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What is the Price of Being an Independent Thinker?
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What is the price of being an independent thinker?
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So listen, the world is complex and we often don't have the time to figure out everything
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Often, we rely on conventional wisdom, that's a rational option.
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But it also means that we fall into grooves of thinking set by others.
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As that old saying goes, where we stand depends on where we sit.
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You could be born in a religious family in a small town in UP and imbibe those values.
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You like your people, you want to belong, and so you become one of them.
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You're conservative, their other is your other, you soak in all their values.
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If you're a woman and being modest and demure is prized, you become modest and demure.
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An independent thinker in that environment would be a heretic and even considered a bad
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Similarly, if you're studying in an American university, there will be pressure on you
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And to me, wokeness is the opposite of liberalism.
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Wokeness begins where liberalism ends.
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As a classical liberal, I put the individual at the center of my thinking.
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Wokeness embraces group identities and simplistic narratives of victimhood and oppression with
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that one hammer for every nail.
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Again, if you dissent, do so silently or you could be in trouble.
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These are just two examples of groupthink.
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But all around us, in every domain and every workplace, there is a pressure to conform.
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I've never conformed and neither has my guest on this show today.
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He knows there is a price to be paid for dissenting from the herd.
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You may never find your tribe and you may always be your own, but you can't change
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a formidable Eric Weinstein, who happened to be in Mumbai a few days ago
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and when he reached out to say he'd like to meet, I took the chance to invite him on the
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Eric got his PhD in mathematical physics, went on to be a hedge fund director and is
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today a prominent public intellectual.
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Those of us who listen to podcasts would be familiar with him from his many appearances
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on Joe Rogan's show, Lex Friedman's superb podcast and Eric's own podcast, The Portal.
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He coined the term the intellectual dark web and has been the center of many controversies
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because he has questioned many orthodoxies.
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We don't discuss any of them in this conversation.
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I found him to be a warm, gentle person and I wanted to explore the man, not the public
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So we had a beautiful, personal, insightful and intimate conversation, which was shorter
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than either of us would have liked because he had a bit of a troubled day, a family member
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was in hospital and he still took our time to give me.
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I'll always cherish this conversation.
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But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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There are many exercises, much interaction and a lovely and lively community at the end
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That's IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
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a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Eric, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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I really appreciate it.
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Good to be with you, Amit.
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So before I ask my first question, if you'll indulge me with an anecdote which may seem
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unrelated, yesterday I was chatting with a poet friend of mine named Vartika and she
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told me about her dad who's in his late 60s.
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And she said how he had a, you know, pretty conventional career as a zoology teacher and
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But after retiring, he's gotten into the zone where he's trekking around, he's backpacking
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He'll visit her in Bombay and then the fancy will strike him and he'll go off somewhere
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And I just found all of that entirely delightful, someone living life to the full.
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And then I went to your Instagram and I found this picture of yours from 1986 in Karjat,
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which by the way is interesting because I was in Karjat just last week and next week
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right after recording this, I'm going there for a few weeks to try and get some writing
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You know, it's like everything coming full circle.
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And I loved your caption of that.
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This is Karjat 1986 and you're writing, two years before I improbably met my Jewish Indian
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wife to be, I am scrawny and gawky in Karjat Maharashtra.
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I somehow have a best friend named Adil who teaches me Urdu.
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The universe is limitless in 1986.
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India unfolds before me in a sequence of worlds within worlds.
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I remember wondering, will India govern my life?
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As it happens, it sort of did and sort of didn't.
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And in no way could I have expected.
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But for a moment in summer 1986, the world seems a limitless adventure and all roads
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Chembur, Auroville, Varun Valley and Panjim in particular.
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I never knew that moment of limitless romance would end.
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If you are young, I wish such a moment of limitless romance and possibility for you
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to be wild, young and free for after all it cannot last and will come to an end as of
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course it must, stop quote.
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Of course it will come to an end for all of us when we die, but why did you feel that
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limitless romance is kind of gone?
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I am kind of curious about that because you seem to me from all your public appearances
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to be someone who is free spirited in a certain way, you are not tied down by convention and
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yet this post seemed like a very poignant lament to this time of limitless possibility.
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But first of all, that's a cautionary tale about posting after midnight.
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I am certain that something must have moved me to say so much in a public forum.
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It's hard for me to say.
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I believe that when you are young, you don't realize, I have a quote that I don't often
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share with the world which is that potential is like sperm, you are not supposed to use
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So you are given limitless potential, but you actually have to particularize it to something.
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You are not going to learn all the world's languages nor all of its cities.
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You are not going to have all of the experiences and I think that in 1986 I was completely
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unprepared for India in particular.
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It's interesting to get to the age of 20 and get hit with an experience of a world that
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is so powerful that it changes everything about you.
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And one of the things that I find in the States is that people who make India a large part
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of their life who don't grow up here and who don't have a historical connection to the
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subcontinent is that they tend to come for spiritual reasons and that was not what drew
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me to India in any way, shape or form.
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So I didn't have, I've never been to Varanasi, I've never thought myself to have an ancient
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I've always been an outsider.
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But the vitality and the complexity and the cosmopolitan nature of India within India
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And one of the things that I liked most about the experience was getting hit with the idea
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that I didn't know how to eat, I did not know how to go to the bathroom.
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All of my intuitions were wrong.
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And to have that happen to you at the beginning of your 20s and to discover worlds within
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worlds within worlds is a very powerful thing.
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And in particular in the US context, we have an illusion, which is that if we simply roll
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up our sleeves and apply some good old American elbow grease, we can solve the world's problems.
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And India taught me that that was simply impossible, that I could spend an entire life on a city
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block and not understand it here.
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So the humbling experience of India and the call to adventure and all of these things,
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it sort of immediately taught me that I did not know what the world was capable of putting
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up and that there was no way of following all paths.
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But I felt certain at the time that my life was meant to pass through here and it did
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and it didn't in the ways that I expected.
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It did in the sense that I fell in love with an Indian woman and married into her family.
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I continue to have the same best friend from that time.
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But I never spent a year here, I never mastered the language sufficiently.
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By the language, of course, immediately you say something wrong right out of the blocks.
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I sort of thought Hindi and Urdu would have gotten, I would have advanced farther within them.
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But on the other hand, I think that the issues of Indian sensibility, the interest and the
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concern with this place has lasted.
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And just in terms of the potential, just realizing that in every life, most of the doors that
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are open to you must close so that there is no way of truly living the world.
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You live a very particular experience and as Robert Frost said in a poem that almost
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no one really actually understands, you simply take one path over the other and you will
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lie to yourself that the path you took made all the difference, that your choices did.
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But in fact, what he was really saying was that there were two paths that were exactly
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equivalent and he simply took one of them and that he will lie to himself in the future
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about the fact that he took the one that seemed a little bit less worn.
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I think that's sort of the genesis of the idea.
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It was a little bit rambling, but there you go.
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Yeah, I know the Frost poem is beautiful.
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I, in fact, teach it in my writing course or rather I talk about it in the context of
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how poets use soft sounds and hard sounds.
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Where in the first part of the poem, where the woods are filling up with snow, all the
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sounds are soft and just, you know, you get that feeling of that softness.
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That wasn't the poem that I meant, but I was thinking of the two roads diverging in a yellow
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You were thinking of Unstopping by the Woods on a snowy evening.
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Oh yeah, that's the one I'm thinking of.
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Oh yeah, two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less traveled by and it's
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made all the difference.
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Yeah, yeah, sorry, we're thinking of different poems.
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But in some sense, I've actually thought that those poems seem strangely connected.
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Yeah, yeah, which is why I made the error I just did.
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Well, or perhaps it wasn't an error at all.
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So one thing that you just said sort of struck me in the sense that you didn't come here
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for the typical reasons that someone from America might come here.
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You didn't come here looking for religion.
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You didn't go to Varanasi.
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You didn't come here with that exotic gaze, as it were.
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You were just trying to kind of soak it in.
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And I'm wondering how taking this temporary road at that time, just coming to India with
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an open mind, how it changes the person you become.
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Because I would imagine that not only would it make you a different person from the person
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you would have been if you hadn't come, but it would also make you a different person
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from the person who comes with that exotic gaze.
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And everything is something outside of you.
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And then you go back and it's back to life and all that.
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Even the concept of the exotic gaze is, I think, misunderstood.
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And of course, I could be wrong.
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But Indians tend to exoticize India themselves.
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And this issue of the cosmopolitan India from within is not understood.
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I think that I've seen very few fellow gorers wandering around South Bombay for the last week.
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On the other hand, it's the most multicultural city you can imagine, even if everyone happens
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So I think that there's a weird way in which you can't actually escape what you're saying
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What we typically call Orientalism in the West and the fetishization is in fact an internal
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So that I think that it's once again a situation in which if you're really open to the place,
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it teaches you that you can't escape these things.
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And even if you don't come for the spirituality, the spirituality will come for you.
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There's no way to avoid it.
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So in terms of how to form me and how does it differ from somebody else,
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I think the key question is, are you open to having your life shaken up without coming
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And I think that that's been an important part of India's role in my life, which is that
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I'm always much more aware of what I don't know, don't understand,
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feel incompetent to comment upon than what little nuggets of insight I can glean.
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And so I think it's been a tremendously humbling experience.
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It forces modesty upon you.
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I'm also struck by the word you used that you were an outsider here.
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And I felt that in pretty much everything I've done in my life, every field I've been
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part of, I felt like an outsider.
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I'm not part of the mainstream.
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I'm doing my own thing.
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Might get respect and all that, but an outsider.
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And I just wonder if there is someone called, I mean, if it's a question of just character
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or personality that you're just a congenital outsider, like in your career from the outside
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in just looking at everything you've done, it would seem whether it's in academy or wherever
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you were, is it correct to say that you were perhaps a little bit of an outsider till
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maybe perhaps at a later stage, you were part of your own little band of outsiders?
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I believe that it has to do with being an insider and an outsider simultaneously and
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being open to both roles.
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If you are simply an insider, it means that you aren't seeking adventure.
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You're not seeking to break your own frames and reweave them.
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If you were simply an outsider, you're usually in denial about the fact that you
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come up with a context, even if that context is not well known.
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And so, you know, as somebody who married into a subculture here, I suppose there are
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ways in which I'm actually an insider.
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But I think what I'm getting at is not just in the context of India, but is there a certain
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kind of person who is condemned or destined to always be an outsider just because of the
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I mean, I think, you know, one of the interesting things, for example, is that in our country,
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the United States, Barack Obama probably became president because he was perennially outside.
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So the only choice was to lead.
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And we perhaps accepted him because he was black and white.
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He was Muslim and Christian.
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He was at turns, you know, foreign, having grown up in Indonesia and American, but, you
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know, sort of tangentially so, where Hawaii was one of the last states to be admitted
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And he had so many different fragments of identity that, in some sense, he was qualified
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to lead a nation whose identity was itself fragmented.
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And so even if the people that he led often had a much more coherent identity, the person
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Well, I just had my stomach defeated by a thali restaurant called Thacker's, right,
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which you probably know at Chapati.
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And it's so many different fragments of a meal that, you know, are put together in one
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tray and constitute a meal.
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But, you know, really, it's an assault of the senses in which everyone eventually admits
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I think, in some sense, that fragmented identity is an identity, and it's a common enough one.
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But because everyone's fragments are different, we never meet somebody whose shards are similar
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I remember once seeing a movie called Total Love TLV out of Israel, and somehow it wove
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together India, Israel, and Holland, where we had just been.
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And my wife and I sort of stared at each other because somehow these shards matched our shards
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It's a tremendously unusual thing to have a fragmented identity match that of another.
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In another of your Instagram posts, there's a picture of you in 1989, and you're in Kyiv,
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right, and some of your relatives have kind of come over, and it's a very touching picture,
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and you're looking very young, and you're kind of posing with them.
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And it's a black and white picture, if I remember.
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And you talk about how you straightaway felt in what was then the Soviet Union.
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You straightaway felt at home, right?
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I want to ask about what that concept of home is for you, you know, because for some people,
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it could be a particular place, maybe a particular place at a particular time.
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For some people, there's a larger sense of community that ties into it.
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In your case, you're Jewish as well, which plays into all of this.
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Tell me a little bit about what is your notion of home and what it means to belong?
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Well, very often it has to do with the things that you've hugged closest to your breast
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and the shock of finding out that they had an origin in some thing that you did not know.
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So I remember being in in Kiev and finding out that certain sort of Yiddish phrases that had
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no use or utility in the United States were still used by my relatives over there.
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And sort of the shock of figuring out that people you had never met are actually relatively close
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family and that the culture did not die and that you came from a context that you knew not.
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It's shocking. And by the way, a similar thing oddly happened here where before I met my wife,
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I really came over to be with my friend Adil's family and the Abdul Ali clan.
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So we happened to be recording proximate to Bandra, which was the home of the great
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ornithologist Salim Ali, the Birdman of India. And the Abdul Alis were very active within the
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Bombay Natural History Society. And they maintained all sorts of forgotten songs that my family,
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in fact, would sing. They would call these Qaheem songs because the family maintained
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a large compound in the beaches south of Bombay near Alibagh.
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And I was playing harmonica, which is not an instrument that many Americans play
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where it's called mouth organ here. And the patriarch of my of my friends,
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family Shamoon Abdullahi of blessed memory. There was an instant connection and
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the transcendence of the particulars, you know, Jew and Muslim and Indian and American,
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all this kind of stuff. You just sort of the superficial identities can sometimes melt away
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and you're left with the deep differences and the deep similarities. And so I there was no way in
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which I was part of this this family, but I was also accepted because culturally there was a great
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deal of homology that had been undiscovered. And so I just find these things fascinating that
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in some sense, the things that we that we value that are not in common currency, you see, if you
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value a famous Beatles song, if I say I really like the song yesterday and you say, oh, I do too,
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it has no currency because so many people appreciate that song. Right. But if I think
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about like, well, there's a little snippet of a song in Marathi that I didn't know
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that I've carried with me that Shamoon taught me and that if somebody knew that I would feel an
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instant kinship because it's such an obscure thing that is never referenced anywhere. And I think that
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that's really what in some sense home is, is that you're looking for the few things that are really
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not in strong currency elsewhere that I that you've held close and anybody else who exhibits those
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things in general feels like home. There's another beautiful clip from your Instagram, as you can see
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I've kind of stalked your Instagram. There's another beautiful clip where you're having,
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which you titled Harmonica Duel, but it's not really a duel. It's this beautiful moment where
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you're walking through the street playing your harmonica and this other gentleman joins you.
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And it's just, you know, everything kind of makes sense. It just fits together, right?
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There was an Avignon in France, in the south of France, and they were having a giant festival,
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which I hadn't heard of. And there was some black blues and jazz cat in the street that
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singing with in English, probably an American. And, you know, we have France in some sense to
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thank for rescuing the careers of so many American black musicians who couldn't earn a
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living in the States. And the French really appreciate it. And the French were, of course,
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early, maybe the first non-Americans to contribute to the canon. I'm thinking of
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Django Reinhardt, who was a famous Sinti Romani musician, and to a lesser extent, his fellow
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musician, Stefan Grappelli. So it was just odd that I was walking through the street and
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I heard this guy and I had a harmonic in my pocket. I tend to travel with a harmonica
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because I think it affords a possibility of making a connection almost anywhere you are.
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And I checked it and he was playing in a style called cross harp, where you don't play with the
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fourth hole blown as the bass, but you use the second hole drawn. And it was in the same key.
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And I thought, okay, well, this is clearly Kismet. And we started playing together. We never
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exchanged a word. But I, to this day, feel a kinship with this person, like almost an as a friend.
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And it's not a friendship in any significant way, but what are the odds that two people
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in the South of France would both have the same harp play in the same style and be able to
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communicate in under a minute? It's kind of absolutely magical. And I've realized over time
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that you might value deep friendships that last many years and those have their place,
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but sometimes you can have a chance meeting just one conversation and you remember that,
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or one moment of connection like this. And I want to also ask you about time,
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which is something I think about, like I'm in my late forties, I'm I think nine years younger than
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you. And when I was young, when I was 17 or 18, it seemed as if 40 was really old. You know,
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you romanticize the rock stars who ride at 27 or then the guys who ride at 33. And you thought,
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man, that's really old. You know, that's a long way away. And at the same time, while time seems
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to be very vast, the world seems to be very small and controllable in a sense. It's your oyster.
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You feel that you grok everything, you understand everything. And I found that as you grow older,
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one's understanding of time, at least my understanding of time, just changes. Like
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I was chatting with a guest of mine and I realized that his year of birth was closer
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to World War I than to his current age, right? And which is so sort of, you know, in your case,
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they're almost the same. I think you're born in 65, right? So whatever. But 20 years shifted from
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the end of World War II. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's, how does, you know, do you think about
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this? Like, then what happens is earlier when we are young, a century seems like a long time.
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At this age, a century doesn't seem like such a long time. It seems like just as in many of
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our cases, the years and the decades can just pass by in a flash. It might feel that a lot of
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the differences that seem so big are not really big differences, that we are all the same people,
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we're all coming from the same place. You can find that moment of connection in Kiev, in Mumbai.
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I really agree and disagree with this very strongly. I made the point, I think on the
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Rogan podcast, maybe the last time, that between 1902 and 1952, it seemed like 10,000 years,
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but between 1973 and 2023, it's barely any time at all. And I don't think that that has to do with
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with me. I think that if you look at a picture of 1952 and you look at a picture of 1902,
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you know, there are no planes flying in 1902 around and cars are an oddity if they're there at all.
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Frozen food hadn't really, I mean, so much changed that I brought up that a Civil War veteran
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lived to see the first hydrogen bomb exploded. Now that's extraordinary.
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If we thought that the same thing would happen between 1973 and the present, we would be living
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in a world of the Jetsons, that cartoon. And I think one of the things that you're seeing that
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is really remarkable is the rise of machine learning and AI. And that's going to have a profound
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impact that is essentially unimaginable. The internet is the big story of the last 50 years.
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And I'm not going to deny how big of a story it is, but I am going to say that it's not,
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it's not like what happened in the Renaissance where you had simultaneously innovations in
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architecture and music and mathematics and painting and poetry and political thought.
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I mean, it was just was astounding that somehow humanity got out of its own way across the board.
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And I think that what's odd about the progress of the last 50 years is that it's been pretty
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narrow. It's been pretty narrowly focused on communications and more importantly, digital
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technology. And, you know, I grew up when I was a little kid with the Concorde. We don't have
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supersonic passenger flight. I think my parents purchased some sort of option to be on Transworld
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Airlines first flight to the moon, they thought was an inevitability. So there was sort of a,
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you know how when you're very hungry and you go to a market, you tend to put too much food in your
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basket because you don't realize that your hunger is affecting you. In the 60s, the world seemed much
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more futuristic. And I think that that's gone backwards. And I think it's just now restarting.
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So I think if you're thinking about time, there are periods of time where nothing happens,
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and there are periods of time when everything happens. And I think we may be watching the end
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of a frozen order following World War Two. Yeah, I think the quote is something to the effect of
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there are years when nothing happens and weeks when years happen. And I think that,
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you know, when I first visited India, people had ambassadors and fiats. And I think the Maruti was
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just, there was an old joke at the time, which is horrible. How is a Maruti like piles? Sooner or
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later, every asshole gets one. But that was, you know, India was breaking out of its formative era
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as a modern state. And, you know, I see much more change in this society than I do in my own.
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So let's take a digression and a slightly heretical question. And I'm really thinking aloud here.
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Careful with the heresy because this is a pretty combustible place, but let's go to it.
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I don't think this will piss people off. But so here's my thought that the number of people who
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are alive today is much more than ever before. So your sample size of potential artists and
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creators is far greater than ever before. And the means of production are far more widespread than
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ever before. And therefore one would logically imagine that when we talk of the Renaissance and
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so on, we're kind of romanticizing it, that we should have just by the numbers, just by the stats,
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just by the fact that people are so empowered, a far greater number and quality of artists
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all over the place. And perhaps they are dispersed and perhaps, you know, catering to little corners
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and we don't. But what is sort of your kind of sense of that? That's preposterous.
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I don't think it's the number of people. I think it's how few people are catalyzed to
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do something great. And what catalyzed the greatness? I mean, I think we're blind at the
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moment to our own potential because a lot of what happened was something I call Umwelt hacking.
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The Germans have a concept that the Umwelt is what you can perceive in the world. So right now we're
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bathed in Wi-Fi, but we need our phones to tell us what the names of the Wi-Fi networks are because
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we can't perceive them. They're not in our direct Umwelt. So we would call our phone a part of what
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Richard Dawkins called our extended phenotype and our extended phenotype can perceive the world.
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Well, when you have a telescope and a microscope and an MRI and you can look inside things and
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make the fast slow and the slow fast so you can actually watch, you simply see a lot more.
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And as a result, a lot of what happened was that people just perceived more and more of the world
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as it was. And that was incredibly inspiring. But I think that, let me just say this in terms
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of musicianship. I think we probably have guitarists who are as technically good
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as guitarists have ever been. And nobody cares. Nobody really cares about the guitar.
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And we have maybe one or two guitar heroes. Maybe John Mayer would be the only one. I just saw John
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Mayer in concert. He's completely uninterested in his own virtuosity. And I know there are other
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virtuoso guitarists, one in particular named Blake Mills, who seems not to care at all that
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many people consider one of the greatest guitarists living. Why is that? Because the meaning complex
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surrounding virtuosity and versus many of these sorts of abilities to perfect has evaporated.
#
It doesn't mean as much when somebody squeezes or bends a note as it once did. And what is being said
#
is not hitting home. So when processed client side, we find it vapid and devoid of meaning.
#
And even the artist is almost apologetic. Yeah, I think that this has been a terrible time for that.
#
And you know, both of these last two things we discussed where you spoke about how in the 60s,
#
there seemed to be much more of a sense of possibility and futuristic sort of a futuristic
#
vision than there is today. And equally, you point out about how the bending of a note no
#
longer means so much because so many notes are being bent. And is there a sense of is jadedness
#
a problem there that we are so saturated with all of these things, whether it is technology,
#
whether it is I mean, technology doing miraculous things, which when I was young to be doing any of
#
the things that I did today, like using GPS to come here or recording today like this, or even
#
being in touch with, you know, someone who's a continent away and we can meet and we can talk
#
would have seemed absolutely frickin magical. But we just take it for granted, you know, today.
#
So is that also a case that this saturation is an issue in the sense that like I think about form
#
a lot and I think about the form of how I spent my days in the 80s, where I did not have an internet
#
or a smartphone to look at all the time. If I was bored, if I was lucky enough to have access to a
#
book, I'd pick up the book and read it and I'd read any book I could get my hands on, or I'm
#
staring out of the window. I spoke to this great writer, Sarah Rye, who's perhaps a little older
#
than you, an incredible Hindi writer, and she had such sharp observations of her childhood,
#
of what the garden was like and what everything smelled like and the colors and everything. And
#
I said like, how do you remember, you know, so much? And she said, Amit, we had nothing else to do,
#
you know, it was boredom that made us notice all of these things. And I worried that in the modern
#
age, the form of our spending our time is scrolling or swiping left and right. And does that sort of
#
affect the way the brain also functions? And does it also affect the capacity of the brain to perceive
#
magic, to feel that wonder, to feel that awe? It's an interesting point. And I find myself every time
#
you ask these questions, I could answer them in the American idiom, but I'm sort of more curious
#
to use the local idiom. The first thing I would say is that almost certainly the phone is having
#
an effect on the quality and nature of the brain that generates the mind that we didn't anticipate.
#
In other words, I believe that we've restructured our brains because the screen is so powerful
#
that somebody could be scrolling on their phone while driving, not realizing that they're
#
operating a death trap and saying, Oh my gosh, that's the cutest cat video I can imagine.
#
So I think that our minds have actually been seriously injured by our phones. And to call them
#
phones is also bizarre. I mean, it's some sort of God tablet that allows us to implant memories
#
from other people that never happened to us. So I have a fairly clear idea what it's like to bungee
#
jump, even though I've never bungee jumped or to dive with sharks or whatever it is. I've had all
#
sorts of experiences that aren't mine, and I'm bored instantly. I mean, after diving with sharks,
#
bungee jumping, I'm suddenly in a dance number, and then I'm kitesurfing. So you're having all
#
of these experiences that aren't yours, and your brain is being restructured. And you find that
#
your attention span has now become a barbell. You either can barely make it through a tweet,
#
or you want to watch something with the most complicated character development ever put in
#
a visual medium like Game of Thrones or The Sopranos or any one of the Mad Men. So I think
#
we've become something else that we weren't. And I believe that the issue of boredom and the issue
#
of creativity under constraint. I was talking about this actually with my father-in-law,
#
where his point was because of the prohibition on kissing in Indian cinema that
#
many of the scenes were impossibly erotic because kissing was barred.
#
Right? And I think it was Esther Perel, the sort of Belgian-American relationship and
#
sexuality therapist who commented that desire is the product of attraction plus an obstacle.
#
And by decreasing the obstacles, we have changed the nature of what it means to be human.
#
There's a fascinating poem called Desire by Clementine von Radix which speaks to justice,
#
so I'll read it out. The poem is called Desire. God, I want you in some primal wild way.
#
Animals want each other, untamed and full of teeth. God, I want you in some chaste Victorian way.
#
A glimpse of your ankle just kills me. And that speaks to exactly what you were talking about,
#
right? That constraint that an ankle can drive you nuts.
#
Bring back the frickin' ankle.
#
Bring back the frickin' ankle.
#
No, no, no. Seriously, man. I'm not kidding around.
#
That ship has sailed though, hasn't it?
#
Well, then let's get it back. I don't believe in that.
#
Especially now with AI, you can really conjure up any, and with consumer-grade AI,
#
not even, you can conjure up any scenario with deepfakes starring whoever the hell you want
#
and just put it out there and it's out there on the screen.
#
I really disagree with this. I'm sorry. I think those of us who
#
quest are not seeking a particular visual confirmation. We are seeking an arbiter of worth.
#
And what the AI cannot do now is dole out dopamine based upon its judgment of whether or not we are
#
worthy of a dopamine hit. So I go back a lot to this idea of courtly love, which was effectively
#
unconsummated romance, which the well-turned ankle is even perhaps too explicit.
#
I believe we have the capacity to wean ourselves away from this. The problem is that we don't find
#
anything that is discriminating about whether we do a great job or a poor job. And as a result,
#
in particular, men are not feeling masculine because there is nothing that actually
#
discriminates about whether a man has been worthy.
#
I saw a guy from North Africa, I think, scale a building in France to save someone,
#
just like scampered up the outside of it, parkour style.
#
And I just thought that was the most marvelous masculine thing in the world,
#
to save a child or save a woman on a balcony. Things are aflame. We want to put ourselves at
#
risk. How many of our creators, as we call them, which I think is probably a term that should be
#
banned, can you imagine Michelangelo as a creator and the Sistine Chapel as his content? I mean,
#
it's to rob life of its meaning. I think people are risking their lives for Instagram for a few
#
clicks and some dopamine. And what those people want is they want a quest. They want something
#
to give their lives meaning. They're willing to take a risk. And clicks seems a bit cheap.
#
I want to double-click on the word masculine. Right now, we are wired in a certain way that
#
men behave in a certain way with society, then reinforces and you have these norms of what a
#
man should be like and all of that. And part of it is understandable. We've evolved that way in
#
prehistoric times, but that is descriptive and not prescriptive. We don't have to turn the is into a
#
not. And the danger in modern times for a lot of people is that men can be trapped by these notions
#
of masculinity. And it isn't always a problem if you give up those notions of masculinity and you
#
want to kind of live another way and you say, fine, I'm like, I'm wired this way, but I don't
#
need to behave this way. So my question really isn't what is your understanding of masculine?
#
And in a normative sense, what are you saying that do we need a certain kind of masculinity?
#
Is it? Oh, I see that. That question usually presents as a trap, even though you don't
#
intend it. No, no, I understand. But it does present as a trap. Because in some sense,
#
to name the masculine and to name the feminine is to rob them in some sense of their mystery
#
and their relationship to each other. One doesn't make sense in the absence of the other.
#
I think part of it derives from that, which we have not been able to route around, for example.
#
So how much of our courtship behavior has to do with a woman in her seventh to ninth month
#
of pregnancy, shortly thereafter, being significantly incapacitated so as to need to
#
depend on another? I think that the whole business about who picks up the check is not a
#
question of an arbitrary standard. It has to do with if I couldn't take care of myself,
#
would you be there to do it? Do you have the wherewithal? I think that we are the most
#
case-selective species in that we have a tremendous investment per child that we have to
#
deal with because of the fact that our brains are plastic and don't contain the basic programming.
#
Effectively, it has to do with codependence. Codependence is a positive rather than a
#
negative, which is quite disturbing. We've pathologized the idea that both man and woman
#
are incomplete without the other in a pair-bonded child-raising context. And now we have an idea
#
that perhaps men will be able to have uteruses implanted and maybe we'll have artificial
#
wombs and women may be just as good, or if not better, at earning a living. Okay, so you'll create
#
a series of conditions that will rob the masculine and the feminine of their purpose, which is the
#
child. And I think really, societies that work, work backwards from babies. And societies that
#
don't work, work forwards from pleasure. In other words, pleasure has to be put in the service of
#
the baby. So when I think of sort of the Enlightenment project and when I think of culture in general,
#
I see there being a tussle between sort of two impulses. And one is an impulse for culture to
#
reinforce our programming. And of course, many aspects of our programming are contradictory and
#
so on, but culture reinforcing our programming in the same way as paying the check being an
#
example of that, for example. But at the same time, it can also act to mitigate our programming,
#
to sort of mitigate, to paraphrase Steven Pinker badly, the worst demons of our nature.
#
And that to me also seems like a useful exercise. So are you saying that at some point,
#
you have to draw a line that we can tamper with human nature up to a certain point,
#
or we can mitigate human nature up to a certain point. But if you try beyond a point,
#
then we are going to run into trouble, is that right?
#
Well, I think that what you're bringing out is that
#
whatever it is that our original programming was intended to do is not necessarily the best,
#
right? So this is the so-called naturalistic fallacy that the world around us is soaked in blood,
#
and is largely about murder. So I don't want to claim that whatever it is that existed in a state
#
of nature before human nature was privileged. But I think what it is, is it's a series of load
#
bearing structures. And if you take one out, you have to replace it with something that is a better
#
load bearing structure. The current vogue for, I don't know how to describe it exactly, knocking
#
out load bearing structures that you've decided are immoral, without replacing them, without
#
taking the burden upon yourself to make sure that you have a better structure that is put in place
#
before removing the old, is really the problem. The problem isn't progressing things. Many things
#
have gotten much better. But I think what I see now is a mania for change without checking whether
#
or not the load bearing nature of the previous structure has been replaced before the demolition
#
Can you give me an example of load bearing structures from the past? I mean, without,
#
you know, necessarily talking about the ideological excesses of the modern time,
#
but just from the past to get a sense of what do you mean by load bearing structures?
#
You know, I forget which French philosopher, I should know this because one of my favorite quotes
#
was a quote that actually really liberated me. A nation is defined to be a group of people who
#
have agreed to forget something in common. And it solved a lot of problems for me because I had
#
always assumed that people were forgetting things about our true nature and that if I could only
#
remind them of them, we would become better people like, you know, the US adventure in slavery
#
or the Indian adventure in caste, whatever you want to put in that place. Now, I don't have any
#
love for the fact that our founding documents in the US said that we hold these truths to be
#
self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain
#
inalienable rights. My feeling about that is that that was a fiction. You had slavery while
#
that was being written, but it was a load bearing fiction to knock that out.
#
You know, this woman, what's her name, Nicole Hannah Jones, who had this 1619 project,
#
she just tried to knock out the founding fiction of the country without putting in place
#
a better fiction because it has to be a fiction. There has to be in some sense, a denial of reality.
#
I just find that incredibly destructive or, you know, if you're not very careful with atheism,
#
it's one thing to remove a claim that one knows the mind of God. It's another thing
#
to offer nothing in return, to not offer a vision of how to organize our morality,
#
to how to stop the infinite chain of whys from resulting in relativism that leaves an
#
ungovernable planet. I think you can arrive at morality through reason, and I think that infinite
#
chain of whys would also exist for a religious person. I mean, what's your relationship with it?
#
I'm an atheist who prays. I don't think it's as easy to do as we all sort of intuit. We all
#
think, well, if I choose atheism, I can choose also to be moral, and you can. But I think about
#
my friend Sam Harris, and I think Sam is a pretty moral person. What I don't think is that
#
there is a need to be moral. Once you decide that there's no one here and it's a question of human
#
flourishing, who's to say what human flourishing is? Does Hannibal Lecter get a vote as to what
#
human flourishing actually means? Maybe human flourishing is someone else's pancreas with a
#
fine chianti. Which is a fine image, but you know, as far as choosing atheism is concerned,
#
I don't think you choose it. I mean, people often have this mistaken concept, and I'm just saying
#
this for my listeners' benefit, not for yours, but people often have this mistaken notion that
#
atheism is believing that there is no God. And actually, atheism is an absence of belief. It is
#
no more a belief than not collecting stamps as a hobby, as the saying goes. So if you don't believe
#
in something that there's no evidence for, it's not something you choose. It just is what it is.
#
Tomorrow, if you would approve God to me, I'd believe that there was a God. And as far as morality
#
is concerned, I think that what religion has really done is provided a code for existing social
#
norms, which were often reinforcing our programming to begin with. So, you know, in that sense,
#
there's a lot of rationalization going on there as well. I've been through that. And then I ended
#
up somewhere else. That was not my final... Where did you end up? I ended up believing that it's a
#
lot harder to get rid of religion. And I don't really just mean belief in God. I really mean
#
religion. No, I mean, I agree with you in the sense that I understand that it fills a lot of
#
holes. And what do you do with those holes? I'm worried that it's much more load bearing than that.
#
In other words, for the moment, let's disentangle the fitness question from the truth question.
#
Assume that there is no God, but to really understand that there is no God is to lose
#
fitness. That is a possibility that every atheist has to consider. And... To lose fitness in what sense?
#
Well, let's imagine that you had a religion that told you which side of the road was the correct
#
road to drive on. Maybe it's the correct side to drive on. If you could sign people up to that
#
religion, you could have a society. What happens when everyone has a very strong sense that
#
whatever side of the road they grew up learning to drive on is the correct side? So my wife and I
#
would be at cross purposes. I drive on the right, she drives on the left. And we have no ability to
#
work this out. It's much more important than in some sense, we are synced up. And so there's
#
certain ways in which religion... I believe that there's a chompskin pregrammer of religion in the
#
mind. And I also believe that there's a chompskin pregrammer of language. So I can't be an
#
a-linguist, because I think the idea is that that's a receptor, if you will, that must be bound.
#
It's not the case that I can say that my language is the best, but there are certain sorts of,
#
you know, I mean, let's see, Hindi would be a subject-object-verb language like Turkish,
#
even though Turkic and Indic languages don't share any ostensible root. You don't find a lot of
#
object-verb-subject languages. We don't know why. So the world's religions seem very varied,
#
but I don't think you find the full panoply of possible religions. And in a certain sense,
#
most of them have to deal with certain basic issues, the table manners, if you will.
#
And then they usually have a foreign relations department, which is, what do I do when I'm
#
confronted with somebody who has an alternate belief system? Now, that's chaotic. It's not
#
always desirable. But on the other hand, I'm worried that if you try to leave that receptor,
#
if you will, unbound, it doesn't result in reason and morality the way many of us wish it would.
#
I mean, we want it to, and it doesn't seem a priori like there's a problem.
#
But I believe that in some sense, the reason we have the religions we do
#
is that those who tried to leave that receptor unbound to claim that it's just like not collecting
#
stamps found out that it's not a philately. It's something else. Steven Landsberg had this book
#
called Big Questions, where he argued, if I remember correctly, something to the effect of
#
Yeah, The Economist, a book called Big Questions. But this was more of a,
#
this was actually an economic musing as well, where I think, and forgive me if I paraphrase
#
him wrongly, but the sense of what he was getting at, which I found profound to think about, was
#
that if you look at the revealed preferences of a lot of people who claim to believe,
#
they don't really believe, right?
#
I mean, I believe a lot of us who claim not to believe exhibit belief.
#
Huh, because we fill that gap in other ways, perhaps. We choose other delusions.
#
No, I think it's hard not to.
#
Well, anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
#
Yeah, yeah. So the question I was sort of, what was the question I was getting at?
#
Yeah, so the question I was getting at is that if we are for a moment to accept that that is true,
#
that a lot of religiosity is for show, or it's just to fit in, or it's not really deeply sincere.
#
In that case, a lot of people live by a code that appears to be a moral code,
#
without having religion as a bulwark of that. You know, we behave in a certain way in society
#
because part of it is mimetic. People around us do that. We see the norms in the conventions.
#
Wait, did you mean mimetic or mimetic?
#
I'm sorry. I meant mimetic, sorry.
#
Oh, in a Girardian sense?
#
In a Girardian sense, yeah. I mean, you know, you look at other people who behave like that,
#
and you kind of do that, yeah. Sorry, I am Bengali, so my pronunciations are bad.
#
It's not that. We all struggle with that exact word. And before we had a conversation in which
#
we later found out that we were saying different things, I thought I would nip that in the bud.
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Though to a certain extent, you know, one could use both
#
mimetic and mimetic in this context.
#
I'm with you. We need new language, sir.
#
Yeah, yeah. So, but anyway, moving on from there, there's something else that also intrigues me,
#
which is, like I realized, we contain multitudes, so we can look at each other in different ways,
#
and we wear different hats at different points in time. Now, earlier, when we were discussing
#
the concept of home, and you spoke about being in Kiev and feeling at home, you spoke about
#
coming to Bombay and feeling a connection with people here, you know, that moment of connection
#
with the harmonica player in Paris, and all of that is happening, and there is a sense
#
that you are not contained here by geography, that there's a lot more that connects you.
#
At the same time, you know, sometimes when you speak about, say, the US and China,
#
you're putting on a different hat, where you're putting on the national interest hat,
#
and you're saying that, yeah, that there are directors of companies who've told you that
#
their fiduciary duty to their shareholders is to ship the job overseas, even though they know it's
#
bad for the country, and you made that argument from the country point of view, that this is not
#
good for the US, therefore we shouldn't do it. At another level, you make arguments from the
#
species point of view, putting a human hat on, saying that, hey, AI, you know, we need to look
#
at the dangers, we need to look at what it can do to the species, and so on and so forth. So,
#
I want to understand this a little better, because, you know, I find it, and no doubt my fellow
#
countrymen will call me a little anti-national for this, but I find it hard in particular to use
#
that nation-state hat, where, like, I completely understand that if I was a foreign policy person,
#
if I was working for the government, that would be my focus. But as an individual in society,
#
I'm a part of so many different diverse networks. In fact, one could argue that in the century,
#
just as strong men are rising up within nation-states, nation-states themselves,
#
despite all their powers of surveillance and all that, are perhaps getting less and less relevant
#
in many domains of the lives of individuals. How does one navigate this? Because if you,
#
for example, look at something like just outsourcing, you could just shift the hat
#
and come to a completely different conclusion. Well, but it's the question of the multiplicities
#
of selves. I mean, for example, I'm the one, I think, who coined the phrase,
#
xenophilic restrictionist. Well, people are very confused that I want fewer immigrants
#
to the United States, and yet I seem to be obsessed with foreign cultures, languages, foods,
#
national identities, because they have some kind of crazy idea that if you appreciate
#
those things and if you're drawn to them, you should want as many people abroad to come to
#
your country. It's completely nonsensical. Clearly it's a nonsensical thing. But I think
#
what people don't like is they don't like the image. Very often, somebody will say to me,
#
hey, I'm an H1B, so of course you hate me. I say, no, I've actually tried to write letters on behalf
#
of many people to sponsor them, but you're a restrictionist. Yes, I want to be frustrated
#
in my desire. I want to adopt all the puppies in the world, but I know that that would not be a
#
good thing if I took all the puppies in the world and I raised them myself. Likewise, I don't want
#
all of the foreign cultures to mix together in my country so that my country suddenly swells with
#
everyone on earth and all of these cultures become
#
de-individuated. I really appreciate the Turkish language and Turkish food and Turkish culture,
#
Turkish art music, and the same way I really appreciate Hindustani classical music as I
#
appreciate Western classical music. And to a limited extent, I appreciate the
#
Tabla beat science or Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar trying to get together, but I didn't
#
actually think that that was such a successful meeting of the minds. I mean, sometimes you get
#
something truly remarkable, but oftentimes if you just pour all the colors in your paint set into
#
one bucket, you don't end up with rainbow paint. You end up with something that's kind of homogenous
#
and not that very interesting. So I think we have to just understand that we're divided against
#
ourselves and that dialectics are everywhere and that most of us are not good at acknowledging
#
them. So either we penalize ourselves for hypocrisies or we go all in and have a
#
simplified position that can't possibly carry the day. And I think that that's sort of the
#
state of affairs is that I believe that there's tension within the self and that those tensions
#
are to be cherished and recognized and accepted and that we should not push everything towards
#
artificial synthesis or saying, well, thesis or antithesis, pick a side. I think that's just
#
is to cheat yourself of the purpose and the meaning of a human life. So very often
#
what I want is at odds with itself. Just to double click on that phrase you used about the
#
de-individuation of cultures and how you don't want sort of... And I couldn't make out there
#
whether you're making the argument against immigration from the point of view of the
#
nation state or from the point of view of cultures itself. Do you think there is a danger
#
that cultures can get homogenized if they are in too big a melting pot? Is that sort of the worry?
#
Sometimes the homogenization is fantastic. Sometimes it's terrible.
#
Well, take a stupid example.
#
Hindi and Urdu are clearly two very related languages, but the word choice often really
#
matters. So I keep the example of, do you say kitab or do you say pustak?
#
By the way, forgive all mispronunciations. I didn't grow up with your phonemes.
#
I mispronounce as many of these words as you do.
#
You're too kind and perhaps you could stand for a little bit more honesty.
#
I think that sometimes the shadings really matter. And I like to have access to them all if I can,
#
but I'm also aware that somebody has to maintain these original sort of source cultures.
#
And then the combinations are almost always the most beautiful things.
#
But it's tough. It's tough to discriminate when is the combination really working and
#
when is it some forced thing that really ends up being an abomination.
#
You know, in a sense, Hindi and Urdu is a great example actually for me to sort of push back a
#
little because it's an example of what happens where a forced divisiveness, like the politics
#
behind this is Hindi and Urdu in a sense were the same language at one point. You could call it
#
Hindustani. It was a delightful mixture of influences from Prakrit and Sanskrit and Arabic
#
and Persian and all of that. And it was this beautiful rich language. And then with the
#
Hindu-Muslim politics of the late 19th century, you had a political project to build Hindi as
#
something separate from Urdu. And that also led, especially as partition came and independence came,
#
but through those decades, it led to a point where there was something called Shudh Hindi
#
or Pure Hindi, which was almost an artificial creation. And people didn't really speak like
#
that. It wasn't spontaneous order that brought it about. It was sort of, it was almost a political
#
movement that we will use separate words. We won't use their words, their words, you know,
#
Urdu being associated with Muslimness in Pakistan and all of that. And the two words you gave, in
#
fact, pustak and kitab, you know, pustak is a very artificial word. I don't think in everyday speak,
#
anybody says, you know, like if they say, pass me the book, they won't say your pustak dedo.
#
That'll be very weird. They'll write it in their exam, but they'll say, yaar, o kitab de.
#
You know, so it's actually an example of how it's gone the other way. And if you look at the
#
spontaneous order, what that was leading to was this common language, which has influences from
#
everywhere. Yeah, we have different artificial language projects, right? I mean, Esperanto is
#
the most famous of them. But for example, the emergence of modern Turkish from what was
#
previously Osmanlıca or Ottoman, you know, this was a political reform of Ataturk where he actually
#
was in the unique position of being able to change the very orthography of the language from
#
Arabic script to a Roman alphabet, a modified Roman alphabet. And the language was regularized.
#
The hybrids were sort of purged. Now, the French do this. They have a national
#
sort of language police, if you will. And then there was the emergence of modern Hebrew,
#
which nobody had really spoken Hebrew as an everyday language in thousands of years.
#
I think we don't really appreciate the importance of the artificial. If you create an artificial
#
lake in Central Park, the birds don't know that it's artificial. They stop there. If you sink a
#
container by the shore, the corals don't know they'll create a reef out of it. The yearning for an
#
identity is sometimes artificial, but it ends up being natural. And it depends. You know,
#
sometimes you have an unworkable yearning. And so a word doesn't take. I've been really fascinated
#
by the number of places where Bombay remains and the other places where Mumbai has taken over.
#
I've watched that in my lifetime, but I've never heard anyone sing Mumbai Mary Hay.
#
That's because you come here and stay in South Bombay. If you come to the suburbs,
#
everyone will say Mumbai. The song is not Mumbai Mary Hay.
#
But I mean, that's a fixed thing in time.
#
But that's what I'm trying to say, which is, if I say feeling groovy,
#
because the 59th Street Bridge song retained it,
#
it's interesting to me that 20th Century Fox by the Doors and Foxy Lady of Jimi Hendrix
#
have taken the slang word from my childhood for an attractive young woman
#
and made it relatively archival and permanent.
#
What did Foxy mean when you grew up?
#
Oh, that woman was a fox meant she was a very appealing and sexually attractive young woman.
#
You know, there was another song that has fallen into disrepair called Fox on the Run.
#
But my father still uses the phrase, oh, she's a tomato for the same designation.
#
So I think that very often what happens is that great art takes the ephemera of a time
#
and makes it permanent.
#
So yeah, these things, they rise, they fall, they come back.
#
If anybody had said that Hebrew would come back into daily usage,
#
there wouldn't have been anyone to take that bet.
#
Which is why I'm kind of in favor of just letting everything mingle
#
and letting societies and cultures mingle.
#
Sorry, but the national aspiration is one of those things that
#
just is allowed to mingle.
#
The desire to express oneself, the desire to revitalize something which has become
#
defunct is one of those things.
#
I have mixed feelings about these things.
#
I have a feeling about the danger of revitalizing things that can go horribly wrong
#
and the danger of denying them when people have a yearning to return to something.
#
And so I think that most of the people that I know don't really think about
#
the fact that the artificial is, in a certain deeper sense, natural.
#
And I think a lot of this in modern times, like reviving something or not reviving something,
#
back in the day, it would depend perhaps on the patronage of princes or kings
#
or maybe what the state does and so on and so forth.
#
And in modern times, I think individuals are far more vulnerable
#
and individuals are far more empowered to revive whatever the hell they want to revive and to,
#
You see, so much of our lives were determined by events in the 1940s.
#
And those events have become distant.
#
And if I talk to you about the American experience of the GIs returning or the atomic weapons
#
were developed, and you might talk to me about freedom at midnight, you know, so
#
the birth of the modern version of the state, those visions are decaying everywhere in the world.
#
They had a very powerful effect.
#
They stabilized the planet.
#
And we're actually headed into a situation in which we've lost our fear of the early
#
And the early 20th century was so powerful and so potent that we devitalized in large measure
#
because it wasn't safe to remain vital.
#
The toys, the power became so overwhelming as to become existential in its scope.
#
You know, I was just, I had a really interesting experience visiting the Tata Institute for
#
Fundamental Research in Navinagar.
#
And I went to a very abstract talk about gravitational waves and dark matter.
#
And in order to attend the talk, I had to go through a military checkpoint.
#
Now, the odd thing, have you spent much time at TIFR?
#
It is the nicest place in the city.
#
The grounds are immaculate.
#
The buildings speak to trying to make your scientists as comfortable as they can be.
#
And the Indian minds that populate this place are dealing in incredible abstraction,
#
which is in some sense, government funded in a relatively poor country.
#
Now, what is going on with that?
#
It took me a while to figure it out.
#
It's the ethos of the 1950s living undisturbed in Maharashtra.
#
And that's what's amazing.
#
The US is no longer catering to its scientists this way.
#
They figure, well, we've already got a hydrogen bomb.
#
Why are we keeping these clowns fed and happy?
#
India doesn't have that feeling at all.
#
It's like, we never know when we're going to need this brain power, man.
#
So in a certain way, I just visited 1952.
#
And people don't also appreciate that in a certain sense, you could argue that this is
#
the modern birthplace of what is called quantum gravity, which has led to a 70 year stagnation
#
at the forefront of questioning the cosmos when a husband wife team named Bryson Cecile DeWitt
#
came to Bombay and had their first child here, I believe, and began this study of quantum gravity
#
here at the very foundation of TIFR.
#
So I think if I hadn't visited this place, and I've been here before,
#
but I wouldn't know what the 1950s were like.
#
I'll send you a link to an episode I did with the brilliant science historian,
#
She wrote the superb book called Atomic State, which is about that period of time
#
where TIFR was formed, in fact, in the years before that.
#
And she speaks about 1932 as this time of great possibility.
#
Yeah, as the Annus Mirabilis of, I think, either nuclear physics or theoretical physics.
#
It's the discovery of the neutron.
#
This is the actual year that the doom of humanity on Earth is sealed.
#
No, no, I'm not kidding.
#
I mean, our doom is sealed anyway, right?
#
I mean, the law of truly large numbers means we can't really be around forever.
#
I mean, one way or the other, we are going to pop it.
#
I'm the only person saying this this way, so I'm going to repeat myself.
#
But it's basically a two-line proof.
#
It's totally clear why I'm the only person saying it.
#
But it's very uncomfortable.
#
The solar system is an escape room.
#
And there's a ticking time bomb that started in 1932.
#
And nobody is working to escape the escape room.
#
And I cannot figure out what we are doing.
#
I'm not questioning that it's a ticking time bomb.
#
I'm questioning that it is the ticking time bomb which will take us down.
#
Well, you only need one to prove that you're in an escape room
#
and to find no one working on escape.
#
I mean, Elon Musk is the closest.
#
He's talking about Mars, which is still inside the solar system and the moon.
#
He's decided it's an escape house.
#
And we should move to another room.
#
And my claim is, you know, there's a phrase that came into my mind.
#
I have no idea where it came from.
#
I figured it must be in currency somewhere.
#
I can't find it on the internet.
#
And the phrase is, our home is in the stars or not at all.
#
And that is, I'm convinced that the Earth is our womb, not our home.
#
And we have not understood this.
#
We're fighting to stay in our womb and the contractions are starting to come minutes apart.
#
And it's doubling our efforts to remain here.
#
And I don't know why we're doing that.
#
And one of the things that I wish is I wish India would go non-correlated.
#
I wish it would stop sucking up to the West and stop looking to the West for approval
#
And I wish that the U.S. would lead.
#
I mean, I'm a proud American.
#
But somebody has to de-correlate from this state of acceptance, the state of learned helplessness.
#
And if I could pick a place, I'd probably choose TIFR.
#
So, you know, something that strikes me and carrying on from what you mentioned earlier
#
about the 1940s, how we are still stuck in those frames.
#
And, you know, in India as well, we are sort of stuck in a mindset that we adopted at that time,
#
still traumatized by partition, et cetera, et cetera, a lot of shit going on.
#
And I wonder if that process of being stuck in an old way of thinking and an old way of
#
looking at the world based on what the world is going through, how do we deal with that?
#
Is both number one, a failure of imagination, and number two, a surrender to inertia.
#
And if both of those then play into exactly what you're talking about here, like here what
#
you're saying is you're saying that our frame of thinking of the Earth as our home is wrong.
#
Our frame has to be of thinking of it as an escape pod or whatever.
#
And my instinctive reaction, which I try to fight whenever I hear something new,
#
my instinctive reaction is to recoil and say, what are you talking about?
#
But I try to fight that because I find that we need to fight that.
#
We need to reconsider every frame, right?
#
So tell me a little bit more before we go into a break.
#
Tell me a little bit more about how you arrived at, you know, this particular frame, because
#
just the task of saying that our home will be in the stars seems so incredibly outlandish where
#
even that relatively modest move that Elon Musk is talking about going to Mars
#
often seems like something we, you know, won't see in our lifetime.
#
Yeah, I think Elon is talking about something harder than what I'm talking about.
#
Yeah, yeah. So for example, if you said, well, I studied economics, you might say,
#
a person might say, I studied economics because physics seemed too hard.
#
The physicists rejoinder as always, what are you talking about?
#
Economics is so much harder than physics.
#
None of us would even dream of studying economics because it's insoluble.
#
I think founding of alternate civilizations using chemical rockets is impossible.
#
I think that the hope of escape is based on physics that we know not.
#
And therefore, it's just a question of discovery.
#
So I think what Elon is trying to do is the really heavy lift.
#
What I'm trying to do is the Hail Mary pass, as we call it in the US,
#
a desperate attempt to say the theory beyond Einstein might contain all sorts of new
#
possibilities. So I think that we just have the entire thing completely mis-framed.
#
But Elon is laying out a concrete path, you know, so forgive me if I'm misunderstood,
#
or maybe you can make it more concrete for me.
#
No, no, I don't want to fight. I want to understand. I'm never into fighting.
#
No, no, no, I just mean an intellectual fight.
#
No, even then, I mean, so make it concrete for me in the sense that when you say,
#
our home is in the stars, we need to escape and so on and so forth.
#
Help me imagine that. What do you mean?
#
What if I had said to you, let's imagine we're talking in the 1600s, and I say,
#
Amit, I look up every day at the sun as it rises in the east,
#
and I dream about the power of the sun, not in some remote place,
#
but brought here on the surface of the earth, Promethean fire, if you will.
#
It would sound mad, but it really just had to do, in some sense, with the neutron,
#
right, which is discovered in 1932, as per your earlier point.
#
And the neutron allowed us to bring the sun to the surface of the earth.
#
Hasn't the sun always been on the surface of the earth in the sense that it powers our
#
forests and our trees and life on earth itself?
#
I would say that that is the photon that is produced as radiation from the sun.
#
I'm talking about the fusion of nuclei.
#
Nuclei don't fuse on the surface of the earth until individuals.
#
Teller, Ulam, Lies Meitner, Zillard, Chadwick, Rutherford,
#
it's sort of a chain Fermi beta.
#
All of these folks figured out how the sun is powered in some sense, and
#
Chandrasekhar, and how to make this happen on earth.
#
And we did it in, I think, November of 1952.
#
So, you know, you want to pick a date for BC versus AD, it probably should be
#
an explosion known as Ivy Mike in the Pacific Ocean in 1952,
#
which was when TIFR was founded.
#
That moment was the moment that Promethean fire in the form of nuclear fusion occurred on earth.
#
So what I'm talking about is something like that.
#
You solve some equations somewhere, and suddenly you can do something
#
that you were never able to do before.
#
Like, why wasn't there radio in the 1700s?
#
You just need to understand something about the world.
#
And Elon is trying to do this without understanding something.
#
I can't understand Elon.
#
How would you try to become an interplanetary civilization
#
when it's this heart of a lift using liquid rocket fuel?
#
But isn't sort of the future technology you're thinking of in the space of unknown unknowns,
#
like today you can look back with hindsight and you can say,
#
yeah, you know, we did 1952, whatever happened, we did this, we did that.
#
But before it happened, it was unknown unknowns.
#
Are we relying on some kind of faith in our ingenuity
#
to actually find that path forward?
#
There's a certain amount of faith, but we actually know that
#
almost to a certainty that Einstein can't be the last word.
#
We know that his equations break down in two places.
#
One at the sort of beginning of time, if you will,
#
which we sort of reference in the Big Bang.
#
And the other is at the center of a black hole,
#
which we call the Schwarzschild singularity.
#
And effectively, when you get a singularity in the solutions to the equations,
#
the most likely explanation for that is that you didn't exactly have the right equations
#
and you were able to fake it up until the point when you got down to zero size.
#
So at the beginning of time or at the center of spatial collapse,
#
the equations break down.
#
And so that says, oh, there's a theory beyond.
#
And to not seek that theory beyond with full vim and vigor is to capitulate.
#
You know, this is a poignant Indian story.
#
We had a family friend, let's call her Auntie Janaki.
#
And she was getting up there in years.
#
And we went to go visit her.
#
She was there with her sister who'd come from Switzerland.
#
And she said, you know, my body was failing.
#
And I realized that we all have a finite amount of time and I had led a good life.
#
And the earth and I had finished our conversation and I was preparing myself
#
and I was accepting this and that and the other thing.
#
And that was being called home and all this stuff.
#
And then her sister turned to us and said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
#
What she needed was blood plasma.
#
So I got her the blood plasma.
#
But I love the phrase conversation with the earth.
#
I don't know that she said that.
#
I'm just making stuff up in the idiom.
#
So the key point being that we can poetically resign ourselves to our fate
#
or we can get the hell out of here and recognize that maybe our fate
#
is to think this thing through.
#
We led ourselves into the valley of death.
#
And right now what we need is people to lead us the hell out of here.
#
And one of the things that I found very moving about the story of the founding of TIFR
#
was the fact that this was a conversation between Tata and Baba.
#
And Homi Baba wrote to Tata and said, we need to do something.
#
I was struck recently that the world's top 10 individuals in terms of wealth
#
had two names that ended in Ani.
#
And there's no sense of that community outside of India.
#
I don't think most Americans even know that that community exists.
#
It is time to save us all.
#
And the right way to do that is through physics.
#
The reason that it's sort of an inexorable conclusion is that
#
I think nuclear fusion is probably the highest leverage technology.
#
And I knew that you had even though we've never discussed it
#
because it got into all of our lungs.
#
Most probably that came out of a lab.
#
And we're feverishly denying that that's true in the US.
#
We treat everybody who suggests that as if they are lunatic.
#
That's changing now, I think, a little bit.
#
And even those who denied it earlier are kind of gaslighting us
#
and saying, hey, we didn't really deny it like that.
#
Then let's get rid of these people.
#
We don't need to talk to them again.
#
Anybody who gaslights an entire planet when all of us become infected
#
with their mistaken handiwork.
#
I don't understand why these people are in power
#
and they need to leave period at the end.
#
I have no patience for this.
#
You cannot gaslight an entire planet worth of people
#
whose lives you shortened, whose IQs you lowered,
#
whose children are worse off.
#
I mean, this is an abomination, whatever it is.
#
And whether it's China or the US, I don't care.
#
But these people who gaslit us and told us it is racism
#
to ask this question, they need to go into retirement instantly.
#
That said, that shows you the leverage the technology has.
#
People worry about the ICBM-like delivery of a thermonuclear weapon.
#
But I worry that one day Tulsa, Oklahoma will simply cease to exist
#
because the weapon will already be inside the United States.
#
We've never seen a hydrogen bomb used against a civilian population,
#
even if we've seen nuclear weapons used on two separate occasions.
#
We are not prepared for who we are or what is about to happen.
#
And the fact that the cost of this will go down
#
and more nations will be able to do this,
#
and soon maybe an individual will have her or his own H-bomb.
#
This has been the period of quiet that precedes what is about to come.
#
And I don't know whether that's two days away or 200 years away.
#
It certainly felt like it might be a lot farther away.
#
I don't think it's that far away anymore.
#
Whatever that thing is, it's about to happen
#
because the cost of these highly leveraged platforms,
#
whether it's bio-weaponry or nuclear weaponry
#
or even digital weaponry, these things are going to spread.
#
And as they spread, more bad actors, more irresponsible actors
#
will have these things at their disposal.
#
So right now we're waiting with what mathematicians would call a Poisson process.
#
These things will arrive.
#
And the key point is that we all share an atmosphere.
#
The earth may be divvied up in terms of its land into different nation states.
#
But to your point that you don't find nation states that powerful,
#
the key thing that we share that we can't stop sharing is an atmosphere.
#
And the atmosphere will carry radiation, it'll carry pathogens,
#
and it will carry the costs of human-mediated climate change.
#
And all three of those things are potentially existential.
#
We need to diversify the number of atmospheres that humans have access to
#
because you can't afford to have all of this under one.
#
Why is it you and I have never met before until today?
#
Why is it that we've both had the same disease?
#
There's an island in the South Atlantic that I love called St. Helena.
#
And I think St. Helena was COVID-free because they had draconian quarantine
#
and they were so isolated that they just didn't have it.
#
It was a pathetic example of what is necessary to have COVID diversity.
#
And eventually they had to capitulate because they need people to be able to move around.
#
So they accepted that COVID was going to come to their shores.
#
Right now, the most important thing is to increase the number of atmospheres
#
that humans have access to, to some very large number.
#
Most people accept that there's one, the earth.
#
Elon thinks there should be three,
#
maybe because you can create an atmosphere on the moon and on Mars.
#
And I think that that's so hard to do with chemical rockets.
#
It's almost not worth trying.
#
But the real opportunity is to change the laws of physics
#
and to see whether or not the theories beyond Einstein
#
have the possibility of easy visitation to distant realms.
#
I'll add an advance to that and say right now the most important thing,
#
given that it's 3.30 in the afternoon and you haven't eaten anything all day,
#
So we'll take a quick commercial break.
#
Take a bite and come back.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog,
#
India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009
#
and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me.
#
And I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day
#
and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons.
#
And now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write
#
will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Eric Weinstein about his life and a lot else.
#
And, you know, we spoke about a lot of big ideas before the break.
#
And now I'd like to sort of know a little bit more about your life.
#
Tell me about your childhood.
#
What were your early days like?
#
and then I ended up, I would say that some of the major determiners
#
of where I ended up were my grandparents and learning issues.
#
I find school almost impossible.
#
And people have an idea that if you're smart enough, school is easy.
#
It's like if you're good at music, you should be able to read it
#
and never anticipating a blind musician.
#
So I would say that probably my learning disabilities,
#
as they were called at the time,
#
were really central to how I became different from other people.
#
I often feel that, you know, one of the,
#
like there are many frames that we operate within
#
which are artifacts of a time gone by.
#
And I think the education system really is one of those
#
where, you know, created really in the early 19th century,
#
you're having kids of the same age study together for a certain set of years
#
and you're churning out workers for the Industrial Revolution.
#
And it makes absolutely no sense to me because you're asking a fish
#
You're asking a fish to compete with a monkey by climbing a tree
#
and that just doesn't make sense to me.
#
I think as early as the late 1800s, this was actually widely recognized.
#
If you think about, are you familiar with the Major General song
#
from the Pirates of Penzance?
#
It's a patter song of Gilbert and Sullivan and Gilbert writes the lyrics,
#
I am the very model of a modern major general of information,
#
animal and vegetable and mineral.
#
I know the kings of England and I quote the fight
#
historical from Marathon to Waterloo and our categorical.
#
And it's a story of a general who has useless information in his head.
#
And then in the final portion of this song,
#
he starts talking about the fact that he has no real knowledge of the military.
#
And so it was a song about British promotion
#
through educational attainment outside of the specific competence
#
for which one was being trained.
#
There's a similar song from the HMS Pinafore, which I guess preceded it
#
because the song references it and breaks the fourth wall
#
about someone who polishes up the handle on the big front door
#
of a law office and becomes the ruler of the Queen's Navy.
#
And I think we've really been in a situation for a long time
#
where education hasn't made sense, but it continues
#
because it's useful for weeding people.
#
And so while it doesn't really teach you what it claims to teach
#
or doesn't prepare you for what it promised you it would,
#
it does come up with an arbitrary system of tasks
#
and see who's better at solving them.
#
Yeah, it's more about sorting than actually.
#
I mean, I used to think the Indian education system
#
is more about sorting than actually teaching something,
#
but you're saying it's like that everywhere.
#
It depends which educational system, because India doesn't have,
#
I mean, Nehru's emphasis on tertiary education
#
as a means of not having to educate a large population
#
at the primary and secondary level is an odd legacy.
#
Tell me about your relationship with music because, you know,
#
you play a lot of it in your Instagram videos
#
and you really seem happiest when you just got a guitar in your hand
#
and you're kind of doodling.
#
You've spoken at different times with great passion about,
#
for example, when you spoke about Eddie Van Halen,
#
you've spoken about how he connected with your head,
#
your heart and your loins.
#
And that just feels like a complete kind of sensory emotion
#
or a complete kind of love,
#
which really very few things give very few people.
#
So tell me about your love for music.
#
Well, I think music is just, none of us know why it's there.
#
We don't know what its importance is.
#
And as a result, the fact that it has a strongly analytic core
#
that you don't really come in contact with
#
unless you play it and analyze it.
#
You don't realize the extent to which our brains
#
respond emotionally and spiritually to algorithms.
#
So it's a very weird way in which
#
people don't know why a song makes them feel what it does.
#
The musician who does have an idea of that,
#
first of all, doesn't have complete knowledge.
#
They just know that certain behaviors produce sadness,
#
And I don't know, it's very strange.
#
I used to think that music should not be
#
in the arts department of the universe.
#
It should be in the science department
#
because there's so much that can be said,
#
particularly harmonically or rhythmically.
#
There's not a lot that can be said analytically about melody.
#
We don't in general have a good theory of melody.
#
We have a pretty good theory of harmony.
#
And from an Indian perspective, it's very strange
#
because harmony is almost non-existent in Indian music.
#
And conversely, Western rhythm is pathetic
#
and finds its highest expression in Indian music.
#
So we have these two odd facts.
#
And I guess it has to do with the fact that
#
Doremi is even-tempered and Sariga is not.
#
So if you even-tempered Sariga,
#
there's a question about what would have happened
#
to Hindustani classical music, for example.
#
And you've spoken about like the mathematical genius
#
And people often talk about how, like when I was a kid,
#
I would hear about how three things are closely related.
#
So if you're good at one,
#
you're likely to be good at the others.
#
I don't know how true that is.
#
And it's music, math, and chess.
#
Well, math encompasses chess.
#
I think Hardy, who brought Ramanujan famously to England,
#
said that chess was pure mathematics,
#
but of a sort of unappealing sort
#
in that there were no good reasons for the axioms
#
of how the pieces would move.
#
But once you set the rules and play the mathematics
#
and combinatorics and forced decision trees
#
constitute a form of mathematics.
#
So let's group chess and mathematics as one.
#
The question is, what's the relationship
#
between people of a musical bent
#
and people of a mathematical one?
#
because in a Western context,
#
harmony gives us an opportunity to explore that.
#
But you see, the one portion of mathematics
#
that you can't deny is that
#
a one-dimensional vibrating medium,
#
whether it's an air column in the form of a flute
#
or a vibrating string held fixed between two points,
#
And that wave equation has certain overtones
#
that occur in very precise patterns.
#
If you have a metallophone,
#
like a two-dimensional vibrating medium,
#
there's no guarantee that the overtones
#
will be in pleasing combinations.
#
That's why a steel drum from Jamaica
#
fashioned out of an oil drum seems relatively muddy.
#
But that is the form of mathematics
#
that comes through almost all cultures.
#
Most cultures will stretch a cat gut
#
or hollow out a piece of wood to make a flute.
#
And implicit in that decision
#
is the construction of an overtone series.
#
So that will be effectively, let me see,
#
it'll be saw followed by saw an octave higher
#
followed by a paw above that saw
#
followed by yet another saw.
#
And then there's this weird ga that isn't,
#
I guess you'd say comal for soft.
#
And it's slightly flat to what we would call
#
And in fact, I believe that the pa or the
#
the saw in Western music is ever so slightly flat
#
to the Pythagorean version.
#
But it's so good when you use a 12-tone
#
even-tempered system that the ear
#
doesn't notice the difference.
#
And so there's a weird way in which,
#
you know, if you continue that the ga followed by paw
#
followed by a sort of a flat knee.
#
I'm not in my own idiom,
#
so I'm just having to think this through.
#
That pattern is forced upon you by physics.
#
And so the brain appears to find it pleasing
#
because it's not a choice.
#
One of the, I mean, I play chess quite a bit
#
and I was blown away when Alpha Zero first came.
#
And, you know, it was just orders of magnitude
#
ahead of Stockfish at the time those games took place.
#
And I remember you saying somewhere that in chess today
#
because of AI, you can see, quote unquote,
#
poetry of a higher order.
#
And I want to lead with that to a question
#
about what I feel is a false dichotomy
#
people make about art and craft.
#
Like the way I think about it is that everything is craft.
#
Only we call it art when we can't understand
#
the processes by which it is doing what it is doing.
#
And then we give it a mystical air.
#
Like you correctly said, a certain combination of notes
#
in a certain way can make us feel melancholy
#
or can make us feel happy and can make us feel whatever.
#
They hit certain neurons in certain ways.
#
And we don't understand this yet.
#
So the process seems mystical to us.
#
But actually there is a science here as well.
#
And everything is working to a certain order
#
that is merely hidden from us.
#
So that difference between art and craft per se
#
is really a difference in our understanding.
#
But they're essentially the same thing.
#
And therefore, when you think of AI and machine learning
#
and so on, and that's why I believe that you can have
#
what appears to be incredibly creative work
#
and musical work and work that can move us to tears
#
or can make us dance coming out of AI for that matter.
#
So you bring up an interesting point.
#
It is said, and perhaps Peter Thiel was the first person
#
to say something like this in my presence.
#
So I'm not sure from whom I'm stealing,
#
That technology is mechanism that barely works.
#
Once it works, we no longer call it technology.
#
And in a certain sense, what you're saying about art
#
is art is craft that barely works
#
because once everyone knows how to do it,
#
it doesn't feel like art anymore.
#
And I think this is also what happened to Europe, actually,
#
by the way, is that people got so good
#
at churning out competent art that they devalued that art.
#
And so the Vatican is filled with works of art
#
that no one other than an art historian ever cares about
#
because they were just doing so much of this.
#
And I found this on the steps of the great art museum
#
in Vienna, Austria, is that there were all these statues
#
low down that you could see the detail on.
#
But they continued to higher and higher floors outside,
#
you know, in the sort of front of the building.
#
And I realized nobody could see these details.
#
They weren't for anybody.
#
Well, they'd gotten so good at doing these statues
#
that you could afford to do them all up and down a building
#
whether anyone saw them or not.
#
So I think that in a certain way, we're interested
#
in what we call art breaking new ground.
#
And as soon as it becomes something everybody can do,
#
we just sort of, you know, you go from saying,
#
well, that's a great song that you've recorded
#
to let's do some karaoke.
#
Yeah, and let's talk about AI a bit
#
because in one of your early episodes with Lex Friedman,
#
you said, quote, the context to our life
#
is coming to an end, stop quote.
#
And I find that really profound.
#
And I find that really true.
#
And I think I said what?
#
The context to our life is coming to an end.
#
But it's a great sentence.
#
Let me turn the tables on you, Amit.
#
What did it mean to me?
#
What did it mean to you?
#
It meant to me that the frame in which
#
we are living our lives is completely turned around.
#
The context has changed, that AI changes everything.
#
I mean, just for a creator, for example,
#
like I was chatting with my writing students
#
I want to just stop us.
#
OK, I mean, it's what term we use.
#
But I'm going to do it when I'm not with you.
#
And you're going to do it when you're not with me.
#
But for the purpose of this podcast,
#
let's value ourselves enough not to call ourselves creators.
#
OK, I think I dignify the term a bit more than you do,
#
but fine, I'll respect your wishes here.
#
And we won't mention content either.
#
OK, now I'm going to have to speak really slowly
#
because I'm going to have to put those filters on.
#
But cool, so I'll go with that.
#
But the reason I'm doing that is I do think
#
that is the answer to your question,
#
is that what we're in the process of doing
#
is devaluing our lives by changing our context,
#
by allowing these terms to seep into our speech.
#
We're spoiling everything that we do.
#
If I call you a reply guy and I call another person
#
a pick me girl, or I say the socialist of the US
#
is a Bernie bro, what I'm doing is I'm turning everything
#
And then the idea is, well, what kind of a pick me girl are you?
#
What kind of a reply guy are you?
#
And I think that that's just terrible.
#
And I think that part of what we have to do
#
is to move away from modern speech
#
because it's one of these, I don't know whether,
#
maybe a Wittgensteinian sort of a prison of language.
#
Everything grand feels grandiose.
#
And I'll have to use the term because we're talking about the term.
#
Isn't creator term just like engineer, that it's a broad term
#
and it's a useful functional term.
#
And in a way it includes artists within it
#
without the pretentiousness that comes from calling someone an artist.
#
And for me, therefore, it serves a purpose as a functional term.
#
But I guess we're looking at the term differently.
#
And let's look at the term virtuoso.
#
That term I understand.
#
And if you say somebody is an engineer
#
and I think more like virtuoso, that's a like physicist.
#
That guy is a theoretical physicist.
#
I don't call myself a theoretical physicist.
#
The word has grandeur built into it.
#
Not grandiosity, but grandeur.
#
So in some sense, the idea of a creator or influencer
#
is cognitively, maybe it's correct, but it's emotively shaded in a way
#
that prejudices the context in which I encounter that person.
#
It's like ruining everybody's first impression.
#
I mean, I kind of see it a little differently
#
because I find that a lot of like what has happened,
#
what happened in the past is that whether you could apply
#
a term like this to yourself often depended on gatekeepers and access.
#
And today, in a sense, with the means of production open to all of us,
#
anyone can go out there and start creating.
#
And therefore, if you need a generic term to describe them,
#
like the term engineer describes engineers,
#
what other term would there be?
#
Because many of these people,
#
like I would not call myself an artist per se,
#
but I would call myself a creator.
#
If you want to get specific, I'm a podcast.
#
I'm an artist in other contexts.
#
I'm not sure this podcast is art.
#
Why does anyone listen to this podcast?
#
No, people listen to this podcast.
#
It's not because of art.
#
It might be because of illumination plus entertainment plus insight
#
plus a bunch of those things.
#
So you're uncomfortable with it in some sense.
#
Like when you said pretentiousness earlier,
#
what I heard is, and I'm all about this question,
#
so I find it fascinating what you're asking.
#
You're allowed to say my expertise is within
#
14th century Persian miniatures.
#
You're not allowed to say my genius is anything, right?
#
So there's those things which you can refer to yourself as being,
#
and there are those things that you must wait
#
for the curator to decide apply to you.
#
If you're a painter, you're allowed to call yourself an artist.
#
But what if you're a great conversationalist?
#
You seem like a pretty great conversationalist to me.
#
What I'm doing is I am actually not demeaning myself
#
by saying that in the context of my podcast, I'm not an artist.
#
Like when I try to write or when I try to do poetry,
#
I don't mind saying I'm going for art in those domains.
#
I'm not going for art here, but in my mind, there's not a hierarchy.
#
This is not lesser than that.
#
This is still valuable and I'm creating.
#
And forget about me for a moment.
#
Imagine an 18-year-old kid who goes out there,
#
who's trying things on YouTube,
#
who's just turning the camera on herself and she's shooting stuff.
#
And it's too early and too presumptuous and perhaps too meaningless,
#
given how broad that term is for her to call herself an artist.
#
But where does she belong?
#
And I think to call herself a creator kind of makes sense.
#
And for me, that term has dignity.
#
I mean, I can understand where you're coming from,
#
where you find that it's a devaluation of a certain kind.
#
But, you know, I think I just use it differently
#
and people I know use it a little differently.
#
Yeah, I'm trying to get at something else.
#
So, for example, sometimes I do live performances.
#
Why does anyone show up?
#
You know, at some point I was touring with Sam Harris,
#
the two of us would sit on a stage
#
and it was called Adventures in Conversation.
#
And people would literally listen to two guys talking.
#
And you could see people on, particularly on Reddit,
#
they'd get really angry.
#
Two guys talking, why should we listen to them?
#
Why don't they listen to us talking?
#
Totally reasonable question.
#
We're not comfortable with ourselves.
#
Everything feels cringe.
#
And I think that there's something wrong with the medium.
#
There's something wrong with the fact
#
that we don't have a word for grandeur.
#
We have the word grandiosity.
#
That's incredibly cringe.
#
What is it that we're doing to ourselves?
#
Where we're not allowed to talk about genius.
#
We're not allowed to talk about art.
#
We have to talk about these things as...
#
You see, if perfume is an art,
#
it's a supreme act of confidence
#
to call something Chanel number five.
#
And there's this odd fact that Drakkar Noir
#
was the first scent not to emulate the natural world
#
in terms of either musks,
#
like an animal or florals or whatever.
#
But it was supposed to smell like industry
#
because industry was what was happening, man.
#
There's a weird way in which we're just uncomfortable
#
that certain people are more interesting,
#
that certain people are trying to be interesting,
#
trying to be interesting,
#
and they succeed 75% of the time.
#
25% of the time you can see
#
that they're transparently not being interesting.
#
And what we're looking for
#
is we're looking for great conversationalists.
#
We're looking for grandeur.
#
We're looking for something that change our lives
#
and make them more meaningful.
#
And my feeling about this is I really value
#
the fact that I sat down here
#
and you didn't ask me the same set of questions
#
I have no idea why everybody asks me the same questions.
#
I don't mean everybody.
#
Obviously when I go on Lex or I go on Joe, Rogan,
#
both those guys get different episodes out of me.
#
people just wanna talk about what they've seen before.
#
It's like sort of cover songs.
#
So anyway, I just wanna leave the door open to the idea
#
that we actually have to fight the concept of cringe,
#
fight the sense of apologies,
#
while of course I can't call myself an ex.
#
We've gotta get back to the idea
#
that glory is a great thing.
#
I agree with you entirely
#
on the substance of what you're saying.
#
But as far as the language is concerned,
#
I'm actually thinking aloud here.
#
I'll actually come at the opposite conclusion
#
in the sense that I think art is a problematic term
#
because one, it sort of signifies a hierarchy
#
that something is art and something is not.
#
And as we just discussed,
#
the distinction between art and craft itself is false.
#
And I don't see why that should be there.
#
And secondly, when you call something art
#
and something else not art,
#
someone is doing the calling.
#
And typically what I have seen in the world of art,
#
for example, is that you will have a gatekeeper culture
#
of elites who will determine that X is art
#
And at some visceral level, I object to that.
#
I'd love everything to get out there.
#
I won't use the term creator economy,
#
which is a way of using it.
#
But I want everything to get out there.
#
I want everyone to have a shot
#
without having to think about that specific label.
#
So I'm actually comfortable with creator.
#
I'm not so comfortable with art.
#
See, I have a different take on this.
#
And it has to do with the fact
#
that I screwed this up so badly.
#
I had the idea that this gatekeeping elite
#
was so annoying, I just thought they were parasites.
#
And the culture of the curator
#
is actually the culture of co-creation with the artist.
#
I don't think in some sense,
#
great art happens without an insemination
#
where you have the art object
#
and then you have the analyst who stands outside it
#
and says, I actually can see a bunch of stuff
#
that I've never seen before
#
and I wanna deconstruct this and comment on this.
#
And I think a lot about Hitchcock and the Beach Boys.
#
I talk about this all the time with my son Zev.
#
Hitchcock chose horror,
#
which didn't seem to support great art
#
and the Beach Boys chose surfer songs.
#
And Brian Wilson was actually sort of this musical genius
#
who, along with people like Frank Zappa,
#
were trying to actually do modern classical composition
#
And Hitchcock was innovating all sorts
#
of kind of artistic techniques within the horror idiom.
#
I think this sort of shows off the genius
#
that until somebody says,
#
don't you realize what Hitchcock did?
#
He pulled back the camera as he zoomed in
#
to get the vertigo effect
#
and he was innovating in this way or that
#
or some color was subtracted from the palette.
#
You don't get the concept of what that art is.
#
So I think actually what we find repugnant
#
is why does some person who doesn't get something
#
get to say what is and what isn't?
#
I used to like Roger Ebert, the film critic, a great deal.
#
He screwed up two films really badly.
#
One was Mulholland Drive
#
and the other was Memento.
#
And in both cases he decided
#
that the very difficult inner logic of the film
#
was some sort of wasn't there
#
and that all that was was a great impressionistic
#
masterpiece and you just had to sit back
#
and let the feel of it determine.
#
In both cases I saw people say,
#
you missed the actual, I think with Memento
#
it was two different sequences going
#
in opposite directions but with interdigitation
#
so that they were interleaved,
#
one going forward, one going backwards.
#
I forgot what the issue was in Mulholland Drive.
#
A great example of this that I talk about a lot
#
with a single film critic was Joe Morgenstern's,
#
who I vaguely knew, a description of Bonnie and Clyde.
#
He saw Bonnie and Clyde and he said,
#
this is an absolute piece of rubbish film.
#
It's got a soundtrack by bluegrass artist
#
Flat and Scruggs that is totally emotively
#
out of keeping with the violence.
#
You have incredible violence and you have an uptempo,
#
happy bluegrass soundtrack.
#
And then two weeks later he rewrote the review
#
and he said, you know that guy Joe Morgenstern
#
who told you this was a lousy picture?
#
I'm Joe Morgenstern and I'll tell you
#
how great this film is.
#
Really, it shows what a great curator can do.
#
That's incredible intellectual honesty,
#
like show me that today.
#
Right, well, actually, you know where you find it?
#
Joe Rogan will say, oh, I was wrong.
#
Lex Friedman will say, you know,
#
I've been wrong about curators.
#
I was wrong about UFOs.
#
There's a bunch of stuff that I just got totally wrong.
#
I think what you're not seeing is you're not seeing
#
that happen in the institutional idiom
#
because the institutions wanna keep this sort of,
#
I don't know, this godlike voice unsullied.
#
So we'd rather you make an error
#
and you stick with your error
#
so that nobody actually has to realize
#
that this is created by a process in people.
#
You mentioned cover songs and you mentioned
#
sort of people asking you the same questions
#
again and again and bands hate playing their own songs,
#
their own hits, you know, like Radiohead hates playing Creep.
#
That's an early song in the revolution
#
and they've done such great music after that
#
and why the hell do they have to play
#
the same damn thing over and over again?
#
And I think that can happen to everyone.
#
And I wonder if you felt it as well
#
that because you have gone out there
#
and you're viewed in a particular way
#
and you've taken on in people's minds a particular persona,
#
you are this guy, you are the,
#
you use the phrase intellectual dark web
#
or you said this about UFOs
#
or you said this about theoretical physics
#
and that's a persona and everyone expects you
#
to play that part and that can become a trap sometimes
#
because obviously at all times
#
you're much more than any of those things
#
and you're changing your mind constantly.
#
How do you, as a public figure,
#
how do you sort of deal with that?
#
I think I was the person who worried about this
#
And I pushed the concept of audience capture.
#
There's a great phrase I heard from Gurvinder Bhogal
#
called the looking glass self
#
where you fashion yourself from the reflection
#
that you see in the eyes of others.
#
So I think that there's that
#
and then there's the fun house mirror self
#
which is what I really dislike where your audience,
#
particularly the audience that is motivated to hunt you
#
attempts to fit you into a very simplistic figure
#
and then they go around trying to get everyone else
#
to see you as they see you as the contorted circus freak
#
that they're trying to create from you.
#
And that's much more destructive
#
because then you end up doing things to show you
#
that you aren't the circus freak
#
but very often you weren't being freakish to begin with.
#
They were just kind of cognitively priming everyone.
#
You'll notice he says the word the over and over again.
#
But every time he says the word the,
#
he's actually thinking about murder.
#
So you could leave a suggestion
#
and then it appears to be self-validating.
#
I worry a lot about that.
#
In terms of audience capture,
#
I always looked to these two figures,
#
David Bowie and Madonna,
#
who constantly changed their persona.
#
So they had a series of avatars over a career
#
and I thought that they got it right.
#
The right way to do this
#
is to constantly morph and change.
#
I'm not exactly sure, to be entirely honest,
#
sees me and I don't think it sees me in one particular way
#
because what you start to realize
#
is that there are these inferential clusters.
#
And the inferential clusters will say,
#
they will read everything the same way
#
based on client side architecture.
#
So for example, every time that you are saying something,
#
they might say, oh, that was incredibly insightful
#
or they might say, wow, you always feel the need
#
to be incredibly insightful even when you have nothing.
#
Okay, so those are two different inferential clusters.
#
My sense is that my audience breaks into a bunch of these
#
and I really wish that most of them
#
wouldn't project into such low dimensional
#
kind of typology and this is what really bothers me.
#
Oh yeah, you're a long form public intellectual.
#
Well, what did you just say?
#
I mean, did you say that Christopher Hitchens
#
and Noam Chomsky are basically the same person?
#
I have no idea what you're actually doing
#
but it's somehow very threatening to you
#
that there are a lot of interesting individuals
#
and so you're desperately trying
#
to make the world less interesting.
#
So that's a really interesting behavior pattern
#
I wasn't aware of before I started putting myself forward
#
is that there are a lot of people who are threatened
#
by the variety of different types of people in the world
#
and they're constantly trying to say,
#
can I just get you to be one thing?
#
Can I just get you to be, you're the UFO guy,
#
you're the science guy, you're the rebel guy,
#
you're the this guy, you're the that guy.
#
I just find it very strange that there's a large portion
#
of humanity that wants you to be boring.
#
And just looking at the internet,
#
looking at what social media has done,
#
I sometimes think that on the fringes at the extremes,
#
there are vocal minorities that seem to be much larger
#
than they are because they're shouting all the time.
#
But there's a silent majority of people out there
#
who are curious, who want to listen,
#
who are not shoving that label on you,
#
but who are susceptible to the labels
#
projected by the vocal minorities,
#
but who are not necessarily projecting those
#
So how do you decide who you're speaking to?
#
This issue of these incredibly annoying people
#
who seem to have nothing else to do with their time
#
other than to hound and hunt,
#
the reason that they do what they do
#
is that it's effective in scaring normal people.
#
So I've sometimes called them intellectual
#
or social border collies,
#
where they're trying to make sure that no sheep go stray.
#
And in particular, Reddit is really bad.
#
I thought Twitter was really bad.
#
I think Reddit, the point of Reddit very often is,
#
you know that thing that you think is great?
#
You know, it's like anything that you find great.
#
Somebody's there to tell you,
#
yeah, I saw right through that.
#
And well, did you see right through a child's smile?
#
Did you see through a summer's day?
#
Did you see right through your own first kiss?
#
How do we get you help?
#
Is there some medication you could take
#
so that you don't screw yourself out of life,
#
saying I didn't fall for that thing that happened?
#
Well, you know, in the immortal words of Green Day,
#
I hope you had the time of your life.
#
It's a, yeah, and the song is called Good Riddance,
#
which is exactly what one feels about these guys, but.
#
Well, but fall for something.
#
Open your frickin' heart to believe in something.
#
When somebody tells you, ha, you know,
#
that person is a dumb version's person of a smart person,
#
or an ugly person's version of a beautiful person,
#
Just have the courage to say,
#
actually, I think they're pretty smart.
#
I think that person's gorgeous.
#
I really, really appreciate that cringe thing
#
that really started out as an earnest hope.
#
Sometimes I support Lex Friedman in this.
#
I just think, you know what?
#
It's really simplistic, this idea that it's all about love.
#
And I'll stand behind my friend.
#
I don't think it's all about love.
#
But if he wants to say that it's all about love,
#
I think it's a beautiful sentiment.
#
And, oh, so you fell for that?
#
I run a WhatsApp group that has a few hundred
#
of my writing students, and one of the rules I've set
#
is you are not allowed to shit on anyone.
#
So that typical Twitter thing that you take a screenshot
#
and you shit on someone.
#
No, we're going to be the opposite of Twitter.
#
Every day is a group hug.
#
Just be positive, support each other.
#
Is this a modern pathology,
#
the pathology of constantly shitting on others
#
to show how virtuous and knowledgeable you yourself are?
#
I mean, I understand that the tendency that it's,
#
like Steven Pinker said,
#
nature gives you knobs, nurture turns them.
#
And I guess we always had the knobs for this.
#
Actually, I hadn't heard that.
#
Yeah, but did social media turn those knobs really hard?
#
And I think it has to do with the fact
#
that certain things are not comfortable on social media.
#
So for example, do you,
#
you're familiar with the singer Tracy Chapman?
#
Tracy Chapman's lyrics are really bad, often.
#
But she used to sing on the streets
#
of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and you'd walk right past her.
#
And okay, she has a voice that can animate the lyrics
#
and make them profound and genius and beautiful.
#
And if you subtracted her voice, you'd be embarrassed.
#
So sometimes the key question is,
#
can you animate something and make it believable?
#
There are various poses that I think are very funny
#
where a woman can pose in a particular way,
#
but if a man were to pose that way,
#
the fourth wall would shatter instantaneously
#
And so in part, it's a question to committing to a bit.
#
Can you commit to a bit and make us believe?
#
I think that every song is like this.
#
I think that if you take a three minute song,
#
it only works if the singer can inhabit the song
#
and create that theatrical state
#
where you don't actually question the lyrics.
#
My wife pointed out that the song,
#
I Can't Stand the Rain Against My Window,
#
Bringing Back Sweet Memories.
#
but then it contains the unfortunate line,
#
hey, window pane, do you remember how sweet life used to be?
#
Nobody in the history of the world has said,
#
That's a terrible line.
#
But if you can commit to that and make it wonderful,
#
that's great art, right?
#
In part, the key point is,
#
can you cause us not to see the blemishes?
#
Can you carry something off?
#
And I remember there was a movie,
#
I can't remember what it was called.
#
Well, there've been a few of this type
#
where an actress plays an unattractive woman
#
It's a very hard role to carry off,
#
to be both unattractive and irresistible.
#
But I love the fact that that's possible.
#
Yeah, and I love Tracy Chapman's fast car,
#
so I was just trying to imagine it in someone else's voice.
#
I think after this, I'm gonna go on YouTube
#
and look for covers and see what it sounds like.
#
But I guess with any song,
#
it's a whole damn package that has to work together.
#
So the lyrics can sometimes be really banal
#
and cliched as can happen.
#
But it's just a package of the music and the words
#
and just the feel that the musician sort of imbues them with.
#
You know, you're a guitarist.
#
Do you feel that there is,
#
like you're not a guitarist, you're a musician.
#
You've played a lot of music.
#
But you've played a lot of music.
#
You have a piano tuner story.
#
You've got videos where you're playing the harmonica.
#
I play at a lot of different instruments.
#
But the fact that I don't call myself a musician
#
It's about the fact that I can't sit down at an instrument,
#
commit to a bit, and dependably move you.
#
You see, one of the things that's really important
#
about making a mistake in music
#
is can you recover from it
#
so that the person stays in that held mode
#
where they believe temporarily,
#
just the way you believe when you go to a movie.
#
You forget that you're in a movie.
#
and I may never be able to pull that off.
#
It may be that I know a bunch of songs
#
or that I can play them.
#
But I so admire a person who steps forward and says,
#
I'm about to do something,
#
and you're gonna believe for four minutes.
#
I wish I could do that.
#
Yeah, you've quoted Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers
#
saying, strip away the drums, strip away the whatever,
#
strip away everything, but there's...
#
We have to be able to play with our instruments broken
#
And there's something beautiful there about
#
just capturing the essence of something
#
and that being everything just beyond the mechanistic stuff.
#
Have you ever heard this cuckoo, I forget what it is, coil?
#
I mean, the bird, yeah.
#
What does it sound like?
#
I mean, isn't the name onomatopoeic,
#
so I guess it would sound cuckoo.
#
It sounds to me like the opening
#
of the B-52's Planet Claire.
#
Do, do, do, do, oh, oh, oh.
#
She came from Planet Claire.
#
So I was just thinking about how funny it is
#
to be walking through Mumbai
#
and hearing Planet Claire about to start
#
because it's mango season.
#
Let's go back to your childhood, early days, whatever.
#
What I'm interested in knowing is how did you form the frames
#
through which you look at the world?
#
Like part of what is happening is of course you travel,
#
you come to India in 86, you're moving around,
#
you're more open perhaps to experiences.
#
But I think one of the struggles that we all have growing up
#
and going through those years is we are firstly
#
forming ourselves, like figuring out who we are
#
and how we look at the world
#
and what we want to do with our lives.
#
And second of all, also fighting off what I think
#
eventually for most people becomes a lifelong anxiety
#
of the looking glass self, what others think of you,
#
You know, today when one speaks to you,
#
one sees interviews on YouTube and all of that,
#
it's a formed person with a formed this thing.
#
Give me a sense of the unformed you,
#
give me a sense of that shaping that happened in your life.
#
What are the things that shaped you?
#
You know, what do you feel when you look back at it?
#
Look, I was a upper middle class Jewish kid from LA
#
with professional parents.
#
You know, okay, it's a small community,
#
but it's not unheard of, nothing that interesting.
#
I think that there was a fall from grace
#
when I was in fourth grade.
#
I was on top of the world.
#
I was very, very good in school.
#
And then as a result, I skipped fifth grade.
#
But I was in fifth grade for a month before they skipped me
#
and I started plummeting,
#
but they were basing the skipping of the grade
#
on my fourth grade performance.
#
So I skipped the year that I started to fail.
#
And in sixth grade, I completely fell apart.
#
And from sixth grade through 12th grade
#
and then for the first year of college, I was useless.
#
And so it's sort of like, you know,
#
there are all these stories about somebody
#
being a noble person and then being a commoner
#
and then their nobility is rediscovered.
#
There's no question of that because I came
#
from sort of shtetl trash in the Ukraine.
#
But I'd been seen as smart and then I got put
#
in the dummy corner for a long time.
#
And I think that was probably pretty formative
#
that in essence, I had the sense of, okay,
#
because writing and reading have gotten really intensive
#
and there's some problem in the writing and reading channel
#
that is not present in the listening and speaking channel.
#
I had this weird fact that I had been young for my grade
#
and I got skipped and I was failing.
#
Why is a guy who's sort of a year and a half ahead
#
in school bad at school?
#
And I had a grandfather who was probably
#
seen as being potentially the smartest person
#
in the four families that were all related to each other,
#
but also the least successful.
#
And so he was sort of the failed,
#
but internally acknowledged to be the smart,
#
failed person in the family.
#
And I was his grandson and he never finished college,
#
but he was a chemist and he had patents,
#
but he didn't have the credential.
#
And so I always viewed it as like, okay,
#
we're the screw ups in the family,
#
but we're also the bright shining stars.
#
And I took that myth very seriously.
#
And in part, maybe the Harvard PhD and the hardest subject,
#
like the hardest place, the highest degree
#
and the hardest subject,
#
sort of a thank you to my grandfather.
#
It's like, no, we were stripped of who we were by the system
#
and I saw you and you taught me all this great stuff.
#
Did you always have that self belief
#
or were there times during this where, you know,
#
It's a performance in a certain sense,
#
but that's what life is.
#
If you ask, am I good enough to be a podcaster?
#
I mean, seriously, what do you have that nobody else has?
#
No, it's a violent act of self assertion to do this.
#
And I said, no, I'm really good at math.
#
I wasn't, but I was, but I wasn't.
#
People don't understand this, you know?
#
It's like, if the only person allowed to say anything
#
on the guitar is Eddie Van Halen,
#
what are all those bands doing?
#
You know, you have to basically assert
#
something that isn't true.
#
People always say, oh, you mean fake it till you make it?
#
That doesn't scratch the surface.
#
This was a violent act of assertion.
#
I'm meant to understand theoretical physics.
#
Well, why should you be allowed to understand
#
theoretical physics when you can't do mathematics
#
when you're not good in school?
#
Oh, because that doesn't count, it doesn't matter.
#
And this is what I really wanna tell people, which is,
#
this Dunning-Kruger stuff is a joke.
#
It's an intermediate stage where you doubt yourself
#
No, go assert something that's wrong.
#
You wonder one of the hardest things in the world?
#
Putting myself forward on guitar.
#
Take a look at who follows me on Instagram.
#
You know, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Robinson.
#
I think he played with Jeff Beck as well.
#
I didn't, Tosin Abbasi.
#
The monsters of guitar follow me,
#
and sometimes they leave comment,
#
like great chops, Eric, keep going.
#
And I just think, look, we all know where I am on guitar.
#
These guys love me, in part,
#
because they're having a question, they're so good.
#
Why is the guitar on Hard Times?
#
I love what they do, I believe in them.
#
And they care about what I think,
#
and they wanna jam with me,
#
and I look to the guitar community,
#
and I say, look, if you're a young woman
#
and you're not confident in your appearance,
#
and you can get the supermodels to follow you,
#
You wanna know who's gonna not cheer you on
#
and tell you, ooh, that's cringe, dude, you suck?
#
It's the people one or two steps below that, right?
#
And my feeling about that is make a very clear decision
#
whether you want to listen to the B-minus critics,
#
because the B-minus critics are pretty well informed.
#
Dude, you blew the timing.
#
You said the same thing three times
#
in the space of a minute on guitar.
#
You're just letting your fingers talk.
#
Hey, do you want lessons?
#
You'll find these comments all the time
#
when I post something about music,
#
and never from the best people.
#
Best people offer me lessons.
#
And so, in part, my feeling is just try to inspire us
#
You're either gonna listen to the B-minus players
#
who are pissed and angry about why you're making it
#
and they're not, or listen to them or don't.
#
But if you listen to them,
#
I can tell you how your life's gonna work out.
#
I actually think in many ways,
#
self-delusion is an adaptive feature
#
you needed to get ahead,
#
because I encounter this situation
#
with many of the young writers I work with,
#
where there will be a mismatch sometimes
#
between their judgment and their ability.
#
So they'll write something and they'll think it's crap.
#
And that generally means their judgment
#
is ahead of their ability.
#
And with a little work, their ability can catch up.
#
And to me, it's a positive sign.
#
It means you wanna continue.
#
But when I look at myself in my 20s,
#
both my judgment and my ability were shit.
#
So I was a bad writer and I thought I was good.
#
But where that worked for me
#
is that it gave me the Dunning-Kruger confidence
#
to just continue faking it till I made it.
#
And then you iterate enough and you're there.
#
So here's a crazy idea that we can push out there.
#
Dunning and Kruger right into my veins.
#
Don't dabble in Dunning and Kruger,
#
because then you're just gonna make everybody angry.
#
But if you're gonna help yourself to some Dunning-Kruger,
#
you better mainline that thing and have a blast.
#
Yeah, and is it then also the tragic case,
#
and I think you've alluded to something like this
#
in one of your past interviews,
#
is it then also the tragic case
#
that because men are more likely to be self-delusional
#
and full of this false confidence,
#
while women often suffer from the imposter syndrome
#
and are more diffident about putting themselves out forward,
#
that a lot of women get lost in this game,
#
that men and women may often start out in the same place
#
in terms of ability or talent or wherever they're going.
#
But the women just don't fake it till they make it.
#
They drop out of the race.
#
Yeah, you know, I wonder sometimes about that,
#
whether or not it's really a question about their,
#
they're more social in a certain sense,
#
and they're more conscious of the criticism probably.
#
But I also think that a lot of them don't like conflict.
#
And a lot of men thrive on conflict.
#
And so I worry about the number of great insights
#
that are locked inside female minds,
#
where the owner of the mind says
#
it's not worth battling it out.
#
I know there's something here.
#
Why would I want to spend three years
#
making myself crazy to prove a point?
#
There was a video that I found
#
of a guy who jumps down 20 stairs
#
with a skateboard and lands the trick.
#
Maybe it flips, I can't remember.
#
And he starts off with this beautiful jump.
#
And then it winds back through the year.
#
The first time he did it, lost his teeth.
#
And then you see the ambulance going to the hospital
#
because he twists his leg or whatever it is.
#
And it's just one year of self-punishment.
#
And it culminates in the thing that you saw
#
at the beginning, which is he lands the trick.
#
And I was thinking as a man, how do you compete with men?
#
It's really hard to compete with anything
#
that pig-headed and stupid that's gonna spend a year
#
abusing itself for 20 seconds of footage.
#
So my feeling about this is that we should encourage men
#
to use their taste for conflict
#
to liberate great thoughts of females
#
who may not feel like going through
#
all of that pain and anguish.
#
With respect to looks, though, there's a different issue.
#
I personally think that women are just brutal to each other.
#
There's all this talk about the sisterhood,
#
but I watch women undermine each other,
#
particularly like, oh, she thinks she's all that.
#
She thinks she's so beautiful.
#
It's like, no, go off and be the center of attention.
#
We want you to be the center of attention.
#
We want you to revel in the fact that you look fantastic.
#
And I'm not talking about the fact that you're a 10.
#
I want a six to look fantastic and glow.
#
And we'll cheer you on.
#
It's your fellow females
#
who are the ones who are undermining you.
#
And you know what, a six who feels like a 10 is a 10.
#
Well, we can get like that,
#
but I don't even want to get like that.
#
Okay, so you're a six, but your face is lit up.
#
I mean, you ever see, what is it, Bethany Hamilton?
#
Hot chick who lost her arm to a shark.
#
Like literally a surfer who just, she lost an arm.
#
And she got back out there and kept surfing.
#
I don't know what's hotter than that.
#
I mean, it's just like people who are full of life
#
If you want to compete and win in the game of love,
#
Just turn yourself as bright as you can.
#
Get in touch with your narcissism
#
and not the pathological form of narcissism.
#
Just try loving yourself
#
because we're so awash in people who hate themselves.
#
And they're beating each other up.
#
That mostly I just want to be inspired.
#
You know, I have one little girl who I'm very sweet on
#
who has a birth deformity.
#
And this is one of the most beautiful girls
#
in the world, literally physically,
#
but just there's a very clear birth deformity.
#
And she's going to be absolutely fine in life.
#
I have just no question
#
because she just sparkles everywhere she goes.
#
And if she can do that,
#
I guarantee most everybody else can do some form of this
#
You know, being an over thinker,
#
I sometimes find it really hard within myself
#
to find that spark of life or even to really love myself.
#
How has the journey been for you?
#
When did you get comfortable in your own skin?
#
When did you start kind of saying that like,
#
I'm happy the way I am.
#
Well, you never get there.
#
I mean, certainly when I have a self doubt
#
and then some idiot in the comment section
#
plays on that self doubt,
#
Because I find that some of the worst people
#
that you encounter on the internet
#
are actually some of the most perceptive.
#
And part of their problem is that they perceive
#
all the world's worst stuff.
#
Like imagine that you had a nose that could tell
#
whether there was anything wrong in your environment.
#
So no meal is ever tasting good.
#
So okay, congratulations.
#
You figured out how to detect any lack of cleanliness
#
or putrid food or whatever.
#
In part, you know, my feeling about this is
#
you never actually completely get over it.
#
But if I need to pick myself up,
#
I'll stand up for a friend who's facing a mob.
#
Every time there's a mob attacking a friend
#
and I have a chance to say, yeah, I think he's great.
#
And so, no, she's not having a problem.
#
You're having a problem.
#
I feel good about myself, you know,
#
because it's dangerous and it's stupid, but it's decent.
#
And I think that there are things that you can always do
#
to pick yourself up to know, you know, volunteer.
#
Volunteer to help somebody less fortunate than you.
#
One of the things I get the most pleasure out of in life
#
is at holiday time, saying,
#
I wanna make five or 10 or two calls to followers
#
who might not be having a good holiday season.
#
So if you're having a bit of trouble, send me your number.
#
I'd like to have a call.
#
Sometimes I'll have 20 minutes,
#
sometimes I'll have three hours with somebody.
#
And that's available to everyone all the time.
#
You know, you can just say,
#
I have a little bit of extra strength.
#
Who needs a cup of sugar?
#
Who needs a liter of flour or whatever it is?
#
You know, you can just offer something to the world.
#
You just served me a great Indian cup of chai.
#
Yeah, but I myself had a black coffee without sugar.
#
Well, I had the black coffee without sugar.
#
you always have the ability to give something of yourself.
#
And so when you're feeling low and you're feeling empty
#
and you just want somebody to fill your tank,
#
you can weirdly fill your own tank
#
by finding it to give something to somebody else
#
who's in even worse shape than you are.
#
Because I guarantee you,
#
there's always somebody who's worse in worse shape than you.
#
That's a beautiful sentiment.
#
And is it something you discovered along the way?
#
How did you discover it?
#
Tim O'Reilly was really helpful.
#
I was at a conference called Saifu in 2011.
#
And it was sort of like 300 people,
#
a lot of Nobel Prize winners, some billionaires,
#
some very prominent scientists,
#
and some people nobody had ever heard of,
#
graduate students or writers
#
that were on small, struggling blogs.
#
And Fu stood for Friends of O'Reilly.
#
And Tim had made a lot of money.
#
And I don't always have the easiest time with Tim.
#
But he got up at a microphone at the end of this conference
#
and he said, it's come to my attention
#
that a lot of you guys are hurting.
#
And he said, I can barely get through this story.
#
There are a lot of people here with a lot of resources.
#
Come to the microphone, tell us what you need.
#
I thought, are you crazy?
#
Like you have billionaires
#
and you have people who are like shit out of luck.
#
And the rich are inviting the shit out of luck
#
to come to a microphone and say, what do you need?
#
I'd never seen anything like it.
#
And I've never gotten the confidence to do that.
#
Once or twice I've said something like that
#
and somebody says, can you send me 10,000 bucks?
#
And I just think, that's not what happened to Tim.
#
What happened to Tim was people moderated their own needs.
#
It was so inspiring that we talk about the giving community
#
when we talk about philanthropy.
#
And it's a terrible name.
#
But it brings up an interesting issue, which is taking.
#
When a guy comes to your village,
#
at some point I did a trek in the Himalayas.
#
And I think we went in over the Margon Pass
#
and we went out over the Bakhtal Glacier into Ladakh.
#
And it was at a time in the mid-80s
#
where these villages were completely cut off.
#
And with my white skin, people brought forward
#
There's no exaggeration what I'm about to say.
#
And they would say, can you cut this tumor out of my mom?
#
Can you heal my cousin?
#
Can you give sight to my uncle?
#
And I was just thinking like,
#
I'm a mathematics graduates, dude.
#
And I've got a Swiss Army knife and white skin
#
and you want me to operate on your relatives, it's crazy.
#
Well, what if you showed up in one of these villages
#
and you did glaucoma surgery?
#
And you restored sight and the ability of a person
#
to go from being a drain on their family
#
to being an earner for their family?
#
Is it unreasonable to ask that you name a child
#
after whoever organized the surgeons who do the cleft lip
#
or who restore sight or any of this stuff?
#
Those of us who take need to take better care
#
Because when a person is in a situation
#
where they're not doing enough,
#
because we're not closing the loop
#
and you have this thing called donor fatigue.
#
And donor fatigue sets in when the donor
#
is just seen as just a source.
#
Well, what more can you give?
#
What more can you give?
#
So in a certain sense, I think we're afraid
#
because the culture of taking, you've seen this in India,
#
somebody shows up at a house and they say,
#
boy, what a gorgeous painting that is.
#
And the owner of the house says, what?
#
I don't know the story.
#
Oh, it's been cluttering up our house for forever.
#
And the American says, really?
#
And then, by the way, that's a beautiful jug.
#
Yeah, absolutely, if you have room for it,
#
put it in your luggage.
#
And the person leaves and says,
#
I can't believe that person took all our stuff.
#
Because there was a culture of hospitality
#
that wasn't understood, right?
#
Which is if you admire something, the owner offers it.
#
And then the person's supposed to refuse
#
and you're supposed to know not to admire in the wrong way,
#
all that kind of stuff.
#
We need to get better at sharing strength.
#
And I think that what I hadn't seen was
#
by the way, I'm not sure
#
because I didn't get much sleep last night.
#
If I said Bill O'Reilly, that was wrong.
#
I said Tim O'Reilly, okay.
#
Tim O'Reilly inspired people to moderate
#
their needs and their wants to what they really needed
#
and what they really wanted and what could be done.
#
And I think that that was the thing
#
that inspired that in me.
#
I've never gotten to the level that Tim O'Reilly got to.
#
But the idea of just saying,
#
I have some strength, who's in need,
#
probably really got catalyzed by that moment.
#
I wish it was original to me, but it wasn't.
#
And it's a beautiful, moving story.
#
What did you need when you most needed something?
#
Oh, Jesus, that's not a fair thing.
#
that we pretend that we can't see unusual minds
#
So I had an unusual mind.
#
That's supposed to be a great thing.
#
But then, more or less, I would say from
#
the time I was 10 to about 17,
#
all school was just daily abuse.
#
The teachers knew I was smart.
#
And they still, like, okay, we have to punish you
#
because you failed yet again today.
#
And I don't think people have any idea
#
what the aggregate effect of getting up every morning
#
to be told you're a moron
#
is just because you have learning issues.
#
And what's more, all I wanted for my children
#
was to have these learning issues
#
because the problem is actually a negative externality
#
of a learning superpower.
#
We have this thing called attention deficit disorder.
#
And do you know what it results in?
#
It results in somebody being able to stay focused
#
on the same problem with laser focus for weeks.
#
And we call it attention deficit disorder.
#
And it's a very, very, very, very, very, very, very,
#
And it's called attention deficit disorder.
#
In what world does that make sense?
#
Yes, the person may not be interested in what you're saying.
#
So that person isn't interested in what you're saying
#
and you call that a disorder,
#
but the person is building something in their basement
#
and doing nothing else.
#
And so it's attention deficit
#
because they find you boring.
#
So this is where I started talking
#
about the people's world.
#
Which is my learning disabilities are not real.
#
Your teaching disabilities are severe.
#
Let's talk about your teaching disabilities.
#
Teachers did not appreciate that.
#
I don't know what to do about that.
#
I don't know why we allow so many bad people
#
There was this poll I saw on Twitter a while back
#
the results took me by surprise.
#
And the poll I think was,
#
if I'm not mistaken by someone named Gad Saad,
#
sorry if I mispronounce the name,
#
but the poll really was if you could choose
#
only one of the two, one of these two,
#
which one would you choose?
#
And it was to be liked and to be respected.
#
And my mind boggled because 95% of the people
#
And I thought like, oh my fucking God,
#
because I would just choose the other option in a flash.
#
I didn't understand that.
#
Well, in part the poll isn't fair
#
because it signals that liked is shallow
#
And so I don't know that I think that the poll
#
was actually well constructed.
#
But it also conjures a different question
#
which is it better to be liked or to be feared.
#
And because so few of us have a sense of,
#
you know, we're liked and we're not liked.
#
But almost nobody's respected.
#
Who do you think we all respect?
#
Have you ever seen universal respect?
#
I think respect is kind of contextual.
#
Universal respect I think is actually impossible
#
because the world is so splintered.
#
have you ever seen an orgy of respect?
#
I think no one hates a great poet.
#
Mary Oliver, Mark Strand.
#
When was the last time you saw
#
tens of thousands of people come out?
#
as we're recording in the last few days,
#
and I don't know if only I'm seeing this
#
or I'm noticing it particularly sharply
#
or it's really happening,
#
but I feel that there is an upsurge of affection
#
for good poems that is coming along.
#
And it's contextual because it's within
#
the kind of people who like a kind of poetry,
#
but you will never find haters there.
#
There's absolutely no one who's gonna say,
#
hey, Mary Oliver sucks.
#
Actually, there will be now that we put it out there.
#
I saw this thing once in my life
#
when Nelson Mandela was freed
#
There was an enormous response.
#
People just wanted to be in his presence.
#
Now, this was a guy who was jailed
#
and could have gotten out at any moment.
#
All he needed to do was renounce violence.
#
It was absolutely shocking.
#
He wouldn't renounce violence.
#
And people so respected the idea
#
that he stayed in jail voluntarily
#
to have his spirit broken.
#
That they thronged the banks of the River Charles in Boston
#
And he spoke in kind of a weird, hesitant way.
#
I think that we have so moved away from respectability
#
that we don't really appreciate what it's like
#
to see people just super energized.
#
And of course, the local example with which I'm obsessed
#
is what happened during the emergency
#
and there was only one guy to turn to.
#
Because most of the founders figured out how to get rich,
#
And one guy stayed true to the plan.
#
And there was a need for someone.
#
And I've called this the break glass
#
in case of emergency person.
#
You were talking earlier about how so many bad people
#
become teachers and equally,
#
earlier I used to think that social media
#
brings out the worst side of people,
#
but now I think it also empowers the worst among us.
#
But a counter to that way of thinking about the world
#
actually comes from thinking about generosity
#
from something you were saying earlier.
#
My friend Prem Panikkar once told me
#
this really moving story.
#
I think he along with Paul Salopek and a couple of others
#
were on this long walk through India.
#
Paul Salopek was walking a bunch of continents,
#
but Prem was walking with him through India
#
and at one point they reached this village
#
and they were given shelter in the home
#
of this person who was there,
#
who then disappeared for two hours.
#
And they were wondering what happened,
#
where's he gone, what's the matter?
#
And then the guy came back with a meal for them
#
and they discovered that this guy, because of a guess,
#
wanted to feed them chicken,
#
wanted to feed them a good meal,
#
so he went to the money lender to borrow money
#
so he could buy a chicken and he could get it for them.
#
I don't remember the specific details,
#
but it's something of this.
#
And I've heard so many, like countless stories
#
of generosity from strangers across cultures
#
who will just fucking help.
#
And that makes me think about the human spirit
#
because if you go on social media,
#
if you look at all the shouting that's happening,
#
you might think that fuck, you know,
#
human nature is ugly, it's messed up.
#
But then there is this also and it's like magical.
#
I had my life saved on the Morgan Pass up north.
#
My friend and I set out on this trek
#
and I don't know, we were invincible
#
and we got up to this place with just our sweaters
#
and suddenly nightfall fell
#
and we couldn't see anything.
#
And we were on this rock.
#
I remember being on this rock
#
and this rock was like precipitous at an angle.
#
And it was like a moonless night.
#
And we were starting to freeze
#
and we had no idea where we are.
#
And we had to grip onto this rock to stay on this rock.
#
And we realized we just screwed ourselves really badly.
#
And after like, I don't know, a couple of hours,
#
we start hearing this enormous ruckus
#
and somewhere there's like horses or something.
#
We see some kind of disturbance around us
#
and we hear this and we shout out,
#
And the voice says, alaikum wasalaam and goes past us.
#
We're like, oh shit, somebody could have saved us
#
and they didn't save us and now we're still stuck
#
on this rock trying not to go to sleep
#
so we don't fall on them.
#
Suddenly these two guys show up and they're barefoot
#
and they demand our packs.
#
And like, we don't know what to do.
#
So now we're gonna have none of our stuff
#
and these two thieves are gonna steal all our stuff.
#
So they take all our stuff and they run off.
#
And I look at Adil and I say, what do we do?
#
He's like, we have to catch them.
#
So all we can see is these two guys.
#
And we're running behind these thieves.
#
We don't know if they're armed
#
to try to get our packs back.
#
And at least they lead us off the rock
#
because we can't see anything.
#
And finally, we're just about to catch up to them
#
and there's a village or an encampment or something.
#
And they turn around and they hand us our packs back.
#
We can't figure, did we scare them with our prowess
#
or did we scare them with our power?
#
I mean, clearly they're adapted to this environment.
#
No, they were saving our lives
#
and they didn't wanna humiliate us
#
by carrying our packs into the village,
#
And so they allowed us the fiction
#
of walking into the encampment as men
#
who had carried their own packs.
#
And we walked into this hut situation
#
and there was all this food that they offered to us
#
and there was some ugly piece of meat,
#
like the ugliest, most disgusting part of an animal
#
It was the only meat that there was
#
and they presented it to us.
#
And I said to Adil, how do I refuse this piece of meat?
#
He says, with your white skin, you can't.
#
He says, you have to eat this.
#
I said, well, you're eating it too.
#
He says, hey man, I don't have white skin.
#
So anyway, I'm eating what must've been like
#
the cartilage of some nose of an ox, I don't know what.
#
We're talking to these guys, like, who are you?
#
And he said, we are the teachers of the Waruan Valley.
#
And Adil's sort of doing the Urdu to English translation
#
and it probably wasn't Urdu, something.
#
And I said, well, what do you teach?
#
So he asked the question and I said,
#
teachers of the Waruan Valley can teach anything.
#
I said, like animal husbandry?
#
And he asked the question and then they came back
#
and they said, anything, except animal husbandry.
#
Anyway, we had a hell of a night
#
and everybody was toasting each other
#
and there was a lot of goodwill.
#
And then we fell asleep in this hut
#
and the next morning we woke up,
#
they were like all ready to go and they were gone.
#
It was the most dramatic thing to be in the Himalayas
#
and see these, just the, because we hadn't seen anything.
#
We just climbed up like morons under this pass
#
and then to see just the sheer scope
#
of the scale of this thing.
#
And we had several more sort of like really dumb incidences.
#
You can get yourself in a lot of trouble up there.
#
But anyway, the thought that I wanted to share was,
#
anybody who survived their own travels
#
in places like this has usually done so
#
because there's just this pathological streak
#
of generosity and goodness that you find
#
when you're walking the world.
#
And I wonder when we think about the design of the world
#
and I'll go back to Pinker's quote
#
about nature gives us knobs and nature turns them.
#
And I think about the ways in which these knobs are turned
#
and obviously we have good knobs and bad knobs.
#
And it's clear to me the different ways
#
in which say social media has amplified
#
many of these bad knobs.
#
The Facebook like button, the Twitter retweet,
#
amplifying the desire for validation,
#
the need for status, the tribalism, all of those things.
#
What are the ways, and I think about this often,
#
what are the ways in which we can turn the good knobs?
#
What are the designs that can help us accomplish that?
#
Like I understand that the like button
#
and the retweet button were never meant
#
to amplify these knobs.
#
They were meant for engagement.
#
But how do we, you know, but if we are now
#
to look back at hindsight and look at all of that
#
and say that without compromising on a platform's desire
#
to increase engagement and all of that,
#
how do we amplify the good knobs?
#
It's very easy, you know, my friend Joe Rogan
#
got into a lot of trouble because his enemies
#
put together a reel of every time
#
he had said the dreaded N-word, you know?
#
And there had become a rule, which is if you say that word,
#
those syllables, and you're not black,
#
then you have to be destroyed.
#
Now it's a really interesting thing
#
because it's a horrible word.
#
But one of the uses of that horrible word
#
is not horrible at all, which is it's used for in-grouping
#
the outsider by black Americans.
#
So Joe had been in the comedy circuit
#
and some of those brilliant minds in comedy
#
have always been black.
#
So Joe got very comfortable with this word being in-grouped
#
by many of his fellow comedians.
#
And so he used it and he used it across a time
#
when nobody was using it anymore.
#
So there's my friend, indefensibly using this word
#
over many years, and I didn't know what to do.
#
The one thing I could do is I could post a picture
#
with my arm around him and just say any questions.
#
I wasn't gonna use the word,
#
wasn't gonna make a point of it,
#
just like we all know what you're doing.
#
You're trying to destroy another human being
#
who doesn't deserve to be destroyed.
#
Stand up for something beautiful that you believe in.
#
Everybody has the ability.
#
And somebody says, oh, that's so cringe.
#
You can say, oh, sorry you see it that way.
#
And it's addictive, right?
#
Because sooner or later what you realize
#
is you'll meet a spouse because you were willing
#
to stand for something, you'll get a job.
#
Like the world will shit on you.
#
It'll make you hate the day you were born.
#
But there'll be three people who are watching
#
and one of them is gonna be your future spouse
#
and one of them is gonna be your future employer.
#
One of them is gonna be your next big break.
#
Just the world is afraid to stand up for anything.
#
And master that one skill
#
and you'll never go hungry.
#
You'll never hurt for companionship.
#
Your life will not be devoid of romance.
#
I think it's a really easy thing.
#
And to be honest with you, I have a family member
#
in a little bit of a medical situation
#
and I'm gonna go visit that person now.
#
It's been fantastic visiting with you, Amit.
#
And I can't wait to continue the next time
#
Yeah, this was a lovely conversation.
#
Before you go, a final question allows,
#
which will take no time at all.
#
It's a custom on the show for me and my listeners.
#
Recommend books, music, films, which in your life
#
have given you joy, so much joy that you wanna
#
share it with everyone.
#
The Great Brain is a completely seditious book
#
to give a child about having your own moral code
#
when the moral code of the society around you has failed.
#
So I'd recommend that to somebody raising a kid.
#
If you've got girls, Pippi Longstocking
#
is a completely seditious book for a child.
#
I also recommend giving them
#
the completely outrageous songs of Tom Lehrer,
#
which are age-inappropriate.
#
Try to get them to your kids as early as possible,
#
filled with prostitution, drug references and the like.
#
But I would recommend finding my analysis
#
of the movie Kung Fu Panda on Quora.
#
That's masterful, we didn't get a chance to discuss it
#
perhaps next time, but it's masterful.
#
I think it's one of the greatest films of modern times.
#
I think people don't understand it
#
because they pretend that it's a children's cartoon
#
when it's anything but.
#
I think your explanation is perhaps the best part of it,
#
Well, that explanation brought me a great friendship
#
with Glenn Berger, one of the two screenwriters,
#
because I shared it on the Tim Fair.
#
My first podcast, which I didn't know what a podcast was,
#
and that changed my life because he got on Twitter
#
and said, I wish we had had this analysis
#
while we were writing it.
#
And it told me the power of the medium.
#
Let me just also say this, that podcasting is about
#
to explode in India, if I'm not wrong.
#
And it's a pleasure to be on one of the ones
#
that people around Bombay, Mumbai have been recommending
#
as they said, you really wanna talk to somebody
#
who might be the Lex Friedman of India.
#
And of course you're not, you're your own thing.
#
So maybe Lex Friedman is the Amit of India.
#
He's great, he's fantastic.
#
But what I would say is we need a new vision.
#
And I'm not sure whether either of the two major parties
#
in India is the right vision.
#
If a great vision is going to emerge,
#
wouldn't it be great if it started to emerge organically
#
out of the fact that it's very hard to stop podcasts
#
because the RSS feed is hard to kill.
#
And I really appreciate with no particular agenda
#
being invited in a country that is not my own,
#
a culture that's not my own just to speak.
#
And if I failed you, if I failed to understand
#
your context here locally, that's on me.
#
But this could be something great.
#
This could be one of the absolute great markets
#
for freedom of thought, freedom of speech,
#
And if I had one wish, by the way, for India,
#
it's stop looking to the West for validation
#
and figure out what it is that can be done over here
#
that at the moment the West is having plenty
#
of troubles of its own, thinking its way out of a paper bag.
#
It would be great to get a boost
#
from this many brilliant people under one roof.
#
Well, thanks a lot for taking so much time off
#
on what I know is a busy day for you.
#
I really enjoyed our conversation and all of your insights
#
and I don't know if you need a new vision,
#
but I know we need to talk.
#
So thank you for coming in, Eric.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode,
#
check out the show notes, enter Abit Holes at will.
#
You can follow Eric on Twitter at Eric R. Weinstein.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support
#
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#
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