundamental thought which
semantically would once be considered
radical thought
became very dangerous and now it's
become synonymous with
extreme or dangerous thought which means
that anyone who considers themself a
radical
thinker is semantically also a dangerous
or extreme thinker these are not helpful
labels
in a sense that the moment you say
radical or extremist
thinker then you're just uh
well how do i put it you're not being
you're not helping
the public discourse exchange of ideas
but through no fault of our own the
concept of radical as having to do with
a root is uh it's a it's an obvious
concept for which there must be language
and
a lot of the attack on thought has to do
with attacking
language which communicates
conceptually so like this is an example
of how
our world is becoming increasingly
orwellian
it's just language is being used to
destroy our
ability to uh to think i think i can't
remember exactly what the numbers are
but i read some statistic about
how greatly the average english
vocabulary has decreased
since 1960. it was like some
incredible number it really baffled me
it's like how are
how are people less able to to think in
a time when
the world is supposed to be growing at a
never before seen
rate it's like we can't keep on
we can't sustain this growth if
we destroy everyone's ability to think
because
the growth requires thinking and we're
we're ruining
the tools for it i watched your uh your
podcast with
noam chomsky and i i think one
interesting thing which he discussed was
how
language is more used to develop
thoughts within our own head than it is
used to communicate those thoughts
with others if the language doesn't
change
even if its usage changes then
when language is destroyed in
communication it also
stymies our ability to to think
reasonably and i'm very very
worried so but the language
in communication uh requires a medium
and there's a lot of different mediums
so there's
uh social media there's twitter there's
uh
writing books there's blog posts there's
um
podcasts there's a youtube videos
all of things you have uh dipped a toe
in
in your exploration of different mediums
of communication
yeah which do you see yourself
this might be just a poetic way of
asking are you going to do a podcast but
a broad broader picture what do you
think
as an intellectual in this world for you
personally would be the path for
communicating your ideas to the world
what are the mediums you
you are currently drawn to out of the
ones i mentioned maybe something i
didn't
to answer your your question concretely
before
uh abstractly uh i'm scared but i need
i need to do a podcast you know it's
it's important
it is my obligation as a member of my
generation
i i really hope that more people my age
start to do this because
we will be the people in charge of new
ideas which either
sink or uh or swim how upset would your
dad be
when your podcast quickly becomes more
popular than his
i think he would be negatively upset
also you'd be proud
he's a good dad i i really think so yeah
sorry to interrupt uh uh yes so but then
zooming out
do you think podcast are you excited by
the possibility of other mediums outside
of podcasting to communicate
ideas i would be if people still
read books or did things like that uh
i'm somewhat guilty of this a lot of the
books i i read are
um very technical and then
my to absorb like really deep
modern conversations i listen to uh
i listen to podcasts and i don't really
read many uh books on like the matters
that we're
discussing for example it's fascinating
because you're making me think of
something um
that i align with you very much of how i
consume deep thinkers currently
so what happens is somebody who thinks
deeply about the world
will write a book jordan penis an
example and instead of reading their
book
i'll just listen to podcast
conversations of them talking about the
book
which i find to this is really
sad but i find that to be a more
compelling way to
think about their ideas because they're
often challenged
in certain ways in those conversations
and they're forced to
after having boiled them down and really
thought to them enough to write a book
so it's almost like they needed to go
through the process of writing a book
just so they can think through
convert the language in their minds into
something more concrete
and then the actual exchange of ideas
the actual communication of ideas with
the public happens not with the book
but after the book with that person
going on a book tour
and communicating the ideas well there
are two meanings
i i make of why not too many people
spend much of their time reading anymore
one
one interpretation is that we've lost
our attention spans to our
phones people can't concentrate on a
page if it takes them a minute to read
we're too busy you know watching tech
talks or whatever people do
the other interpretation would be that
language and verbal communication
has as well as you know some amount of
communication which is done through you
know facial expression
uh tone of voice etc these are means of
communication
that have evolved along with
humanity over thousands and thousands of
years
so um we know that we are built
to communicate in this way uh
we have had writing
for much less time it is a system that
we invented
not a system which evolved and
is innately part of uh
you know humanity or the the human mind
um and so we are designed
to consume conversation by our own
evolution
we are designed to consume
writing by some process of symbols
that's evolved over a couple thousand
years
it makes sense to me why many are much
more compelled to
listen to podcasts for example than they
are
to read books it could be that
this is simply a technological uh
progression which has displaced uh
reading conventionally instead of
some sort of maladaptation of our minds
which has
corrupted our attention spans and likely
there's some combination
which determines why people spend much
less time
reading but i don't think it's
necessarily because we're all broken it
may
simply have to do with the fact that we
are designed to
listen and through our ears and speak
through our mouths and
we are not innately designed to
communicate uh
over a page so yeah there's an exciting
coupling to me between
like a few second tick tock videos
that are fun and addicting and then the
three four hour
podcasts which are both really popular
in our current time so people are both
hungry for
the visual stimulation of internet humor
and memes a huge fan of and also
slow moving deep conversations
and that might you know it's there's a
lot of i mean it's part of your
generation to define what that looks
like moving forward where
a lot of people like joe rogan is one of
the people that kind of
uh started accidentally stumbled
into the discovery that this is like a
thing yeah
and now people are kind of scrambling to
figure out why is this a thing
like why is there so much hunger for
long-form conversations
and how do we optimize that medium for
further further expression of deep ideas
and all that kind of stuff
and youtube is a really interesting
medium for that as well
like video sharing of videos
mostly youtube is used with the spirit
of like
the tick tock spirit if i can put in
that way which is like
how do i have quick moving things that
even if you're expressing difficult
ideas they should be quick and exciting
and visual and switching
but there's a lot of exploration there
to see what can we do something
deeper and nobody knows and you're part
of the
you have a youtube channel uh releasing
one video every few years
um so so your momentum is currently
quite slow but uh perhaps it'll
accelerate but
you're you're uh you're one of the
people that gets to define that medium
is that do you enjoy that the visual the
youtube
medium of communication as well i know
that
when the the topic of conversation
uh or the the means
by which a conversation is is
communicated or an idea is communicated
if that is sufficiently interesting to
me
um i will read a book on it i would
listen to a podcast on it i would watch
a video
on it i think if i'm very curious about
something
i will consume it however possible i
think when i have to consume
things which really don't interest me
very much
uh i'm indeed much more ready to
consume them through some sort of video
or discussion than i am through
like a long tedious book
so for the the for the breadth of uh
acquiring knowledge video is good
for the depth the medium doesn't matter
i think it'd be fun to ask you about
some
big philosophical questions to see if
you have an opinion on that
do you think there's a free will or is
free will
just an illusion well i think
classical mechanics would tell us that
if
we are if we were to know every piece of
information
about a system and understand the rules
which govern that system
we would be completely able to predict
the future
with complete accuracy so
if something could know everything about
our lives
it could freeze time and and understand
the position of every
neuron in my mind about about to fire um
no decision could be uh
unpredictable there in some sense there
is that sort of uh
that sort of fate i think that doesn't
make the decisions we make
illegitimate even if some grand super
computer could
understand what decisions we would make
beforehand with
complete certainty i think we're making
legitimate systems
uh within a system that has no freedom
we're making legitimate systems within a
system that has no freedom can you
explain
what you mean by that yeah so
if we were to have uh just a simple
pendulum and i told you how long the
the rope was i i we froze it at a
particular
uh point and i told you how high high
above the ground
the weight was and uh
you know the motion of a of a pendulum
is something which is
it's easy for everyone to imagine um
i could if we had all of that
information
you could ask me where will the what
will the pendulum do
six and a half minutes from now and we
would have a precise
answer that's like a that's an example
of a very simple
system with a very simple lagrangian um
and we could completely predict the the
future that the pendulum has no
ability to do anything that would
surprise us
weirdly that's true of whatever this
four-dimensional crazy world we live in
looks like if we were to if we were to
understand where every piece of this
system was at any given time
and we we understand the the laws of
motion how everything
worked if we could compute all of that
information somehow which we won't never
be able to do
uh we would
every decision you you will ever make
could be predicted by that
computer that doesn't mean that your
decisions are illegitimate you are
really making those
decisions but with a completely
predictable
outcome so i'm just uh sort of a little
bit high at the moment on the uh
on this on the poetry of a system within
a system that has no freedom
so the human experience is the system
we've created
within the system there's no freedom but
that system that we've created
has a feeling of freedom
that to us ants
feels as uh
much more real than the
the physics as we understand it of the
underlying
like base system so it's almost like not
important what the physics of the base
system is
that for the what we've created the
nature of the human experience
is uh there is a free will
or there's something that feels uh close
enough to a free will
that it may not be uh
worth uh spending too much time on
the fact that it's something of an
illusion we will never build a computer
that knows everything about every
piece of the universe at a given time uh
and so for all intensive purposes uh
our decisions are up to us we just
happen to know that their outcomes could
be predicted with enough information
so um speaking of super computers they
can predict every single thing about the
uh
what's going to ever happen uh what do
you think about
the philosophical thought experiment
of us living in a simulation do you
often find yourself pondering of us
living in a simulation
of this question do you think it is at
all a useful thought experiment
i think it's very easy to become
fascinated
with all of these possibilities and
they're completely legitimate
uh possibilities you know like do i
is there some validity to
like solipsism uh while it can never be
falsified or disproven so i mean
sure you could be a figment of my uh
imagination uh it doesn't mean that
i will act according to this possibility
i'm not going to
call you mean names and just to test the
system uh to see how robust it is to
distortions yeah so i mean all of these
existential
thought experiments are completely
possible we could be brains and jars
it doesn't mean that our experience
will feel any less valid and so it
doesn't make a difference to me
if uh you were some
number of of ones and zeros or you were
a figment of my
imagination which lives in a in a stored
stored away brain
uh it will never really change my
experience
knowing that that's a possibility and so
i try to i try to avoid making
decisions based on such contemplations
you know if we take this this previous
issue of free will
um i could i could decide
that because i have no
choice in my life if i
lie around in bed all day and eat chips
i was destined to do that thing and if i
make that decision then i was destined
to do that thing
it would be a really poor decision uh
for me to make i have
school and a a dozen commitments uh
there's somebody listening to this right
now probably
hundreds of people sitting down eating
chips
and feeling terrible about themselves
those are how dare you sir if they're
listening
to this they're purely they're clearly
curious about um
possibilities of of thought it's not the
it's not the bed and the chips that
okay it makes the man it's not the
better the chips the makes man yet
another
quotable from zev weinstein okay uh
but you don't think of it as a useful
thought experiment from an engineering
perspective
of you know virtual reality
of thinking how we can create further
and further immersive worlds
like would it be possible to create
worlds that are so immersive that
we would rather live in that world
versus the real world
i mean that's another possible
trajectory of the world that you're
growing up in
is where more and more immersing
ourselves
into the digital world for now it's
screens and looking the screens and
socializing the screens
but it's possible to potentially create
a world that's also visually for all of
our
human senses as immersive as the
physical world
and then you know it's to me it's an
engineering question of how difficult is
it to create a
world that's as immersive and more fun
than uh the world would currently live
in it's a terrifying concept and i hate
to say it
we might live happier lives in a virtual
reality headset 30 years from now
then we are currently living this future
the digital future worries you it
worries me
on the other hand it may be it may be a
better
alternative to um fighting for
whatever people are clinging on to in
our non-virtual world or at least the
world that we don't
yet know is virtual so embrace the
future
we've been talking a lot about thinkers
now in the broad definition of
philosophy you kind of included
innovators of all
forms do you find it useful to draw a
distinction between
thinkers and doers i think that
the most important gift we've ever been
given is our ability to
observe the universe and think
deductively
about whatever principles transcend
humanity
because you know as we discussed that's
that's the closest thing we will ever
have to
um a universal experience is
understanding things which
must be true um everywhere
in order for that so
i think if if we're if we're deciding
that that life is
is meaningful and the human experience
is meaningful
uh you could make a very convincing
argument that
its greatest meaning will be
understanding whatever
transcends it um
i think that's only sustainable if
people are happy
and well fed and
things of of market value are
invented and so i think we really need
both to live meaningful and
successful and possible lives
in terms of like who who my greatest
heroes are i can't decide between
figures like uh einstein and
newton and feynman and on the other hand
figures like carrie mullis
for example i think
people like einstein make our lives
meaningful
and people like carrie mullis
who's probably responsible for saving
hundreds of millions of lives
make our make our lives possible
and uh good
so in terms of where i would like to
find myself
uh
with these two different uh notions of
achievement
i don't know what i would more like to
achieve
i have an inclination that it will be
something scientific because i would
like to bring meaning to humanity
instead of uh sustenance
but i think both are very important we
can't
we can't sustain our lives if we don't
keep growing technologically
i think people like you are making that
possible with
uh like computing because that's one of
the few things that's really
moving forward in a in a clear sense
um
i think i think about this a great deal
so i think both are very important so
one example that's modern day
uh inspiring figure on the on the latter
part and the engineering part
on the sustenance is elon musk
is that somebody you draw inspiration
from
what are your thoughts in general about
the
kind of unique
speck of human that's creating so much
uh inspiring innovation in this world
so boldly i know that we will not
survive without people like that um
elon is a ridiculous and sensational
example of one of these
figures i don't know if he's
the best example or the worst example
but he is he is of his own kind
he is radically individualistic and
those are the people who will allow us
to continue uh
as as humans i'm very happy that that we
have people like that in this world
you said this thing about if
we are to say that life has meaning
our life is meaningful then you could
argue
that it is a worthy pursuit to transcend
life do you see
that another just i'm gonna have to
i'm gonna have to go back um and sleep
on that one
uh do you do you draw some speaking of
elon
some inspiration
of us uh
transcending earth of us moving outside
of uh this particular planet
that we've called home for a long time
and colonizing other planets
and perhaps one day expanding outside
the solar system
and uh expanding colonizing our galaxy
and beyond
honestly i know very little about space
exploration
i think it makes complete sense to me
why
we are starting to think very seriously
about it it's
an amazing and baffling and innovative
solution to a lot of problems we see
as a world population i can't really
offer
very much uh of interest on
the topic i think when i i'm talking
about
like transcending humanity and
transcending earth
i'm talking usually about
deriving truth and that's one of the
things that makes like theoretical math
and physics
so interesting it's like i i really
really love
biology for example but
biology is a combination
of whatever principles ensure evolution
and whatever weird coincidences happened
billions of years ago
um so g is more interesting to
understand the fundamental mechanisms of
evolution for example than it is
the results the messy results of its
processes
i can't say which is more interesting i
can say which i think is more
is more deep i think theory
and abstraction which can be achieved
completely deductively
is deeper because it has nothing to do
with circumstance and everything to do
with uh logic and thought
uh so like if we were ever to
to interact with aliens for example uh
we would not have our biology in common
if if these were or some sort of really
intelligent
life form uh we would have
math and physics in common because uh
the laws of physics will be the same
every everywhere in the universe
our particular anatomy and
biology pertains only to life on this
on this planet and the principles may
apply more
ubiquitously do you ever think about
aliens like what they might look like
i try to when i i deal with thought
experiments like these
i try to keep a very abstract
mindset and i notice that whenever
i try to instantiate these abstractions
i i corrupt whatever thoughts
uh there are for which they're useful so
it's kind of like the labels discussion
so like the moment you try to
make it concrete it's probably gonna
look like some cute version of a human
a big like it's the little green fellas
with the
eyes and so on or whatever whatever the
movies uh
have instilled like your cultural
upbringing you're going to project
onto that and the assumptions you have
it's interesting so you prefer to
step away and think and abstract notions
of what it means to be intelligent what
it means to be
a living life form and all that kind of
stuff i try to
i almost try to pretend i'm i'm blind
and i'm
deaf and i'm only
a mind with no inductive reasoning
capacity when i'm trying to think about
thought experiments like these because i
know that
if i incorporate whatever my eyes
instruct my brain i will
i will impede my ability to
think as deeply as possible because once
again it's
the thing which shallows our thought can
be the incorporation of circumstance and
coincidence
and for particular kinds of thought
that's very important i'm not
discounting the use of inductive
reasoning
in many humanities and in many sciences
but for the deepest of thoughts
once again i i feel it's important to
try to transcend
whatever uh methods of observation
characterize human experience
see but within that that's all really
beautifully put i i wonder
if there is a common mathematics and
common physics be