Is This The End of Humanity? - Eric Weinstein

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Go to avocado green mattress dot com slash trigger to get up to fifteen percent off. That's avocado green mattress dot com slash trigger for up to fifteen percent off mattresses. Avocado green mattress dot com slash trigger. Before November of nineteen fifty two with the test known as Ivy Mike the first hydrogen bomb.

You know, there's like before Christ and after Christ and they're just very different. Suddenly we were like gods. And that is the B C A D of human history. That's much more important than the birth of Christ.

What is the difference between the nuclear weapon as it originally was and the the second generation, the hydrogen bomb, etcetera? Well there was no point to ducking cover. I mean, you weren't gonna survive this thing. My guess is that one or two devices means that Los Angeles is normal. No one is interested in the idea that the solar system is an escape room and that Einstein is our jailer.

We've got to get past Einstein before the thing goes off. We're on the eve of destruction and take a Jewish attitude, which is survival at all costs. This is the end. This this is the apocalypse. Eric, welcome back to Shukanom Chay. Thanks guys. Great to be here. It's great to have you back on. Uh we've had three previous conversations, all of them extremely popular with our audience. People loved it.

But the one thing that we've always felt that they've missed out is some of the conversations we've had with you in private. We really shouldn't talk about that. And some of the conversation we've had in private is actually um about geopolitics and particularly how all of that is informed by the invention of first nuclear weapons. And then thermonuclear weapons.

Uh it's interesting that as we sit down to record this, this episode might not go out for a few weeks, but as we sit down to record this, the Trump administration's just announced that it wants to do nuclear testing again, on par with other countries, is the language. We don't know the detail of that.

But this seems to be a a thing that we've talked about in the past. So just take us through it. Take it away, Professor. Mm-hmm. Well it's awfully nice to see the two of you and onto nuclear weapons. Um

I've been talking about this for a while. Somehow there was a crazy idea at the end of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell, nukes became a non issue, which was never true. And there was never a peace dividend, because there will never be a peace dividend as long as We know how to create this technology from physics. And this issue about fictionalizing nukes and what they mean and how to think about them.

So that we can live our lives. I mean, right now we're looking out at Los Angeles and there exist websites that will allow you to simulate the effect of any of the tests with any epicenter you like, chose. Uh at any point here. And whether or not you're gonna have gamma radiation as you will from the thermonuclear weapons or

cesium from fission weapons or dirty bombs or who knows what. All of our cities, other than two in Japan, have been untested as to how they'll perform under these circumstances. So it's not clear that it even makes sense to build cities. But because no one's used a nuclear weapon in anger since nineteen forty five, we don't know whether this is a silly thing to be worried about or the the most important thing to be worried about.

So for years I've been calling for a return to rare above ground nuclear tests, which I think we're ended by the test ban treaty of what is it, sixty two? So uh it's been over sixty years since we've had above ground nuclear testing. And as a result, we've just forgotten that the power of the strong force and the electromagnetic force together is. Astounding.

Um and just if I can say from a physics perspective, we would call this SU three cross U one gauge theory. I mean it's just it's a technical thing that leads to engineering abilities that are Sort of unthinkable. I mean I don't know how to how to put it. I don't think we can really think through the effect of thermonuclear weapons on urban centers. And the fact that this comes from physics and comes from science. Even my colleagues in physics are completely disconnected from their Manhattan

project colleagues and that ethos. It was so long in the past that it's sort of like modern Greeks thinking about Ulysses. There's just no no direct connection. It's some sort of mythological So anyway, I've been talking about this nonstop and Till I'm blue in the face, many people are bored of hearing it from me. But it was always going to be the main issue. So first of all, you said a lot of things there I I want to pick up on, but the first one is you said there's no peace dividend.

Is that really true, Eric? I mean we had uh historic historian uh Dominic Sambricon, one of the rest of history guys. We had a great it's one of our most popular conversations and one of the things we talked about is the reason there has been has not been another world war. is because of nuclear weapons. They are sufficient deterrent for major powers to get direct conflict between them. Is that not true? It's worked for eighty years. Exactly as you say.

And if you're settled, if you're happy with 80 years, you could even double it to 160 years, which is a drop in the bucket when it comes to geological time, even human time. So um yes, they make the world much safer in the in the short run. Much safer than than it's ever been. So i i if you like to think in short term thinking, uh nuclear weapons are the best thing that ever happened to humanity.

Surely though, as those weapons become more and more powerful and one of the things you've talked about is the transition from nuclear weapons to thermonuclear weapons and the impact of that. But beyond that, I mean Russia is developing a what they call a tsunami bomb. which is basically a giant nuclear torpedo. It explodes in the water outside Los Angeles and, you know, the entire western seaboard basically gets swept off the map. Same on the eastern side, eastern seaboard. As The potential

damage becomes greater. Isn't that a greater disincentive for those weapons to be used? And therefore we are more likely to not have a world war. You're more likely to not have a world war if everyone is convinced of the calculus and everyone remains rational. But you know, this is sort of the whole idea behind playing chicken. Um, people always fancy themselves excellent chicken players and so You know, it's like that scene in Rebel Without a Cause.

um where you have two people who who think that they can outwit the other one as to what level of risk they can they can handle. Um I don't view the current crop of leaders as particularly skilled. I mean I would say that Putin would be the most skilled uh of the current crop of leaders and G. But they're not world class talents in this department, I don't think, and nobody's use these weapons in so long and I'm even positive whether they'll work.

And so the fear of God also has to be reinstilled in the population through, let's say, through music. I mean, there was a song called The Eve of Destruction that your listeners can find or you know, on the beach. Or Doctor Strange Love. And All of these stories we've stopped telling so that we no longer think of these things as immediate. So I don't think it works as well as you think it does. But if you're satisfied with that short term

cessation of hostilities because everyone's so terrified of the consequence. Absolutely. That's that's the major positive externality of Armageddon. And the apocalypse is that it keeps the peace very well. Well my thinking is a little bit more than that.

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, right? I know and you know that, which is I think one of the reasons you're saying we should be testing nuclear weapons. Is your rationale that we should be doing this to remind people of just how dangerous is we should remind ourselves. You know, I don't think

There's this sort of cavalier attitude that you develop when you know how men who've never gone to war, I've never been to war. Men who've never gone to war tend to talk tough because they have no idea what they're saying. And so I'm always interested when I see people who are like

You you've got a tough guy and you've got a guy who's actually been in special forces at the same table. And the guy who's who talks tough will go on at great length and the guy who's actually seen some stuff will just remain silent. It's not even worth having the conversation. And my feeling is that there are too many people within a in the middle of a masculinity crisis who are currently at the head of world government.

Eric, when we talk about nuclear weapons, the what we sometimes fail to acknowledge is there's an element of luck to this piece because We came quite close, didn't we, to the in the Cuban Missile Crisis to everything going disastrously awry. Sure, in even in the early eighties with uh Stanislav Petrov, I believe, who more or less said, I I think the Americans probably aren't actually attacking us. I'm gonna hold off and launching. Yeah, it's come several times it's come down to sheer good luck.

And I just don't wanna I don't feel like playing uh Russian American roulette forever. I mean I j it just I guess even the questions are offensive. Wha why are we pretending that this is it's not safe? I mean to to me, the exciting thing is if we were smart We would be taking the supposed peacetime dividend, and we'd be plowing it into the idea that the solar system is an escape room. Our job to escape the solar system as fast as we possibly can and spread out.

So that if something goes wrong on one planetary surface, we're not all doomed. And that doesn't seem to animate anyone. To me, it's clearly the world's most important question. I've spent my entire life on this question. I'm not really on the podcast circuit. That's what I really do. And No one's interested. Like no one no government is interested.

There's no institute, there's no fund, there's nothing you can apply for. No one is interested in the idea that the solar system is an escape room and that Einstein is our jailer. We've got to get past Einstein before the thing goes off. It's it's it's as clear as day to me. I think the thing is is that is it to put it mildly, incredibly big picture for most people, including myself.

I think the thing that most people and most governments have been l almost lulled into a false sense of security around nuclear weapons because we just assume that the other person won't use them. Where it starts to get a little worrying for me is when you look at Iran developing nuclear weapons with a country that is so fiercely ideological. And particularly when it when they look at Israel and they're like, They've said in the Roman words they want Israel wiped off the map.

Isn't isn't that the most dangerous outcome if someone like Iran has a nuclear weapon? As c as opposed to Russia or anything or any other country. I mean India and Pakistan. Uh you know, you have two countries that are the difference between h Urdu and Hindi is nil. These people are exactly the same culturally, you know, one born.

One more Hindu, one more Muslim, however You know, that is an incredibly dangerous flash point because it's dependent upon skill and you have the government versus the army versus the ISI in Pakistan. Um, you know, if I think about the Taiwan Strait and China in its calculation versus the US, that's incredibly dangerous. We have a half proxy war between Russia and Ukraine with uh Ukraine representing NATO and and the US.

Uh and we've humiliated Putin in particular, in my opinion, by the two thousand and four uh ascension into Article five status of the three FSU countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Estonia. Sorry. Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. Yes, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. Sorry, and and the nineteen ninety-nine provocation of Poland, which I think was entirely defensible as a Warsaw pact. entry entry into into Article five status. I don't know what we're doing. I think we seem insane.

I I just uh uh let me put it on the table. I don't think anybody's thinking Why do you say that? Because I think I'm thinking rationally. I think I can defend everything that I'm saying. And I think no one can handle it because nobody actually is motivated to go behind If general relativity holds, gentlemen, we're in real trouble.

It's very hard. I Einstein is the problem. What what do you mean by that, Eric? We're four light years away from the nearest star. So if you think about habitable planetary surfaces. If you could grant science fiction powers to Elon and he could terraform the moon and Mars. we'd have three spheres that we could get to sort of by chemical rockets. That is not enough diversification for humanity. It's nowhere close.

So then you have this issue, okay, where do we where do we get the supply of spheres? It's it the issue is atmospheres. We're all connected by the same atmosphere. So you saw that with like Chernobyl. The cloud doesn't stay in Ukraine. The only place to find new planetary surfaces, if we're not going to make artificial platforms like Which is very difficult. is to be able to get very far away very quickly.

And you can sort of do this with something called time dilation, but if you were to tour a round trip and traveling adjusted at the speed of light, by by taking a s short jump to the nearest star and back, you'd lose eight years relative to your relatives. That's not practical. It's not gonna work. You can't really traverse the cosmos of general relativity zoom force. So we know general relativity isn't the last word. We know Einstein isn't the final sage.

And for some reason because his theory hasn't budged for over a hundred years, but basically a hundred and ten. Um, we're demotivated. We we just have decided that we live in space-time, which is totally unfair. We don't live in space-time. Space-time is a model of where we live. And in that model there's no out there's no out. We can prove that you can't go faster than the speed of light. And as a result, we're trapped here.

But this is like the greatest puzzle ever. It tells you that everything that we're good at, science, Physics, introspection, mathematics can be brought to bear on the question of our survival. And if we can crack this one problem, we can split up. You can have a planet, you can have a planet. It's the Oprah principle of the cosmos. All right? And then we don't all have to have the same fate if one planet goes stupid, and most of them will go stupid.

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I mean... I see what you're saying, but I think For the vast majority of governments and people, they see their concerns are more real world and by real world I think things that are happening in the here and now. More short term, I guess. I guess. So the point is so to them propose these things was they may be in the long term a good idea. A lot of people will go, but we don't have enough money in this country. We've got a huge deficit in the world. Your allocation is zero.

And by the way, let's stop talking about normal people. Normal people just don't matter. The goal is to save normal people. And to save normal people you need extraordinary people. You see who endangered these normal people? It was two guys, Stanislav Ulom and Edward Teller. And these two guys came up with a piece of geometry. And the pe do you know how the thermonuclear weapon works? No. You should explain how a nuclear weapon works, then how a thermonuclear weapon works, and then also

what have been some of the developments since the thermonuclear weapons were invented. Like I mentioned, it's an army bomb, etcetera. Okay. So the first thing is why didn't we have these crazy weapons during the Civil War? The Civil War War was very close to World War Two in human history. And w if you look at one it it's clearly fought in antiquity and then suddenly you've got jet planes and you can have the ability to draw.

The key issue is that we didn't understand that there was something called the neutron. We knew about protons and electrons before we knew that there were neutrons. About nineteen eleven I think Ernest Rutherford said maybe there's a neutral version of the proton inside of the And that was the most dangerous idea, in my opinion, any human ever had. Just that one idea. Maybe there's a a neutral version of the proton. Why is that? Because if you if you send a proton as a bullet into a very large

Atom nuk atomic nucleus. That's a lot of protons stuck together. So as magnets, they're all trying to run away from each other. There's some extra force called the strong force that is even crazier than the super strong force of electromagnetism that's pushing them. But if you send this proton in, as it gets closer and closer, it gets repelled.

Because everything is like is charged like with like. Well what if you have something that doesn't feel that charge, but it's just like a proton? That's like a bullet that then taps this thing. And this thing is already straining to stay together under the strong force. So it blows apart. And what does it do? It releases more bullets that these neutrons. And that's what a chain reaction is. It's bullets creating bullets creating bullets tapping at these think about a bunch of magnets.

velcroed together so that they stay together and don't repel. And then suddenly when you tap them, the velcro comes apart because it's just at that critical thing. So that would be called a subcritical mass of heavy elements like uranium. And now the idea is that if you push that together, it goes from subcritical, not enough bullets to start the chain reaction, to critical, enough bullets. That's what causes the reaction. So what you do is you take a subcritical mass of radioactive material.

And you wrap it in a sphere of chemical explosives. And you push that thing from subcritical to critical so that the density of the bullets means that there are enough targets for them to hit. That's the first stage, and that's fission. And that's what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and at Trinity. Now. W why did it take seven year seven years to come up with thermonuclear weapons?

It's because what you want to do there is you want to actually fuse hydrogen into helium to release the energy that you get in the sun. And for that, you need a detonator that is already the atomic weapon of. madness from nineteen forty five. Then now you're gonna just use that as the detonator. So what you do is you create sort of like a lipstick like tube and you put the detonator fission weapon in the top part of the tube.

And what Stanislav Ulom and Edward Telper figured out was that you could bounce The consequences of that weapon on some geometric pattern and have the reflected waves come down to a rod and compress. hydrogen into helium in the second stage. And the key problem there, as I understand it, is that because you're using an atomic bomb as a detonator, the top part's gonna blow apart the s the the the s the tertiary stage.

And therefore it won't work. But there's one thing that can get there fast enough. So that you don't blow up the design before it's ready. And that's light. And so my understanding is that what you do is is that you take the light that comes off of the initial explosion and you focus it with geometry.

to concentrate it in the tube to create the tertiary stage. So chemical is the primary subcritical to critical is the secondary reflected light to compressing hyd hydrogen to helium is the tertiary. And that thing was Ivy Mike in November of fifty two. And that is the B C A D, my friends, of science.

What does that mean, B C I D? You know, there's like before Christ and after Christ, and they're just very different. Before November of nineteen fifty-two, with the test known as Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb. In the publication in April of nineteen fifty three, less than six months later, with the double helix giving the structure of DNA, we didn't have the power of the twin nuclei, the nucleus of the atom and the nucleus of the cell. And then after that, suddenly we were like gods and

That is the B C A D of human history. That's much more important than the birth of Christ. Before that time we didn't have the power of gods, and after that time we did. And what is the difference between the nuclear weapon as it originally was? The detonator and the the the second generation, the hydrogen bomb, etcetera. Well there was no point to duck and cover. I mean, you weren't gonna survive this thing.

It was just at a different scale. I mean, you're talking about orders of magnitude. bigger bombs than what already caused the the Emperor to surrender in Japan. We're just talking inconceivable levels of destruction. Well give me an let's conceive it. My guess is that one or two devices means that Los Angeles is no more. By no more you mean completely flattened and raised to the ground. Yeah. I mean th there was a th the Soviets uh of course were slightly late to the game. Uh Sakharov.

Father of that bomb. And of course they had to go big or go home. So they did this czar bomb and the czar bomb I think it's in Nov Nov Nova Zemlia. Novajemla, yeah. New uh new new land, you mean new land, yeah. And this was at a scale that wasn't conceivable. I I I wish I had the the American comparable device was this thing called Castle Bravo.

Which was way bigger than we had expected. We didn't know how well we could control it. But if you if I've played on the simulators, uh all of these concentrated cities are just instantly uninterested. And what what are the long term effects of these of these types of weapons? Is it does it mean that the land that they have been detonated on will

will not be will never be able to bear fruit, etcetera. Well my understanding is that the hydrogen ones are actually cleaner, that you really have gamma radiation in the form of like photons that are very hard to guard against. And the other ones have these radioactive isotopes that linger on. But I've never really cared that much about the post war scenarios.

Everything that you know about life as we've led it is gone. So, um and not to say nothing of the fact that as we understand it currently, I think if you had nuclear war between major players The tit for tat would actually end all all human life on Earth, wouldn't it? Even if it didn't.

You're you're talking about setting back everything that we know of as life, as modern life, to levels that I I don't know whether there's subsistence living or hunter gathering or somebody's got some crazy compound, but I'm not going there. It's it's it's too much. And and and by the way, there's a you know, there's a comparable version of this for um for pandemic.

You know, and we're we're talking about playing with things where we're just not if you saw what happened with Covid, it just took over the planet. I guess the question is, if you have weapons of that magnitude, does not therefore instill a certain humility? in the people wielding them.

For instance, you look at Putin. Glad glad you find my this question's funny. But y but you know, you you unless you are completely insane, you wouldn't m be tempted to push that button because you know that the moment you launch that weapon, not only have you su ensured the destruction of millions of people, you've also assured your own destruction. What conversation are we even having? These people are nuts, Francis. Which people? Oh, Sinwar was clearly crazy. Yep. Kamey.

Putin Putin is uh absolutely up for brinksmanship. G, I think, thinks he can calculate this to a fairly well. Donald Trump is famous for promoting himself as a wild card, my friends, in order to confuse his negotiating part. I just don't see this level of skill. Netanyahu clearly did not understand he was in a hybrid war and he fought a kinetic war while he lost the hybrid. I don't see this level of skill.

Well hold on a second. I mean if you look at Russia Ukraine and and we should come back to that because of the point you made, but you know, you know what I think about the invasion of Ukraine. I think it's an abomination from Putin. I agree. And uh I know you do, but I also think

Uh and we should explore this actually before we get into the nuclear dimension because uh the one argument I've never heard anyone who thinks that the West provoked Russia is any is ever addressed is the argument that I always make on this, which is Um, ultimately, every time Russia is strong, it seeks to cushion itself westwards, create a bigger cushion b between Moscow and its western frontier.

And so if you don't expand NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that's fine, but what you will end up with is a Russian dominated Eastern Europe in the way that you had before the collapse. Now Some people will see that as a price worth paying, others not. But ultimately my point is you are going to find yourself in a confrontation with Russia at some point unless you have no red lines whatsoever.

unless you're and Putin's on record as saying America's evil because what they did is they upset the post World War Two order. They went reneged on the agreement of the post World War Two order. Well the post World War Two order was Russian tanks in Berlin, right? So and half of p Germany being uh effectively controlled by the USSR. So

unless you're prepared to tolerate that, you are always going to get into a standoff with Russia. Uh and therefore if you don't expand NATO into Latvia, Lith Estonia, Lithuania, they just become um they get taken over by Russia in in some form. And and if we say, well, Russia's got nuclear weapons, we always just we gotta we gotta be careful, well, when does that end? At some point there is a tension that has to be addressed. even in the nuclear world. Isn't that inevitable, Eric?

Just a mathematician. I mean, I guess you're doing your whole I'm just a comedian thing now. No. We're free America. Well, you're free American. Yeah. You will soon be free Americans, my friends. I believe we are going to have to redefine the West to include a lot of Eastern Europe. And I w wish that we would do that to include Russia. It's a very weird thing to have to say.

Um Russia both is and is not the West. Correct. And I feel like we haven't spent enough time thinking about Russia, the differences between Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians. I have to say I think it's just really important that we recognize that the West probably made a bad line of division. Between Austria and Hungary where We sort of stop seeing ourselves at some at some point. How is Poland not us?

Well Poland increasingly is us. But Russia isn't. But Chopin was us and Tchaikovsky was us and Putin should not Putin. Pushkin should be us. Dostoevsky is certainly us. I mean i in many ways. my feeling pr pr particularly as a mathematical physics guy. Um it was a different mathematical physics culture, a different musical culture. You know, this is why, for example Uh Van Kleibern's chamber. winning of the competition in Russia was so powerful recognized that

In the style of play, the Russians were dominant. They were the experts. And I have to say that. You know, Russia is a barbell culture. It's the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. And we just don't understand it well enough. So I've spent a great deal of my life appreciating Eastern Europe, in awe of Eastern Europe. And I'm sad to say that in general, I don't think we give Eastern Europe its due. The two the two men who gave America its thermonuclear strength.

Budapest and Lvov, which is I'm now told is Lviv. But uh Stanislav Olam came from. the mathematical school of uh Bonoch at Hausdorff in the Scottish Cafe. And Edward Teller came from Laszlo Ratz's math classroom at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest. And these fine Americans who signed our death warrant.

We're Eastern Europeans. Yes, but neither of those places is in Russia, Eric. Then we're talking about the R. No, but I'm saying but I am saying that we are already over the line when Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were absorbed into NATO. we acknowledged that we have the wrong line. We said those are us. Uh-huh. If we say Ukraine is us, Ukraine's old name was Little Russia.

Th the key issue is that Russia is the strongest part of that universe. And we would have had to make an accommodation that said, we recognize your strength, we respect Your strength, your brilliance. And I think it was the I think it was the right thing to do. I th sorry, go ahead. And Constantine Jump in if I get this cor incorrect is that We don't see them as Western because of the way they treat the individual.

the individual in Russia is expendable. And we saw that by the way they treated their soldiers in World War Two, whereby as long as you know, if however men had to die, that's however many men had to die, but they had to move forward Dig a ch dig a trench, throw them in, cover the trench, we keep moving. America is and the US and the UK is, you know, we leave no man behind.

So I feel that that's a com the way that w we see Russia as a completely alien culture because of that. Because we see it as a cold, brutal way of looking at its own population. My God. I don't agree with this at all. I believe I'm sorry, let me No, no, dude. Go go ahead. I've never actually had this out, so it'd be Yeah and we're also all thinking out loud. This isn't something we came prepackaged to, right? Um I don't think that this is true.

I think that there's an issue of geography. And geography has a lot to do with how people die in war. So in general, for example, Austria is Alpine Germany. It's a very hilly uh place whereas a lot of Germany is much flatter. That is going to affect how tanks uh and other things roll through, how defensible something is. You have a piece of geography in Eastern Europe Which leads to incredible killing and movable borders.

So if you look at just a historical timeline of how, let's say, the Lithuanian-Polish Empire expanded and contracted and everything's moving around, it really doesn't get still until the nuclear weapons come in. So you have a situation in which these people have been subjected to very high levels of uncertainty and warfare because of a bad accident. So you have the same situation in some sense with the Jews during the nineteen thirties and forties. You had a fantastic percentage of the world's

uh Jewish population put to death. And one thing that could have happened is is that we would have found that we had adjusted to the concept of the expendable Jew. And the Jews m said, under no under no terms is this going to happen. We are gonna treat every Jewish life as precious. We will bargain a thousand people for the return of a single Jewish hostage. It in fact gets us into trouble. So my feeling about this is Poland experienced what

A fifth or a fourth of of its population dying during World War Two? Mm-hmm. I don't feel that way about pol poles at all. And and I it is true what you say, Francis, about expendability in terms of risk tolerances. No, I've never been to It's just different. People have a different level of Um of risk tolerance. And I believe that that is culture. But if you move a Russian to Bel Air or Beverly Hills,

They very quickly uh acclimatize to the idea that their safety matters. And my feeling about this is this is the luxury of a of a country with unbelievable borders, two beautiful oceans. a very long peaceful border with Canada and kind of a weird border with Mexico. thinking that there's something about American life that is precious. And it's an accident. Almost one hundred percent of who I am came from Russia and Ukraine and Moldova and Romania.

And Latvia. I I think we just have to get out of this mindset. I I think that those I think that they are us and they are a spicy, weirder, stranger version of us. But in the grand scheme of thing, it's not Africa, it's not East Asia, it's not the Pacific Islands. That's us. And we have I I wish that we were oriented differently. But

I I don't agree with that actually, but I there's also a lot to unpack elsewhere. I mean The the greatest objection I think to what you're saying is that Russia sees itself as being a separate civilization.

Russia sees itself as the descendant of the Eastern Christian civilization. Uh and there's a continuation of it, in fact. Um so the idea that they uh an alliance is possible, but I think what you're talking about, which is absorption. Um I I I don't think I don't think there's ever been any appetite for that. Well, I think that there was. I think that we may have blown that. I think there was a period of time.

When Russia, and if we're just gonna be honest because we both know both cultures, there was a desire to say, don't you see us as you? You know, the concept that somebody's really made it uh if they've made it in the West. Th the Russians were in in some ways, in my opinion, like many other civilizations, partially poo-pooing and partially desirous. um of being seen. And I believe that in part uh it was up to NATO and the West.

to not treat this as we won you lost ha ha, but instead to be gracious in victory and say this was not a defeat of Russia, this was a defeat of communism, which had settled over Russia. But but even once you've done that, uh look, Russia has a brief experiment with democracy in the nineties. Doesn't work out. And, you know, people will say, Oh, the evil Americans came and wrote that's not what happened.

That's not what happened at all. Sure there were some peop Western people who came and did business and profited. It was actually Russians that used the moment to steal as much wealth as they could. And after that finishes and all the chaos of that eight year period finishes, you've got a former KGB colonel who comes in, he's not elected, he's appointed by the previous president to make sure that his corruption doesn't get prosecuted.

And the Russian people were perfectly happy with Twenty six years. of a K G B kernel being in charge. Well it's Putin's all the way down. There's also this yearning for the strong man to stop chaos. Right, exactly. And it comes from You know, hundreds of year history. I don't know if I've ever talked about this on air, but it comes from the times of trouble really, but also before that, which is

The time Russians learned that instability is worse than anything else, literally. So you can have the worst tyrant ever, but that's still better than chaos. Wha what is the great quote? The great quote. Something like better thirty years of tyranny than a single night of anarchy. Well yes. Well because the you know, the times of trouble is a period of time when a very short time

due to in political instability and some other things that happen, like a it's like a third of the Russian population gets wiped out. You have foreign foreign fake ruler after foreign fake ruler after foreign fake ruler coming in and people go, Okay, we've got to have stability, right? But that's precisely my point is people with that mental attitude Um I d I might be right for their geography, might be wrong for their geography, but what it does is it creates a gro uh a a culture.

that I think is not compatible with the way that we do things. And y and the the evidence is there. I mean, the Polish people or the Ukrainian people, they didn't go down the same path as Russia. After after 1991, after 1989. Because Russia wants to be a power center. It doesn't want to be part of a thing where it's not the main thing. That's my argument.

I have I have access to both perspectives. I understand. I'm sorry? You're talking about a guy from Russia talking to a guy who's It only came from Umai. It's a little rich that we're having this conversation in Los Angeles. It's not really I don't think so at all. Tell me more. Well, because people within there are I have friends who are Westerners who live in Russia and love it there. Yeah. But they don't love it in the West.

Because their mindset is not is not suited to this culture, it's suited to that culture. But communism was entirely f foreign to this place. Well th that's not what I'm saying. I I mean like right now. Sure, I understand. What I'm trying to say is

I believe that we had opportunities that may no longer be present for a greater union after this battle was over, when there was uncertainty. I if instead of trying an isolated democracy with, you know, American Economists meddling in the post Cold War reconstruction, whatever.

If we tried something different, I think there was an opportunity. Something different how? Like what what should we have tried? I don't know. You know th there was a period of denazification after World War two. But that requires admission of defeat, which is the thing you've just said we shouldn't have done. You said we should have been you know.

No, what what did I say? That what was important to defeat was communism. Yeah. This is what we did with Germany, is that we made a point about defeating Nazism and we allowed the German people the Which was not entirely true, to say, oh yes, those Nazis were terrible. That wasn't us. Yes. Yes, but what happened in in Russia, you're right, is we didn't defeat communism as the ideology. We didn't say

You went through this terrible period of communism, all of these terrible communist leaders, they were bad, whatever. But you know, a lot of people in Russia don't think communism was a great period in Russian history. But my point is, in order to have gone through that, Russia would have felt even more humiliated, or some Russians would have felt even more humiliated.

than they ended up doing. And the thing that many Russians feel humiliated by is not that the evil American economists came and ruined everything. It's actually the fact I remember this as a kid in Russia being given humanitarian aid. And the and and the view is, well, you know, these these people they they gave us these crumbs off their table. How insulting. We will build ourselves up again and we will be strong and we will show you. I do think it was kind of insulting and

I don't know. Look, I I I think in part I'm I'm in awe of Russia. And I'm in awe of Russia in its brutality, it's a very important thing. It's horror. I'm in awe of its accomplishments, its achievements, its high culture. I I I think about Russia a lot. Most of my American friends do not. Mm-hmm. You know, just as a s side note, I'm very worried about my family losing its familiarity with its Eastern European heritage.

I make a point of uh my son and I go on Kvoss runs and we try to figure out who's got the best kvass from all of the Armenian stores that carry it and just talking a lot about the Soviet schools of mathematics under Gelfond and under physics under Landau and what these cultures were about and what what they meant. I care tremendously about Russia and I I feel connected to it. I don't feel that way with China.

I mean, a Chinese American can say, I I feel that, but I do feel a c a continuity from Austria to Hungary to Moscow.

I just think that's with all respect a very strong argument when we're talking about the thing that we're talking about. Because if you say we should have done something else, I don't know what Well I said I said I really think that we should have separated two things. We should have separated out the communist overlay and the Russian substrate. And we should have been celebrating not only Russia, to be blunt.

But you know, there's Ukrainian opera, there's uh the the incredible uh savoir faire and Joadviv of of the Georgians, the the proud histories of the Armenians and You know, w there's there's so much over there that we don't even know exists as Americans. And I really feel like I wish we treated these places with the respect that I have for them and all of their accomplishments, their literature, their music, the their science. I I just think it's a crime. E even in in mathematics we make up

two different names for the same theorem b depending upon whether we want to claim that it was done in the West or it was done in in Eastern Europe. But I look we don't need to labor it. I think we have a difference of opinion. I think that it's it's not an easy

sell, but it's not impossible. And I think you think it's more difficult. And I will have to say that you probably know far more about these two cultures than I do. But well I agree with your point about respecting different cultures and their many achievements.

I I am not put I the reason I'm pick I'm not picking on you specifically. I have heard this argument a lot about how the reason we've ended up in conflict with Russia is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West mistreated Russia. And I'm sure you can find plenty of individual examples of where that's absolutely the case.

But overall my contention is that Russia is a separate civilization that w doesn't want to be part of our civilization, doesn't see itself as part of our civilization, and the only viable friendly relationship with Russia is one of alliance. Right. Now, was that achievable? Maybe, but it would have been achievable at cost, in the same way that the alliance with the Soviet Union during World War Two was necessary for the West. and unavoidable if we were gonna win that war collectively.

But the cost was tremendous. The cost was the subjugation of all of Eastern Europe. And what I'm saying is, unless we took the position that we took, we would have ended up allowing Russia to overrun not just half of Ukraine as it now has, but all of Eastern Europe is the inevitable destination of that for very much for the very geographical reasons that you lay out. A while back I pushed myself in training because I'm a bit of a legend.

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uh what is clearly Western Europe and Russia. Um but it you know, it has always been the case to me that Ukraine people in the east of Ukraine, people in the west of Ukraine barely see themselves as members of the same country, the way the western crust of Turkey looks to Anatolia and says there be dragons, uh, you know, even though it's their country. So there's a great deal of intra country alienation. Um you know, where

Chernoffski looks to the Donbass and says, Wow, that's that's some freaky stuff. I I i particularly with Livov, which I think of as being a Polish city, even though it's in Ukraine. Look, it's y Eastern European Eastern Europe is complicated. And You have to think not in terms of boy i it it's really sad that Riga uh can't simply be part of the West. Um my feeling is is if we were in grouping Russia we would be getting a better deal for Latvia than

saying, okay, Latvia, you're with us and then um antagonizing Russia. But This is above my pay grade.

my caring about each of these places individually and caring about different places within you know, just t to tell a tiny little anecdote. I got my great aunt in Kiev to take me to Umain where my family was from. And she said, Do you want to see the park where your grandfather used to walk with me? I said, Sure, you know. And it was like Versailles. It was it was some park on a scale you couldn't even believe called Sofivka. Nobody in the West has ever heard of this place. That's ridiculous.

You know, th this should be a famous site throughout the world. And I don't know how that happened. So what I think we need to do is to recognize that we have an exaggerated blindness when it comes to Eastern Europe. And a lot more of us should try to speak, you know, a regional language and a lot more of us should care just the way the the Brits uh used to have their foreign service be very well informed about

all four f far flung uh provinces where they could see the world because they had an empire to take care of. I think The US should be honest that it's had an empire and it should carry a great deal more. to speak the local languages, to care about the traditions, to understand the difference between orthodoxy and other forms of Christianity, etcetera, etcetera? I I agree with you with the argument in that sense and look the arg the arguments you're making about Eastern Europe.

You know, there's a lot of people in Latin America who feel very bitter towards the United States because they would put forward the same you know, the same arguments. You know, you're Venezuelan, you're Mexican, you're Argentine, you're Mexican, you're Colombian, you're Mexican. And you and they would uh they would make that point, and in some ways it's probably merited. I think one of the challenges that America faced. is that the geographical isolation of your country

You don't have to engage with the world the same way the British do, because we're a tiny little island and we are in Europe, separated by a small b a small bank of water. So we We have to be more engaged than you do at the moment. Now that might change. Hmm. I mean, I might your tiny little island was like the Superpower. Once upon a time. It ain't anymore. Once upon a come on, man. But it ain't anymore. A hundred years ago. A hundred

I mean nineteen forty eight is within living memory and the Suez crisis. I just think this is not true, Francis. I think this is much more recent. Um you you have to understand I married into uh into an an Indian family. And so I go to your British clubs uh in Bombay that are now uh populated by Indians and and I look at the, you know, the club members who died during the Great War and it's all British names. You know, it I I feel connected.

The the arguments we get into in in Bombay are very often arguments about W were the Brits that bad? How m how much was positive? How much was negative? Of course you're not around to hear them. I'm sure if you were around people would be angrier. Um That's what we do. But I'm talking

the guy who mostly comes from Ukraine is talking to the guys from Russia and Venezuela as if you're British and I'm American. There is something a little rich about all this. You know, that that in general The UK was very knowledgeable about the world because Oxford and Cambridge and the Foreign Service and the Army and the British East India Company worked as a system.

Agreed. Yeah. And that system eventually gave way to the American system. I think one thing people don't understand or appreciate about James Bond is that James Bond was created. Because Felix, who works for the CIA, has to be a less than character. And and there's something about the British that is necessary to keep the world in order, right? It's a it's sort of a

It's a post empire vision for a powerful, strong, virile Britain. I gr look, what you were talking about, in my opinion, and as someone who lives in the UK You're talking about a Britain that sadly no longer exists, Eric. It doesn't exist. We are financially bankrupt, our army is tiny, our navy is practically non existent. Uh w when it comes to our political might, no one really listens to us anymore.

You could see that by the way Keir Starmer spoke about, you know, recognizing a Palestinian state. And to be honest you when it came to Netanyahu, he requ he r he regarded it as a mere as a mere irritant. I was the one. Invited. by one doctor David Tong to go to Trinity College in Cambridge. And I can't tell you how priceless

that day I spent with David was. You know, I went to the portico where he said Newton measured the speed of sound by clapping. And I saw the you know, the notes in the first edition of the Principia about what should be fixed in the second. And I was thinking, okay, this is, you know, this is Michael Latia a a and Isaac Newton. All of that stuff is still in the UK. That magic is still in the UK. I'm in the UK often enough to know that the UK's biggest problem

is that it's gotta get over this negative view of itself. We in the States have a much more positive view of the UK. And my feeling is, for God's sakes, man, get it together, slough it off. Pick yourself up and get back to being the UK. It is essential that you become the UK. We don't know exactly who we are if you're moping about.

So it's really important to just cut the crap. Look, I agree that we need a stronger view of ourselves. I think we need to stop apologizing. I think we need to stop seeing ourselves as the worst people in history.

I completely agree. What I'm dealing what I'm talking to you about, Eric, are just the facts of where the UK is at the moment. I'm not saying in in a you know, if we don't sort ourselves out in forty, fifty years' time we can't beat. Did didn't the US go through a Great Depression? We did. Okay, so we're in the Great Depression. Couldn't figure out our way out. You know, my feeling is is is that you need

To be stronger, and you need to tap into some extremely dangerous stuff. And I'm sorry about that, but part of the issue is liberal societies go illiberal in one of two ways. They go illiberal through hyper liberal illiberalism and hypo liberal illiberalism. So the US has been experimenting with hyperliberal illiberalism. Maybe we shouldn't have a border because all people are no no person is illegal. Maybe you can be any gender you want, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is not liberalism.

That's revolutionary thing. That's gonna get reversed by hypocrisy. liberal illiberalism, which is like the Donald Trump MAGA, let's blow up a boat uh fill which we hope is filled with drugs and ask questions later. You know, that kind of super masculine, we're gonna send the National Guard in, we're we're gonna send ICE in, we're gonna throw people out. And one way of looking at it is that it's a it's a turn towards fascism.

It's possible. But another way of looking at it is that it is necessary to counter the negative effects of a spate of hyper liberal illiberalism with hypo liberal illiberalism. That's a little confusing. I'm sorry. But one thing that we're doing is we are undoing some of the excesses with excesses that are currently in favor for this group.

And my feeling about this is the UK may have to experiment and and as a guy who is has a preference for the for not only a liberal state but I would probably err on the hyper liberal. Um, but I I don't like hyper liberal illiberalism. You're you may have to experiment with hypo liberal illiberalism to get rid

of the sense of weakness and not being able to defend yourselves and not knowing who you are. This question about what does it mean to be English, what does it mean to be British, enough? We all know what it means. One one of the things is that you guys are a human software producer. So if I think about, you know, Michael Atia, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, he'd come to Harvard, play I'd played ping pong with him. He was absolutely British.

But the name Atia indicates that his family is from Lebanon. Paul Duroc, the great English physicist, had a French last name. Whether Disraeli, you know. So many great people from the UK have clearly been from somewhere else. My feeling is you n you have to be more proud of the software that you build. The software that you build is second to none. It's the envy of the world. And y you've gotta stop this madness of hat of self hatred. So what is what is uh the British software?

My God. It's irreverent. It it loves oddities. It's uh extremely dry in its humor. It's incredibly bold and daring in its creativity. It mixes irreverence and reverence, like nobody's business. It's elitist as the day is long, it's elitist in multiple senses, both in the landed sense, which I don't love, but it's part of your system, and in the sense of being a meritocracy.

I love the fact that when you guys can't do things initially, you do them better. For example, you can't grow wine to save your life. So what did you do? You turned France into a a parlor game where you could guess the vintage and And the chateau and you know, you created French wine. You don't think of it that way, but you did. And then when they went to war with you and you couldn't get access to French wine, you created your own wine houses in Portugal where they didn't have any noble grapes.

So what did you do? You created crazy numbers of minor grapes as if they were noble grapes to create port. That's why they all have English, I mean, just one cool thing. Or the blues. I'm very proud of what we did with the blues up until um Skiffle, which was terrible. You guys came up with Skiffle and I think it's almost unlistenable. I mean it produced the Beatles, but let's not get into that. But it produced a lot of beyond the Beatles. Um the aftermath of Skiffle

was the elevation of the blues into this unbelievable virtuosic art form. We didn't know what we had. And you sent it back. That's what the the British invasion Is in large measure uh the UK telling us what we had and didn't appreciate it in ourselves. We had to send you Jimi Hendrix before we had understood what he was. I I love these stories. And you know, my feeling about it is.

You also have a bit of a barbell culture which we love. You know, the the the the guys who brawl and and at the football games and and the and the pubs. Are connected to the people who have, without question, the world's finest sensibilities about art, the greatest historians and masters of language. One of the things that I think is terrible is that you don't know your own culture often enough. I grew up i as a as a Jewish kid from a Ukrainian Jewish family in LA fetishizing Chaucer.

And you know, when I taught my kids drinking songs, um I went back to Ravenscroft in sixteen oh nine, you know, and and looking at this canon My daughter fell in love with Henry Purcell. You know, we we played Gilbert and Sullivan in the house and Flanders and Swan and all the or or you know, th th the great British American project.

T.S. Elliott is this marriage of the UK and Missouri, where I had Jim Watson in my office who discovered three-dimensional structure of DNA, and I I got a chance to play Francis Crick. A little video of him on my screen in my office and I I watched Jim tear up'cause it was clear that there was no person on Earth. that was ever going to be for him what Francis was. And you know, I got a chance to ask him, I said, you know, if I I read your book very carefully.

You shared an office with Jerry Donahue from Linus Pauling's lab at Caltech, and he told you that all of the textbooks were wrong, that the hydrogen atom was in the wrong place in the nucleotide. In the next page you've figured out the base pairing uh arrangement through hydrogen bonds. Didn't you really do the double helix and not you and Francis? And he looks at me and he says, Oh no.

He says, Absolutely, you're right. I did the inside of the double helix. But look at the beautiful sugar phosphate backbone twirling around the outside. That's 100% franc. So you look at it and you think, okay, the world's greatest scientific partnership ever. It's the US on the inside and the UK on the outside. I mean, it just doesn't

That for me. And it's I could go on and on and on about what I got from the UK that I could never have gotten from anything else. You're in charge of that legacy. And you're screwing it up. We want the confidence. We want We want you guys to be the great orators of our time. You know, how much do we how much do we li lean on Churchill? Again, a a complex product of America and the and and the UK. It's very important to us if we are going to be the major power that the UK play its role.

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But what I don't understand is how does How does the testing of nuclear weapons to demonstrate to us just how destructive they are address that problem? Well in multiple ways. First of all, uh there was a question about testing the nuclear weapon for the simple purpose of reminding us of what we're talking about to scare the crap out of us so we can get another eighty years of peace.

But the other thing is if we test them within our scientific programs, then we will have more lethal weapons because we will be more assured that we know how they behave. We've lost a lot of knowledge about how these weapons behave by letting that atrophy. So it really matters.

A great deal. Um Whether it's underground, whether it's above ground or underground nuclear testing, you know, the un the underground stuff doesn't have the same impact and the above ground stuff has terrible consequences.

I I'm not the person to design this and I don't think we're doing it in the smart way. I think what we're doing is is that we're all playing chicken again. And by the way, there's a lot of stuff that can happen beyond nuclear weapons. It doesn't need to have the same raw Terror, but if you can figure out how to send energy through the earth and have it refocus at some other point.

Um so that you could vaporize something at a a at a cell phone coordinate. Right now we don't know how to do that because the only thing that you can send through the earth would be like neutrinos, which are hard to catch on the other side, or um You know, gravity waves. You can't send photons through the earth particularly. Uh or electrons. But if you do further research in physics, you may be able to create all kinds of weapons that you can't possibly imagine. Including time weapons.

Which brings us nicely to AI. Because it currently feels that we're in an arms race when it comes to AI between America and China. Is that something that concerns you, Eric? The way that's not how I would phrase it. Okay. Well you push back on my

Inadequate phrasing. We're we're just playing with fire. And we don't know what fire we're playing with. So you can view it as America versus China, by the way. Don't sell Deep Mind in the UK short. Figured out Alpha Fold. Well done gentlemen. Um we don't really know what this game is is like. We don't know what it's about. We're playing it as if it was an old style game. But Deep Seek migrated very quickly.

And I've talked to some of the major players. I said, how are you going to keep secrets from China? They said we can't. So essentially, we can't keep secrets from China. Therefore, what we have, they will have, and vice versa. Maybe. Or maybe the issue is the bottleneck is the chip.

Or maybe somebody will figure out something about chip architecture where it it's not as essential to use this scheme and maybe the energy needs are gonna be dwarf anything, or maybe the energy needs are suddenly gonna collapse. Where where's the beginning? We're at the infancy of something that is astounding. And we already know how astounding it is. And it it can only be this astounding or more.

And we're acting as if it's not that big of a deal because it hasn't changed our lives that much yet. That's one reason. The other reason we're acting in this way is that human beings have not come up with a way of preventing people from playing with fire. We can't. It it just isn't gonna happen, right? Even if the entire West, let's say, agreed not to do this.

Even if the entire world agreed not to do this, someone somewhere would still do it.'Cause the advantage of being the one that's doing it is so so tremendous, right? So There's actually nothing we can do to stop people playing with this fire, right? Is that fair? Well the test ban treaty, if I ha I have this feeling that if we were talking in the fifties You would have said that the test ban treaty was impossible because you can't stop people from playing with fire.

Explain to us what the test ban treaty is. We agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons among the major players. That hasn't prevented the existence of nuclear weapons or their continued development, right? It has certainly slowed down. It's antiquated the weapons a great deal. It stopped the atmospheric testing that caused radioactive uh decay products to to blow in the wind. We had things like what is it, Operation Starfish, where we exploded a

atmosphere uh weapon in space and knocked out the grid in Hawaii. Yeah, we we we we we retarded ourselves a great deal. And then we signed the bioweapons conventions uh in the in the seventies, which had a big effect on how we do research.

We have scared ourselves before into some kind of cooperation that does something. But isn't the challenge with that and I think it's a very good example, but nuclear weapons are mainly Used for one thing and one thing only. AI is multi-purpose. Well, first of all, Russia doesn't agree with you. Russia used nuclear weapons for engineering purposes. They would use them to dig holes or put out fires or do all sorts of crazy things. So even that is not quite true. And then with respect to AI.

Things don't always spread just because they're known. I keep giving this example. Like if I ask people, do you know the formula for black powder? No. Do you? No. Seventy-five percent saltpeter, ten percent sulfur, fifteen percent charcoal. Okay, now everybody at home knows, but they'll forget it. We in general don't see people taking advantage of these huge leverage up.

Right now we're in some race because we don't know what we're racing for. We just know that if the other guy had something that we didn't have, that that feels vulnerable. But the problem is the other guy may become the AI itself. So the US and China may get into a race to get this thing and then the thing says, You dear sweet children. Um Nobody even knows what we're talking about. Right. So

Doesn't that mean that that's even more dangerous? Because with nuclear weapons, we know what we're talking about. Okay. We've been at death's door. I mean, we am I right that we were just gentlemen at the cave of the apocalypse together? In Greece. In Greece. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So my feeling is we've been thinking about the apocalypse for a long time, and we should have been thinking about the apocalypse every week since nineteen fifty two fifty.

Suddenly we're back to thinking about it. My friend Peter Thiel is giving lectures about the Antichrist. People are talking about Armageddon, the AI apocalypse. We need to be thinking about this. I don't know how we got out of thinking about this. Now that we're thinking about it again, it's what I said at the art conference. It's a race, it's a sprint to the finish. Right now.

The world has woken up. Holy crap. The World War Two order is crashing as we speak. The people around J. D. Vance, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin have no patience for this anymore. Nobody's maintaining it. Okay. So the the question is, what are we doing? And i this is so clear to me, I can't understand why everyone isn't animated by it. And I could pretend that I'm crazy and that you all are sane, but I'm pretty sure it's the reverse.

No, I really think that. I really think I'm somehow not affected by some sort of universal mind virus, and I can't figure out why. So the argument is this is the time. To run like hell. This this has been in our future. for forever. And we're here. And right now the thing to do is to try to figure out how to spread out. And run as many experiments as we can and recognize that it's not just that Eastern Europe is going to get sacrificed to Russia.

Planets are gonna die because the technology is just too powerful. We should be honest where we are. And if we're honest, right now, the thing to do is to colonize as many planets as we can find in the heavens. And that seems crazy to people, but I just had a conversation on my way over with a person who doesn't exist.

Who told me all sorts of points that I made were good, others were weak. She knows all about every aspect of the world. If I tell her ask her to tell me a doctor joke, I can say, tell it to me in Urdu, tell it to me in Yiddish, tell it to me in Russian. We are already living science fiction. Why can we not understand that this is the time to lead a science fiction life about?

getting out of the solar system and finding the largest number of planets and spreading out and running the largest number of experiments we can. Everything that has one planet and us trying to make sure nothing goes wrong here Is completely enervating. But somehow none of you are energized as I am. And I don't know why. to say we are Ferdinand and Isabella. It is time to find Columbus and try to reach something new, whether it's a new route to India or whether it's new land entirely.

It's time to do something new. The last major landmass that was found on Earth was found off the north coast of Siberia about a hundred years ago. We've gone out of the habit of finding new worlds.

And my feeling about this is that this should be energizing us. We have a brief period to sprint. We should create new institutions, new science. We should take on Einstein and defeat him. We should get excited. We should you know dance harder, sing longer

do more partial differential equations in into the night and try to realize that we're on the eve of destruction and take a Jewish attitude, which is survival at all costs. Something will work out, something will provide. If we are just If we just believe and work hard enough and risk everything. Our history tells us that it's always possible to survive. And that's what, you know.

really as a Jew what I want to bring to a diverse audience of uh Muslims, Christians, Hindus, a atheists, Buddhists I don't care. There's something about the Jewish will to survive. That is not infecting planet Earth. I just see everybody basically on the couch with their remote solving minor problems. And it it's time to recognize, no, no, no. This is the end. This is this is the apocalypse.

This is the phase transition, and it's it's been clear as day since 52-53. And we're just now waking up to it with AI for reasons that are completely unclear. That's always been the problem, Francis. It's always been the problem. Eric, it's been a fantastic conversation, as always.

It feels a bit weird saying this considering what we've all what we've been talking about over the previous an hour hour and a s hour or so. Uh so what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? That a lot of our problems uh are mediated by our phones. That the phone is not an appliance. It's a brain scrambling device. in general, we're making things out to be much harder.

than they're meant to be. We have grand challenges. We have the ability to fall in love, form families, drive each other crazy, and not screw up this whole beautiful experiment. And my feeling about it is that we've decided somehow that there's something wrong with us. And I think that it's we're just making things out to be much more difficult than they are. There are glorious, wonderful challenges. There are places to visit that are still remarkably undiscovered uh on earth.

And we're going to wake up hopefully in the next couple of years. to the idea that with the machine's help we can solve all sorts of problems that we thought were intractable. And so I think the thing that we're not talking enough about is that this is the sprint to the finish and it can be glorious. Even though it's incredibly dangerous. And that if we just have a completely different attitude, which is that we are the original badasses.

That changed everything in such a short period of time. We get back to being those people who did so much. Instead of visiting the monuments built by our ancestors, I think we could imagine that unlike this period of stability and safety for the last eighty years, this could be a period of incredible chaos, great peril, lots of fear. But unparalleled fun, excitement, wonder, glory,

We don't even feel comfortable with the word glory. We can say Slava Uvr Ukraina, but we can't say Glory to us. And I think it should just be a glorious age filled with hope and I think we can get out of here and I I I love the fact that I'm back on the show and I can end on a positive note like that. So thank you both. Well, thank you, as always, Eric. And make sure to join us over on Substat where you get to ask Eric your questions and we get to carry on the conversation.

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