Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society

Are you nervous about this?

Scared shitless.

Okay, Nibas Bukhasia, you mentioned kung fu.

Panda as one of your favorite movies. It has the usual profound master student dynamic going on. So who has been a teacher that significantly influenced the direction of your thinking and life's work? So if you're the kung fu panda, who was your shifu?

Oh, that's interesting, because I didn't see Shifu as being the teacher.

Who was the teacher?

Ugwe. Master Ugwe, the turtle.

Oh, the turtle. Right.

They only meet twice in the entire film, and the first conversation sort of doesn't count. So the magic of the film, in fact, its point is that the teaching that really matters is transferred during a.

Single conversation, and it's very brief.

And so who played that role in my life? I would say either my grandfather, Harry Rubin, and his wife, Sophie Rubin, my grandmother, or Tom Lear. Tom Lair. Yeah.

In which way?

If you give a child Tom Lehrer records, what you do is you destroy their ability to be taken over by later malware. And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene that it destroys the ability to lead a normal life for many people. So if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted from any kind of neurotypical presentation, I'll often ask them, are you a Tom Lara fan? And the odds that they will respond are quite high.

Now, Tom Lahre is poisoning pigeons in the park.

Tom Lair, that's very interesting. There are a small number of Tom Lehrer songs that broke into the general population. Poisoning pigeons in the park. The element song, perhaps the Vatican rag. So when you meet somebody who knows those songs but doesn't know.

Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you?

Harshly, no. But you're russian, so undoubtedly you know Nikolai Ivanovz Lubuchewski, that song. So that was a song about plagiarism that was, in fact plagiarized, which most people don't know from Danny Kay where Danny Kay did a song called Stanislavsky of the Musky arts. And so Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job of plagiarizing a song about and making it about plagiarism and then making it about this mathematician who worked in non euclidean geometry. That was like giving heroin to a child. It was extremely addictive and eventually led.

Me to a lot of different places.

One of which may have been a PhD in mathematics.

And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics, I believe, at Harvard, something like that.

I just had dinner with him, in fact, when my son turned 13, we didn't tell him, but his bar mitzvah present was dinner with his hero, Tom Lehrer. And Tom Lero was 88 years old, sharp as attack, irreverent and funny as hell. And just. There are very few people in this world that you have to meet while they're still here. And that was definitely one for our family.

So that wit is a reflection of intelligence in some kind of deep, where that would be a good test of intelligence, whether you're a Tom Lehra fan. So what do you think that is about wit, about that kind of humor, ability to see the absurdity in existence? Do you think that's connected to intelligence? Or are we just two jews on a mic that appreciate that kind of humor?

No, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence. You can see it. There's a place where Tom Lara decides that he's going to Lampoon Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever, meaningless wordplay. And he has, forget the, let's see, he's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan wrote it. And he says that I. Mr. Depressed her young sister name Esther. This Mr. Depester, she tried pestering sisters, a festering blister. You best to resist her, say aye. The sister persisted, the Mr. Resisted. I kissed her. All loyalty slip when she said I could have. Her sister's cadaver must surely have turned in its crypt. That's so dense, it's so insane that that's clearly intelligence, because it's hard to construct something like that. If I look at my favorite Tom Lyric, Tom Lero lyric, there's a perfectly absurd one, which is once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918 and they've hardly bothered us since then. Right. That is a different kind of intelligence. You're taking something that is so horrific and you're sort of making it palatable and funny and demonstrating also just your humanity. I mean, I think the thing that came through, as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible, horrible lines was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was, who was channeling pain through humor and through grace.

I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia, that same kind of humor emerged from the generation of World War II. It seemed like that humor is required to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering that that war created.

Well, you do need the environment to create the broad slavic soul. I don't think that many Americans really appreciate russian humor. How you had to joke during the time of, let's say, article 58 under Stalin, you had to be very, very careful. The concept of a russian satirical magazine like crocodile doesn't make sense. So you have this cross cultural problem.

That there are certain areas of human.

Experience that it would be better to know nothing about. And quite unfortunately, eastern Europe knows a great deal about them, which makes the songs of Vladimir Vasotsky so potent. The prose of Pushkin, whatever it is, you have to appreciate the depth of the eastern european experience. And I would think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time of the civil war, or maybe under slavery in Jim Crow, or even the harsh tyranny of the coal and steel employers during the labor wars. But in general, I would say it's hard for us to understand and imagine the collective culture unless we have the system of selective pressures that, for example, Russians were subjected to.

Yeah. So if there is one good thing that comes out of war, it's literature, art and humor. Music?

Oh, I don't think so. I think almost everything is good about war except for death and destruction.

Right. Without the death, it would bring the romance of it. The whole thing is nice.

Well, this is why we're always caught up in war, and we have this very ambiguous relationship to it, is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful and at an unacceptable price, and the price has never been higher.

So to jump in into AI a little bit, in one of the conversations you had or one of the videos, you described that one of the things AI systems can't do, and biological systems can, is self replicate. In the physical world. Oh, no, in the physical world, well.

Yes, the physical robots can't self replicate. But this is a very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we've been able to create that's really complex, that has an analog of our reproductive system, is software.

But nevertheless, software replicates itself. If we're speaking strictly for the replication in this kind of digital space, just to begin let me ask a question. Do you see a protective barrier or a gap between the physical world and the digital world?

Let's not call it digital. Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world.

Why logical?

Well, because even though we had, let's say, einstein's brain preserved, it was meaningless to us as a physical object because we couldn't do anything with what was stored in it at a logical level. And so the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically are not necessarily.