Eric Weinstein: Hi, it's Eric Weinstein.
Um, just to put it simply, we're blown away.
We've just released the first episode of The Portal, which is my new show.
And, um, we had a response and reaction that we really couldn't have imagined.
So while we have several shows in the can and we have some great interviews lined
up,
uh, instead, one of the producers asked me to simply come in and do an extended
extemporaneous riff to say what the show is likely to be about.
Now, there was no script, there was no preparation, uh, and there'll be a little
bit of light editing, but more or less, what we thought might be interesting is to
have you in on the ground floor.
If you're listening and subscribing at this point in our history, you deserve to
know how we're thinking, what's up next without having all of the rough edges
rounded and polished for your listening pleasure.
So it's going to be a little bit imperfect, but I hope you'll enjoy what
comes next, which is,
uh, an improvisational riff on where we may be going with the show, The Portal.
I hope you like it.
Hello, I'm Eric Weinstein, and you found The Portal.
This is our second episode, and perhaps you caught our first one, which I
interviewed my friend Peter Thiel.
In that conversation, Peter and I discussed a great many things, but one of
the, let's say, overarching themes is that somehow the world around us seems to have
been completely misexplained and not only misexplained for a short period of time,
but perhaps misexplained for decades without anyone much noticing.
At least that was our contention.
The contention is that because of a dizzying amount of change in a small
number of sectors, we have misinterpreted what is going on much more generally as
change across a great number of sectors.
Likewise, while we have generally enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity,
we have been somewhat inured to the growing danger that comes from the sheer
amount of violent potential that has so far been kept under wraps in the stasis
that followed World War II.
So these two features of our world - that is - a generally peaceful world in which
the potential for violence and destruction has gotten ever greater, in a world in
which a small number of sectors are advancing at a breakneck pace, but leaving
behind the majority of sectors where nothing much seems to be happening, seems
to be a relatively uncommon picture to be discussed, at least in official channels.
What The Portal is going to be about is breaking this bubble.
This is a bubble that we believe, in some sense has been around since the early
1970s and almost all of us have grown up having our lives defined and determined by
the set of common misconceptions about the world in which we live.
So what is The Portal?
The Portal is an attempt to end this bubble, to look beyond the intellectual
laziness and stasis that is available everywhere through the institutional
media, through, let's say, legacy sense-making structures and to start
listening in on a different conversation, perhaps a conversation that many of you
are relatively unfamiliar with, in which different players, different names, are
rotated into the spotlight and the familiar pundits and talking heads are
rotated out.
Now, what is it that this group of people is thinking about?
What are they working on?
What do they believe?
Well, in part, many of them are worried about the idea of complacency and excited
about the idea of breaking through a portal into a different space.
Sometimes that's in an area like radical life extension, where so far up until the
present, almost no one has gotten beyond the, um, biblical age of Moses set at 120
years by convention.
If that's been the hard stop, some people are now dreaming about life expectancies
that could go into 200 or 300 years if we could only find access to the right
molecular mechanisms.
Likewise, in areas like physics, we have the possibility that there are two main
dominant theories that are irreconcilable and therefore incomplete.
What if we had an ability to bridge those theories and come up with a much more
detailed and accurate theory that spanned both the phenomena covered by Einstein's
general relativity and the quantum theory known as the standard model.
Would there be something to do, something wholly unexpected?
We don't know.
We also dream of limitless energy.
Perhaps fusion technology or incredible storage devices would allow us to harness,
you know, much greener energy sources.
Perhaps we would find some way of living in a world of abundance in which we could
print things, freeing us from drudgery using artificial intelligence and machine
learning,
and learn to have much more harmonious and fulfilling existences, or perhaps this
would unleash some sort of economic problem whereby very few of us would be
able to earn a living in this new world and that the abundance that we thought we
craved would in fact be a curse in disguise.
What I want to do is to talk to you very simply and plainly about the problems that
we currently face that almost no one is willing to discuss, and that is that we
have a world
largely built for rapid growth in which that kind of broad growth is no longer
found easily, simply by looking with better instruments, with more patience and
more detail at the world in which we live.
Let me give you a slightly different picture of where we are as a society.
One that you've probably not thought of.
Imagine somebody who has graduated from high school, but one, two, three years
later hasn't found something else to do with their life and they're hanging around
the same high school as fewer and fewer of the students that they once knew continue
to attend classes.
Effectively, this is getting creepier and creepier, and I think that that's in large
measure where we are with the technological revolutions that we have
undertaken.
At some point it was incredibly cool to figure out how to place a long distance
call between continents, but this has become commonplace.
Likewise, many of the fantastic things that once got us excited about the release
of every new iPhone now has us relatively unexcited about the new suite of apps and
features that every new phone promises will be slightly different than the one
before.
So I think what's important to think about is how optimistic we once were.
What did we think we were going to do?
I think we thought we were going to be curing diseases.
Wouldn't it be great not to have lost anyone in your family from cancer when we
declared a war on cancer in the early 1970s?
What did we think we were going to be doing with energy?
Didn't we think that fusion was around the corner?
If you think about all of the things that we could be doing, we've learned in most
of these areas that it is no longer mature to hope, to imagine that somehow we are
going to be able to make the future very different than the present.
Yes, things will get a little bit better, but are they going to get dramatically
better?
Are we going to be leading a life in our here in our now that would allow a kind of
escapist lifestyle that we saw on Star Trek, or even in Star Wars, which came out
in the sixties and seventies respectively?
I think that in general, most of us have realized that these dreams have remained
dreams for so long that we've consigned them to the world of children.
Perhaps very dim people believe these things.
What I'm interested in is trying to get the smartest, most dynamic and most
agentic people in our society once again talking to each other and ignoring the
people who are most focused on dampening all of our enthusiasm.
Now perhaps, you think, look, this doesn't sound very scientific.
Shouldn't we be relying on the best systems we have?
For example, isn't peer reviewed science the gold standard?
Well, I would say no.
Peer review is a relatively recent invention, and I would even say an
intrusion into the hard sciences.
In 1953 when the double helix was elucidated by Watson and Crick, they
submitted it to the journal Nature.
But it was never a peer reviewed.
Why?
Because an editor's job was to figure out whether it was worthy of publication.
And in fact, the editor at the time, if I recall correctly, said that anybody who
saw this paper would be so influenced by it, that he couldn't take the risk sending
it out for any kind of review.
Well, if that's true, let's say peer review isn't really the centerpiece of our
science.
Is the scientific method the centerpiece of our science?
Well, at some level, sure, it's like proof checking, but a lot of the work that we do
in science has been incredibly imaginative.
And you might even say it's been irresponsible until it comes into final
form and can be reconciled with experiment.
But instead, we've developed a culture in which immediately upon proposing
something, we are told that the sine qua non of science is that there be an
agreement between theory and experiment?
Well, this is wholly untrue.
In fact, if you go back to Paul Dirac's great Scientific American article in the
early sixties, he says that it is much more important than a physical theory have
mathematical beauty
and that we learn to trust a theory, even when it doesn't agree with experiment, if
it has a kind of intellectual coherence to it.
But how often are people pointed to something like Dirac's 1963 paper?
In fact, you could look to Jim Watson, who's told us that in order to make great
advances, we have to be irresponsible.
Now, this is a very odd feature of the world.
Many of our top people do not seem to play by the rules that have been set for
everyone else.
And the question is, if we are in a situation in which we have unleashed such
incredible destructive power as we did with the hydrogen bomb, and in potentially
unlocking the cell,
why is it that we are so incredibly timid about what it is that we might do next?
We have all the destructive power that we need already at our fingertips.
What we don't have is the ability to escape our fate.
In fact, what we need is to find The Portal, to find a way out, to find new
economic vistas that will allow far
larger numbers of people to participate without causing an ecological disaster.
If you take all the people, let's say, in India, China, and Bangladesh, what have
you, who are leading lives at a far lower economic level than we are, if you were to
elevate them to our current level as we have in the United States, you would be
causing an ecological disaster.
Well, clearly we are not going to leave these people behind.
We need them to be full participants in whatever beautiful future we're trying to
create.
And that future has to be ecologically sound because we don't have the ability to
despoil the planet as we dream about universal human prosperity.
So what are we going to do?
Well, I think that the most irresponsible thing to do is to stop dreaming, to get
our dreams to be so small that we're not embarrassed to share them in public.
I think what we need to do is to start dreaming much more aggressively, dream
much bigger, and start dreaming in public with each other, harmoniously
if we can, or have our dreams fight each other, but at least start unlocking the
potential of human imagination and not immediately grounding every new idea in
some sort of race to see whether we can invalidate it, give it enough of a room to
grow.
You know, this is how we used to talk about protecting infant industries before
we decided that free trade should always be the rule of the day and that we should
have no barriers to protect, uh, new ideas in a nursery where they might learn to
thrive before testing to see whether they can survive as adults.
What we're going to do in this program is effectively to declare war.
War on stasis.
War on group think.
War on everything that has enervated our society, and we're going to do it because
we have the ability now to compete with the networks that previously grew up to
distribute whatever it was that was portrayed as sense-making.
You can tell that there's something wrong with both CNN and Fox.
If you're reading the New York times carefully, you can tell that the narrative
arcs in the daily newspaper clearly have to have been thought out to cover many
days in long before the facts are known.
Somehow we are living in somebody else's reality.
What we need to do is to return to our own future.
Now, there is no question that we might make some serious mistakes.
People may die.
There may be very serious consequences of experimenting.
But it's certain that if we stay here and we do not attempt to grow beyond the
problems that we've previously created for ourselves in decades past, that the future
is not going to be appealing or powerful enough to evade some of the fates that
some people are seeing as being nearly inescapable.
If we cannot create a larger pie, we're going to have to engage in a lot of
zero-sum games.
We're going to have to deal an incredible amount with some kind of social
engineering project, which, quite frankly, I don't see having any hope of succeeding.
We're barely able to hold a conversation.
Could we actually hold a constitutional convention if our new technology required
that we rethink the boundaries of what constitutes search and seizure?
Whether hate speech should be included with free speech in our foundational
documents?
Have we really gotten to a place in which, um, we can only look back because we are
afraid to look forward?
The Portal is going to attempt to answer these questions.
So it might well be asked, how are we going to try to do something different on
The Portal that might actually have a significant impact on our society?
And I'm going to begin in a kind of unexpected place.
How are we going to get The Portal to be self-supporting?
Well, oddly, when we proposed this podcast, a friend of the program decided
that he was in a position, uh, through business success to fund The Portal and to
in fact remove the need for advertising from our desire to broadcast.
And I thought about this long and hard.
Of course, it's very appealing to imagine that somebody cares so much about what's
happening on the program that they're willing to bankroll it.
However, I think we've decided against it, at least initially, and I wanted to share
some of my reasoning.
The reasoning is that very few programs could possibly afford to do that, and as
important as this program is, it's really not about me,
it's about what can we do with sense-making done individualistically and
outside of any kind of institutional control.
My belief is that the more people are able to podcasts, the more people are able to
use these new channels for outreach, the greater the likelihood that we can create
an ecosystem of interesting disruptive ideas to change everything.
So in fact, it's much more important that we figure out some way of fixing the
business model, where all of these podcasts are somehow delivering value that
people are at least initially unwilling to pay for, because we've all been taught to
expect that these things that we consume electronically are free.
Well, we want to have the same problem, at least initially as everyone else so that
we can work on it.
Can we teach advertisers and capitalists to stay the course when somebody says
something controversial but responsible, to weather a storm of a boycott?
Can we create what I've called risk-vertisers, who actually pledge some
loyalty to the people that you most want to see talking about the issues you most
want to hear discussed
if they can do so responsibly, these risk-vertisers are people that we're going
to go in search of.
So if you have a product that you think is terrific, and you want to reach people
with tremendous brand loyalty, I hope you'll consider being a risk-vertiser for
The Portal Podcast, and that means, effectively, getting to know us, our
audience, and not immediately buckling at the first sign that there's some sort of
social media storm coming your way.
Furthermore, I think we're going to talk about science and we're not going to be
dumbing it down.
I'm very frustrated that very often when you see top quality scientists going into,
let's say, public outreach mode, that they very often adulterate the subject matter
in an attempt to make it more understandable.
Now, of course, that's inevitable when you have people specializing in very difficult
subjects that they've studied for years.
But I also feel that partially what happened is that we got into a habit of
underestimating the intelligence of the audience.
Rather than giving the audience the need to look up some terminology to make some
forays of their own with the search engine,
we've gotten them into a complacent state where if they don't immediately understand
something, then somehow the fault is with the broadcaster.
Well, I think we reject this for a very simple reason.
Do you remember when TV was called the idiot box?
I know that I'm of an age that that was a very common thing to do once upon a time,
but if you look at all of the amazing things that have been happening on TV,
it's totally changed the format to watch something like Game of Thrones, or The
Sopranos or Madmen.
And why is that?
Because the character lines and the storylines and the development are so much
more complex than anything people are able to do in a smaller format that in fact
television, quite surprisingly, became the most distinguished media in which one can
now write.
Well, likewise, I think we need to do the same thing for the public discussion of
science.
We need to draw more of you in and count on the fact that we've been
underestimating the intelligence of our followers for quite some time and start
playing up to your level, and we may lose you along the way, but I have faith that
with our ability to monitor your comments and listen to your feedback, that we can
find an entirely new level of explication in which many of you will find that
far from being left behind by specialists, you are actually able to participate in
conversations that have previously been restricted only to experts.
So I think we're going to try to pitch it at a higher level.
We're going to try to rescue a business model, um, so that we can get more people,
uh, with the ability to experiment in front of a camera as I'm doing now,
but we've also decided to explore some topics that I think could break some
serious ground.
In particular, I think that one of the things we're really interested in doing is
talking about a couple of new economic models that have been shared with the
world rather narrowly up until now, one of which involves a, what might be called
COSI and immigration, which I'll
explain later, uh, shows that simply opening borders is in no way a free market
solution, that you have to securitize rights and allow people to trade them in
order to get free market economics to work in the immigration area.
Another of which has to do with bilateral trade, and the geometry, uh, of markets
culminating, uh, eventually in a model of humans in which they are allowed to change
their tastes.
Now, it sounds very strange to say that economic theory falls apart when human
beings change their tastes.
But since at least the late 1970s, uh, we've had an excuse in place in the work
of Becker and Stigler that allows us to make assumptions about human beings that
are known to be wildly untrue.
And the way out, strangely enough, is through differential geometry, the
differential geometry of markets.
So that's something that I think we're going to be very interested in bringing to
you.
I don't know whether the idea of geometric markets is something that can be easily
explained to a mass audience, but this theory of geometric marginalism is in fact
a starter theory.
That, if that is successful, might allow us to discuss an even more profound
attempt, which would be this concept that I've called geometric unity.
Now, when I talk about getting off the planet, I have no idea whether or not it
is in fact possible to go beyond the solar system.
Nobody's ever done it, it's been relatively irresponsible to think in these
terms ever since we've understood what we're up against, uh, in particular in the
form of Einstein's restrictions, through the general and special theories of
relativity,
but I do know this: if we are to have a hope of visiting all of those exotic
locations we can see in the night sky when we're far from a city and the moon is not
blocking out all of the stars and galaxies, I do know that if we are going
to have a hope of visiting someplace truly remote, it's probably going to come
through a better understanding of the source code of reality.
Now, up until this point, we've talked about this in terms of the so-called
theory of everything, and if you'll notice, we have a very funny pattern about
this.
A very small number of highly regarded physicists have been entitled to talk and
dream openly about a theory of everything, most commonly in the form of string
theory.
Yet the current string theoretic revolution, which began in 1984 with
something called the anomaly cancellation, has largely petered out.
True, some people, diehards in the field will continue to say that this is the best
time to enter theoretical physics, and that even if some of the original hype was
misplaced, that there's no reason to think that the longterm prospects are dim.
Well, that's not true.
We all know that that's not true.
Why?
Well, we had to buy an enormous accelerator in Geneva in which to test
some of our earlier theories, and in fact, while it found the, what appears to be the
Higgs particle, it's found very little else beyond the standard model.
In fact, nothing of significance.
Are we going to continue to fund such machines when our successes become more
remote?
Are we going to continue to be able to attract the top minds as we have always
been able to attract them into theoretical physics?
Again, I think that as other occupations continue to offer more money and physics
offers less stability and less in interest and excitement as a field,
it's going to be very difficult to compete for talent.
If we're going to do something, now is the time.
We still have the expertise, we still have enough of the infrastructure.
Sure, in my opinion, it may be decaying, and I don't even really particularly get
along with this community, but this is the community of greatest agency of greatest
intelligence, and it has to be reinvigorated.
We need to get this community more money, we need to get them more security, and we
need to get them once again, dreaming up the future.
Now, they brought us the future when they brought us the world wide web, which came
out of CERN, when they developed the semiconductor, they effectively invented
molecular biology as a side project,
they ended World War II, and they gave us the communications technology in which our
phones communicate with remote towers and allow us to connect to people a world away
with very little delay.
In essence, our entire economy owes itself to theoretical physics.
And are we going to let this field wither and die on the fine because it hasn't been
able to succeed
in roughly 45 years?
I would say that this is the place that we have to bring the fight.
People have not understood how vulnerable we are when we start to lose our most
dynamic communities, and we find ourselves incapable of fighting for the resources
either in terms of neurons or in terms of dollars that are necessary to sustain our
hope of progress.
Further, I think we're going to explain a lot of our theorizing, some of which has
been covered in the annual edge essays, uh, for edge.org, uh, in which effectively
we've engaged in a 10 year strategy.
I've always wondered what would be the best way of sneaking a weapon through
airport security.
Even though I've never attempted to do anything like that, I always thought that
the best way of doing it would be to do it in pieces,
where each piece is not entirely understandable as being part of something
that is being screened for.
Well, that's what I chose to do in the edge essays that we'll be discussing.
I think the first essay I wrote was called "Go Virtual Young Man", which was in
response to what I was just learning about in terms of Bitcoin.
Another one was about kayfabe, or the system of lies that is the substrate of
professional wrestling.
That was about my fear of an election cycle in which effectively everyone would
know that everything was fake, but we would still be somehow dependent, uh, on
the pantomime and theatrics in order to conduct the business of our society.
Another one was on Russell conjugation.
Now, Russell conjugation, if you don't know, uh, has to do with how we
emotionally shade our language so that people can, can understand what our
content is, but they don't realize that we are emotionally coercing them to feel
differently about things than they would if they simply thought about them from
first principles.
So there's a large number of essays that I want to discuss with you, including one on
anthropic capitalism.
Now, the question of anthropic capitalism is simply this: was the last 200 years in
anomaly?
Was it a very bizarre time in which effectively markets were without parallel
in organizing human activity?
And is it possible, when we say something like late-stage capitalism, that we've
actually blown through this period where capitalism is itself a danger to our
society?
Now, we have nothing else to pick up from it.
If we look outside our windows in any major metropolitan area, we'll see that
people are engaged in some self-organizing activity, and if our only two
possibilities of keeping that going are either to allow the market to run
relatively unfettered or to begin telling people what to do is if central command
was viable, then we're in a really tough spot.
I think we're going to have to start thinking about new systems and I don't
know what those systems will be.
But since we've been able to reach major candidates, like the up and coming, uh,
Andrew Yang on the democratic side, I'm at least hopeful that there are places in
which these new ideas might have a hearing.
So, to sum up, what is The Portal?
The Portal is a search for some way out of the stasis in which we have lived.
If our lives have largely been lived in an intellectual bubble, that dates from the
early seventies, it's time to pop that bubble and to find out what's on the
outside.
I hope you'll join me trying to find The Portal, and we can go through together.
Thank you.