TRIGGERnometry - Is This The End of Humanity？ - Eric Weinstein

00:00:00.000 Before November of 1952, with the test known as Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb,

00:00:07.000 you know, there's like before Christ and after Christ, and they're just very different.

00:00:10.000 Suddenly, we were like gods, and that is the BCAD of human history.

00:00:15.000 It's much more important than the birth of Christ.

00:00:18.000 What is the difference between the nuclear weapon as it originally was

00:00:22.000 and the second generation, the hydrogen bomb, et cetera?

00:00:25.000 Well, there was no point to duck and cover.

00:00:28.000 I mean, you weren't going to survive this thing.

00:00:31.000 My guess is that one or two devices means that Los Angeles is no more.

00:00:37.000 No one is interested in the idea that the solar system is an escape room

00:00:40.000 and that Einstein is our jailer.

00:00:42.000 We've got to get past Einstein before the thing goes on.

00:00:45.000 We're on the eve of destruction and take a Jewish attitude, which is survival at all costs. 0.93

00:00:50.000 This is the end. This is the apocalypse.

00:00:58.000 Eric?

00:01:00.000 Every family tree holds extraordinary stories, especially those of the women who shaped who we are.

00:01:07.000 In honor of International Women's Month, Ancestry invites you to shine a light on their legacy.

00:01:12.000 Until March 10th, enjoy free access to over 4 billion family history records

00:01:17.000 and discover where they lived, the journeys they took, and the legacy they left behind.

00:01:22.000 Start with just a name or place and let our intuitive tools guide you.

00:01:26.000 Visit Ancestry.ca to start today.

00:01:28.000 No credit card required. Terms apply.

00:01:31.000 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:01:37.000 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:01:42.000 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:01:46.000 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here.

00:01:50.000 The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:01:53.000 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:01:57.000 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:02:01.000 Welcome back to Shikinomche. 0.99

00:02:02.000 Thanks, guys. Great to be here.

00:02:04.000 It's great to have you back on.

00:02:05.000 We've had three previous conversations, all of them extremely popular with our audience.

00:02:10.000 People loved it.

00:02:11.000 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.

00:02:16.000 We really shouldn't talk about that.

00:02:18.000 We should talk about some of the conversations.

00:02:21.000 Okay, some of the conversations.

00:02:22.000 One of the great conversations we've had in private is actually about geopolitics and particularly how all of that is informed by the invention of first nuclear weapons and then thermonuclear weapons.

00:02:36.000 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 has just announced that it wants to do nuclear testing, again, on par with other countries is the language.

00:02:48.000 We don't know the detail of that.

00:02:50.000 But this seems to be a thing that we've talked about in the past.

00:02:53.000 So just take us through it.

00:02:55.000 Take it away, Professor.

00:02:56.000 Well, it's awfully nice to see the two of you.

00:02:59.000 And on to nuclear weapons.

00:03:01.000 I've been talking about this for a while.

00:03:03.000 Somehow there was a crazy idea at the end of the Cold War.

00:03:06.000 The Berlin Wall fell.

00:03:08.000 Nukes became a non-issue, which was never true.

00:03:11.000 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.

00:03:21.000 And this issue about fictionalizing nukes and what they mean and how to think about them so that we can live our lives.

00:03:29.000 I mean, right now we're looking out at Los Angeles and there exists websites that will allow you to simulate the effect of any of the tests with any epicenter you like chosen at any point here.

00:03:42.000 And whether or not you're going to have gamma radiation, as you will, from the thermonuclear weapons or cesium fission weapons or dirty bombs or who knows what.

00:03:52.000 All of our cities, other than two in Japan, have been untested as to how they'll perform under these circumstances.

00:04:00.000 So it's not clear that it even makes sense to build cities.

00:04:03.000 But because no one's used a nuclear weapon in anger since 1945, we don't know whether this is a silly thing to be worried about or the most important thing to be worried about.

00:04:15.000 So for years I've been calling for a return to rare above-ground nuclear tests, which I think were ended by the Test Ban Treaty of, what is it, 62?

00:04:25.000 So it's been over 60 years since we've had above-ground nuclear testing.

00:04:31.000 And as a result, we've just forgotten that the power of the strong force and the electromagnetic force together is.

00:04:40.000 It's just astounding.

00:04:42.000 And just, if I can say from a physics perspective, we would call this SU-3 cross U-1 gauge theory.

00:04:49.000 It's just a technical thing that leads to engineering abilities that are sort of unthinkable.

00:04:58.000 I mean, I don't know how to put it.

00:05:00.000 I don't think we can really think through the effect of thermonuclear weapons on urban centers.

00:05:06.000 And the fact that this comes from physics and comes from science.

00:05:10.000 Even my colleagues in physics are completely disconnected from their Manhattan Project colleagues and that ethos.

00:05:17.000 It was so long in the past that it's sort of like modern Greeks thinking about Ulysses.

00:05:23.000 There's just no direct connection.

00:05:25.000 It's some sort of mythological thing.

00:05:28.000 So, anyway, I've been talking about this nonstop.

00:05:31.000 And until I'm blue in the face, many people are bored of hearing it from me.

00:05:36.000 But it was always going to be the main issue.

00:05:39.000 So, first of all, you said a lot of things that I want to pick up on.

00:05:42.000 But the first one is you said there's no peace dividend.

00:05:45.000 Is that really true, Eric?

00:05:46.000 I mean, we had the historian Dominic Sambricon, one of the rest of history guys.

00:05:51.000 We had a great – it's one of our most popular conversations.

00:05:54.000 And one of the things we talked about is the reason there has not been another world war is because of nuclear weapons.

00:06:02.000 They are sufficient deterrent for major powers to get direct conflict between them.

00:06:09.000 Is that not true?

00:06:10.000 It's worked for 80 years, exactly as you say.

00:06:14.000 And 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.

00:06:24.000 So, yes, they make the world much safer in the short run.

00:06:30.000 Much safer than it's ever been.

00:06:32.000 So, if you like to think in short-term thinking, nuclear weapons are the best thing that ever happened to humanity.

00:06:39.000 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.

00:06:48.000 But beyond that, I mean, Russia is developing what they call a tsunami bomb, which is basically a giant nuclear torpedo. 0.57

00:06:54.000 It explodes in the water outside Los Angeles and, you know, the entire western seaboard basically gets swept off the map.

00:07:01.000 Same on the eastern side, eastern seaboard.

00:07:04.000 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?

00:07:16.000 You're more likely to not have a world war if everyone is convinced of the calculus and everyone remains rational.

00:07:23.000 But, you know, this is sort of the whole idea behind playing chicken.

00:07:28.000 People always fancy themselves excellent chicken players.

00:07:31.000 And so, you know, it's like that scene in Rebel Without a Cause where you have two people who think that they can outwit the other one as to what level of risk they can handle.

00:07:45.000 I don't view the current crop of leaders as particularly skilled.

00:07:51.000 I mean, I would say that Putin would be the most skilled of the current crop of leaders in Xi.

00:07:57.000 But they're not world-class talents in this department, I don't think.

00:08:02.000 And nobody's used these weapons in so long.

00:08:05.000 They're not even positive whether they'll work.

00:08:07.000 And so the fear of God also has to be reinstilled in the population through, let's say, through music.

00:08:14.000 I mean, there was a song called The Eve of Destruction that you hear listeners can find or, you know, On the Beach or Dr. Strange Love.

00:08:23.000 And all of these stories we've stopped telling so that we no longer think of these things as immediate.

00:08:31.000 So I don't think it works as well as you think it does.

00:08:34.000 But if you're satisfied with that short-term cessation of hostilities because everyone's so terrified of the consequence, absolutely.

00:08:42.000 That's the major positive externality of Armageddon and the apocalypse is that it keeps the peace very well in the short term.

00:08:51.000 Well, my thinking is you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, right?

00:08:56.000 And you know that, which is, I think, one of the reasons you're saying we should be testing nuclear weapons.

00:09:00.000 Is your rationale that we should be doing this to remind people of just how dangerous this is?

00:09:04.000 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.

00:09:22.000 And so I'm always interested when I see people who are like, you've got a tough guy and you've got a guy who's actually been in special forces at the same table.

00:09:32.000 And the guy who talks tough will go on at great length and the guy who's actually seen some stuff will just remain silent.

00:09:39.000 It's not even worth having the conversation.

00:09:41.000 And my feeling is that there are too many people in the middle of a masculinity crisis who are currently at the head of world government.

00:09:49.000 Eric, when we talk about nuclear weapons, what we sometimes fail to acknowledge is there's an element of luck to this piece because we came quite close, didn't we, in the Cuban Missile Crisis to everything going disastrously awry.

00:10:03.000 Sure. Even in the early 80s with Stanislav Petrov, I believe, who more or less said, I think the Americans probably aren't actually attacking us. I'm going to hold off and launching.

00:10:15.000 Yeah, it's come several times. It's come down to sheer good luck. And I just don't want to, I don't feel like playing Russian American roulette forever. I mean, it just, I guess even the questions are offensive.

00:10:34.000 Well, why are we pretending that this is, it's not safe. I mean, to me, the exciting thing is if we were smart, we would be taking the supposed peace time dividend, and we'd be plowing it into the idea that the solar system is an escape room.

00:10:52.000 It's 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.

00:11:02.000 Hmm. 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.

00:11:12.000 That's what I really do. And no one's interested. Like no one, no government is interested. There's no, there's no Institute. There's no fund. There's nothing you can apply for.

00:11:25.000 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 as clear as day to me.

00:11:36.000 I think the thing is, to put it mildly, incredibly big picture for most people, including myself. I think the thing that most people and most governments have been almost lulled into a false sense of security around nuclear weapons because we just assume that the other person won't use them.

00:11:55.000 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 their own words, they want Israel wiped off the map.

00:12:10.000 Isn't, isn't that the most dangerous outcome if someone like Iran has a nuclear weapon as opposed to Russia or anything or any other country? 0.93

00:12:19.000 I mean, India and Pakistan, you know, you have two countries that are, the difference between Urdu and Hindi is nil. These people are exactly the same culturally, you know, one more Hindu, one more Muslim.

00:12:34.000 However, you know, that is an incredibly dangerous flashpoint because it's dependent upon skill and you have the government versus the army versus the ISI in Pakistan.

00:12:46.000 You know, if I think about the Taiwan Strait and China and its calculation versus the US, that's incredibly dangerous.

00:12:53.000 It's a half proxy war between Russia and Ukraine, with Ukraine representing NATO and the US.

00:12:59.000 And we've humiliated Putin in particular, in my opinion, by the 2004 ascension into Article 5 status of the three FSU countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Latvia.

00:13:12.000 Estonia.

00:13:13.000 Sorry.

00:13:14.000 Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania.

00:13:15.000 Yes, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania.

00:13:17.000 Sorry.

00:13:18.000 And the 1999 provocation of Poland, which I think was entirely defensible as a Warsaw Pact entry into Article 5 status.

00:13:28.000 I don't know what we're doing.

00:13:30.000 I think we seem insane.

00:13:32.000 I just, let me put it on the table.

00:13:35.000 I don't think anybody's thinking rationally.

00:13:37.000 Why do you say that?

00:13:38.000 Because I think I'm thinking rationally.

00:13:40.000 I think I can defend everything that I'm saying.

00:13:43.000 And I think no one can handle it because nobody actually is motivated to go behind.

00:13:47.000 If general relativity holds, gentlemen, we're in real trouble.

00:13:51.000 It's very hard.

00:13:53.000 Einstein is the problem.

00:13:55.000 What do you mean by that, Eric?

00:13:57.000 We're four light years away from the nearest star.

00:14:00.000 So if you think about habitable planetary surfaces, if you could grant science fiction powers to Elon and you could terraform the moon and Mars, we'd have three spheres that we could get to sort of by chemical rockets.

00:14:17.000 That is not enough diversification for humanity.

00:14:20.000 It's nowhere close.

00:14:22.000 So then you have this issue, okay, where do we get the supply of spheres?

00:14:26.000 The issue is atmosphere.

00:14:28.000 We're all connected by the same atmosphere.

00:14:30.000 So you saw that with like Chernobyl.

00:14:32.000 The cloud doesn't stay in Ukraine.

00:14:35.000 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.

00:14:46.000 And you can sort of do that with something called time dilation.

00:14:50.000 But if you were to tour a round trip and traveling just under the speed of light, by taking a short jump to the nearest star and back, you'd lose eight years relative to your relatives.

00:15:00.000 That's not practical.

00:15:01.000 It's not going to work.

00:15:02.000 You can't really traverse the cosmos if general relativity is in force.

00:15:06.000 So we know general relativity isn't the last word.

00:15:09.000 We know Einstein isn't the final sage.

00:15:11.000 And for some reason, because his theory hasn't budged for over 100 years, basically 110, we're demotivated.

00:15:21.000 We just have decided that we live in space-time, which is totally untrue.

00:15:24.000 We don't live in space-time.

00:15:25.000 Space-time is a model of where we live.

00:15:28.000 And in that model, there's no out.

00:15:31.000 We can prove that you can't go faster than the speed of light.

00:15:35.000 And as a result, we're trapped here.

00:15:39.000 But this is like the greatest puzzle ever.

00:15:42.000 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.

00:15:53.000 And if we can crack this one problem, we can split up.

00:15:56.000 You can have a planet, you can have a planet.

00:15:58.000 It's the Oprah principle of the cosmos. 1.00

00:16:00.000 And then we don't all have to have the same fate if one planet goes stupid. 1.00

00:16:04.000 And most of them will go stupid. 1.00

00:16:07.000 If you own gold and it's just sitting there not earning anything, then you need to hear this. 1.00

00:16:12.000 What you're about to hear is not a normal gold advert.

00:16:14.000 Today's sponsor is Monetary Metals.

00:16:16.000 And what they're doing is rethinking how gold is used.

00:16:19.000 Traditionally, gold ownership is passive.

00:16:22.000 You buy gold, store it, and hope it preserves value over time.

00:16:25.000 While it sits there, it doesn't do anything and often you're paying storage or insurance fees just to hold it.

00:16:31.000 Monetary Metals approaches gold differently.

00:16:34.000 They allow gold owners to earn a yield on their gold paid in gold.

00:16:38.000 Not in dollars or pounds, but in physical gold ounces.

00:16:41.000 The way this works is straightforward.

00:16:43.000 Monetary Metals connects gold owners with real productive businesses like refiners and jewelers that need gold to operate their businesses.

00:16:50.000 Those businesses lease the gold and pay a yield back to the gold owner in gold.

00:16:55.000 That means your gold isn't just sitting idle.

00:16:57.000 It's being put to productive use and over time, you're earning more ounces of gold.

00:17:02.000 You can earn up to 4% annual yield paid in gold, allowing your holdings to compound in ounces rather than currency.

00:17:09.000 While your gold is earning yield, there are no storage or insurance fees charged and you remain in control.

00:17:15.000 You decide how much of your gold you want to deploy into lease opportunities and how much you want to keep undeployed.

00:17:21.000 You can open an account with as little as 10 ounces of gold and start earning yield straight away.

00:17:26.000 In an environment where paper currencies lose purchasing power over time, earning a yield in gold is a way of growing real wealth and real terms.

00:17:34.000 To learn more, visit monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry or click the link in the description of this episode and see how you can earn up to 4% yield on gold with monetary metals and put your gold to work.

00:17:46.000 That site again is monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry.

00:17:50.000 In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour.

00:17:59.000 Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology.

00:18:11.000 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.

00:18:33.000 And by real world, I think things are happening in the here and now.

00:18:36.300 More short term, I guess.

00:18:37.300 I guess. So the point is, so to then propose these things, whereas 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.

00:18:50.300 We've got a huge deficit in the US.

00:18:52.300 Your allocation is zero.

00:18:53.300 And by the way, let's stop talking about normal people. Normal people just don't matter.

00:18:57.300 The goal is to save normal people.

00:19:00.300 And to save normal people, you need extraordinary people.

00:19:03.300 You see, who endangered these normal people?

00:19:06.300 It was two guys, Stanislav Ulam and Edward Teller.

00:19:09.300 And these two guys came up with a piece of geometry.

00:19:12.300 Do you know how the thermonuclear weapon works?

00:19:14.300 No.

00:19:15.300 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.

00:19:25.300 Like I mentioned, the tsunami bomb, et cetera.

00:19:28.300 Okay.

00:19:29.300 So the first thing is, why didn't we have these crazy weapons during the Civil War?

00:19:32.300 The Civil War was very close to World War II in human history.

00:19:36.300 And if you look at one, it's clearly fought in antiquity, and then suddenly you've got jet planes and you can have the ability to drop off.

00:19:43.300 The key issue is that we didn't understand that there was something called the neutron.

00:19:47.300 We knew about protons and electrons before we knew that there were neutrons.

00:19:51.300 In 1911, I think, Ernest Rutherford said, maybe there's a neutral version of the proton inside of the atom.

00:19:57.300 And that was the most dangerous idea, in my opinion, any human ever had.

00:20:02.300 Just that one idea.

00:20:03.300 Maybe there's a neutral version of the proton.

00:20:05.300 Why is that?

00:20:06.300 Because if you send a proton as a bullet into a very large atomic nucleus, that's a lot of protons stuck together.

00:20:14.300 So as magnets, they're all trying to run away from each other.

00:20:18.300 But there's some extra force called the strong force that is even crazier than the super strong force of electromagnetism.

00:20:25.300 But if you send this proton in, as it gets closer and closer, it gets repelled because everything is charged like with light.

00:20:33.300 But what if you have something that doesn't feel that charged, but it's just like a proton?

00:20:37.300 That's like a bullet that then taps this thing.

00:20:40.300 And this thing is already straining to stay together under the strong force.

00:20:44.300 So it blows apart.

00:20:46.300 And what does it do?

00:20:47.300 It releases more bullets, these neutrons.

00:20:49.300 And that's what a chain reaction is.

00:20:51.300 It's bullets creating bullets, creating bullets, tapping at these.

00:20:55.300 Think about a bunch of magnets velcroed together so that they stay together and don't repel.

00:21:01.300 And then suddenly when you tap them, the velcro comes apart because it's just at that critical.

00:21:06.300 So that would be called a subcritical mass of heavy elements like uranium.

00:21:11.300 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.

00:21:20.300 That's what causes the reaction.

00:21:22.300 So what you do is you take a subcritical mass of radioactive material and you wrap it in a sphere of chemical explosives.

00:21:31.300 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.

00:21:39.300 That's the first stage.

00:21:40.300 And that's fission.

00:21:41.300 And that's what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and at Trinity.

00:21:45.300 Now, why did it take seven years to come up with thermonuclear weapons?

00:21:52.300 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.

00:22:01.300 And for that, you need a detonator that is already the atomic weapon of madness from 1945.

00:22:09.300 And now you're going to just use that as the detonator.

00:22:12.300 So what you do is you create sort of like a lipstick-like tube.

00:22:16.300 And you put the detonator fission weapon in the top part of the tube.

00:22:23.300 And what Stanislav Ulam and Edward Telper figured out was that you could bounce the consequences of that weapon on some geometric pattern

00:22:33.300 and have the reflected waves come down to a rod and compress hydrogen into helium in the second stage.

00:22:41.300 And the key problem there, as I understand it, is that because you're using an atomic bomb as a detonator,

00:22:47.300 the top part's going to blow apart the tertiary stage, and therefore it won't work.

00:22:54.300 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.

00:23:03.300 And so my understanding is that what you do is that you take the light that comes off of the initial explosion

00:23:08.300 and you focus it with geometry to concentrate it in the tube to create the tertiary stage.

00:23:14.300 So chemical is the primary. Subcritical to critical is the secondary.

00:23:19.300 Reflected light to compress hydrogen into helium is the tertiary.

00:23:23.300 And that thing was Ivy Mike in November of 1952.

00:23:27.300 And that is the BCAD, my friends, of science.

00:23:31.300 What does that mean, BCAD?

00:23:32.300 You know, there's like before Christ and after Christ, and they're just very different.

00:23:36.300 Before November of 1952, with the test known as Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb,

00:23:42.300 and the publication in April of 1953, less than six months later, with the double helix giving the structure of DNA,

00:23:50.300 we didn't have the power of the twin nuclei, the nucleus of the atom and the nucleus of the cell.

00:23:55.300 And then after that, suddenly, we were like gods. And that is the BCAD of human history.

00:24:02.300 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.

00:24:08.300 And what is the difference between the nuclear weapon as it originally was, the detonator, and the second generation, the hydrogen bomb, etc.?

00:24:18.300 Well, there was no point to duck and cover. I mean, you weren't going to survive this thing.

00:24:24.300 It was just at a different scale. I mean, you're talking about orders of magnitude, bigger bombs than what already caused the emperor to surrender in Japan.

00:24:36.300 We're just talking inconceivable levels of destruction.

00:24:40.300 Well, let's conceive it.

00:24:43.300 My guess is that one or two devices means that Los Angeles is no more.

00:24:49.300 By no more, you mean completely flattened and raised to the ground?

00:24:53.300 Yeah. I mean, the Soviets, of course, were slightly late to the game. Sakharov, the father of that bomb. 0.93

00:25:02.300 And, of course, they had to go big or go home. So they did this Tsar bomb. And the Tsar bomb, it's in Novoa Zemlya? 0.72

00:25:10.300 Novoa Zemlya, yeah. New land. New land. New land, yeah.

00:25:16.300 And this was at a scale that was inconceivable. I wish I had. The American comparable device was this thing called Castle Bravo, which was way bigger than we had expected.

00:25:27.300 We didn't know how well we could control it. But if I've played on the simulators, all of these concentrated cities are just instantly uninhabitable.

00:25:39.300 And what are the long-term effects of these types of weapons? Does it mean that the land that they have been detonated on will never be able to bear fruit, et cetera?

00:25:51.300 Well, my understanding is that the hydrogen ones are actually cleaner. You really have gamma radiation in the form of, like, photons that are very hard to guard against.

00:26:00.300 And the other ones have these radioactive isotopes that linger on them for forever. But I've never really cared that much about the post-war scenarios.

00:26:12.300 My feeling is that once you get going, everything that you know about life as we've led it is gone.

00:26:19.300 So, 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 human life on Earth, wouldn't it?

00:26:34.300 Even if it didn't. You're talking about setting back everything that we know of as modern life to levels that, 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.

00:26:55.300 It's too much. And by the way, there's a, you know, there's a comparable version of this for pandemic.

00:27:04.300 You know, and 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.

00:27:13.300 I guess the question is, if you have weapons of that magnitude, does not therefore instill a certain humility in the people wielding them?

00:27:24.300 For instance, you look at Putin. Glad you find this question's funny. But, you know, unless you are completely insane, you wouldn't be tempted to push that button because you know that the moment you launch that weapon, not only have you ensured the destruction of millions of people, you've also ensured your own destruction. 0.51

00:27:47.300 What conversation are we even having? These people are nuts, Francis. 1.00

00:27:52.300 Which people? 1.00

00:27:53.300 Oh, Sinwar was clearly crazy.

00:27:55.300 Yep. 0.96

00:27:56.300 Khomeini.

00:27:57.300 Yep.

00:27:58.300 Putin is absolutely up for brinksmanship.

00:28:02.300 Xi, I think, thinks he can calculate this to a fairly well.

00:28:06.300 Donald Trump is famous for promoting himself as a wild card, my friends, in order to confuse his negotiating partners.

00:28:15.300 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 war.

00:28:25.300 I don't see this level of skill.

00:28:27.300 Well, hold on a second. I mean, if you look at Russia-Ukraine, 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.

00:28:36.300 I think it's an abomination from Putin.

00:28:38.300 I agree.

00:28:39.300 And I know you do, but I also think, and we should explore this, actually, before we get into the nuclear dimension, because the one argument I've never heard anyone who thinks that the West provoked Russia is ever addressed is the argument that I always make on this,

00:28:52.300 which is ultimately, every time Russia is strong, it seeks to cushion itself westwards, create a bigger cushion between Moscow and its western frontier.

00:29:03.300 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 of the Soviet Union.

00:29:14.300 Now, some people will see that as a price worth paying, others not, but ultimately, my point is, you're going to find yourself in a confrontation with Russia at some point, unless you have no red lines whatsoever.

00:29:25.300 And Putin is on record as saying, America is evil, because what they did is they upset the post-World War II order.

00:29:33.300 They reneged on the agreement of the post-World War II order.

00:29:36.300 Well, the post-World War II order was Russian tanks in Berlin, right?

00:29:40.300 So, and half of Germany being effectively controlled by the USSR.

00:29:45.300 So, unless you're prepared to tolerate that, you are always going to get into a standoff with Russia.

00:29:51.300 And therefore, if you don't expand NATO into Estonia, Lithuania, they just become, they get taken over by Russia in some form.

00:30:02.300 And if we say, well, Russia's got nuclear weapons, we always just, we gotta, we gotta be careful. 0.79

00:30:08.300 Well, when does that end?

00:30:10.300 At some point, there is a tension that has to be addressed, even in the nuclear world.

00:30:16.300 Isn't that inevitable, Eric?

00:30:18.300 I'm just a mathematician.

00:30:19.300 I mean, I guess...

00:30:21.300 You're doing your whole, I'm just a comedian thing now.

00:30:23.300 No.

00:30:24.300 We're free America, well, you're free American.

00:30:26.300 Yeah.

00:30:27.300 We'll soon be free Americans, my friends.

00:30:29.300 I believe we are going to have to redefine the West to include a lot of Eastern Europe.

00:30:36.300 And I wish that we would do that to include Russia.

00:30:39.300 It's a very weird thing to have to say.

00:30:44.300 Russia both is and is not the West. 0.57

00:30:46.300 Correct.

00:30:47.300 I feel like we haven't spent enough time thinking about Russia, the differences between Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians.

00:30:56.300 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 stopped seeing ourselves at some point.

00:31:12.300 How is Poland, not us? 0.94

00:31:15.300 Well, Poland increasingly is us.

00:31:18.300 But Russia isn't.

00:31:19.300 But Chopin was us, and Tchaikovsky was us, and Putin should...

00:31:22.300 Maybe not Putin.

00:31:23.300 Pushkin should be us. 0.95

00:31:24.300 Dostoevsky is certainly us.

00:31:26.300 I mean, in many ways, my feeling, particularly as a mathematical physics guy, it was a different mathematical physics culture, a different musical culture.

00:31:39.300 You know, this is why, for example, Van Cliburn's winning of the competition in Russia was so powerful.

00:31:51.300 This is that America recognized that in the style of play, the Russians were dominant.

00:31:57.300 They were the experts.

00:31:58.300 And I have to say that, you know, Russia is a barbell culture. 1.00

00:32:04.300 It's the highest of the high and the lowest of the low.

00:32:09.300 And we just don't understand it well enough.

00:32:11.300 So I've spent a great deal of my life appreciating Eastern Europe, in awe of Eastern Europe.

00:32:20.300 And I'm sad to say that, in general, I don't think we give Eastern Europe its due. 0.98

00:32:25.300 The two men who gave America its thermonuclear strength came from Budapest and Lvov, which I'm now told is Lviv.

00:32:36.300 But Stanislav Ulam came from the mathematical school of Banach at Hausdorff in the Scottish Café.

00:32:45.300 And Edward Teller came from Laszlo Ratz's math classroom at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest.

00:32:54.300 And these fine Americans who signed our death warrant were Eastern Europeans. 0.99

00:33:03.300 Yes, but neither of those places is in Russia, Eric.

00:33:06.300 And we're talking about Russia.

00:33:07.300 No, but I'm saying that we are already over the line.

00:33:11.300 When Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were absorbed into NATO, we acknowledged that we have the wrong line.

00:33:21.300 We said those are us.

00:33:23.300 If we say Ukraine is us, Ukraine's old name was Little Russia.

00:33:27.300 The key issue is that Russia is the strongest part of that universe. 0.85

00:33:31.300 And we would have had to make an accommodation that said, we recognize your strength.

00:33:36.300 We respect your strength, your brilliance.

00:33:40.300 And I think it was the right thing to do.

00:33:43.300 I think one of the issues is the way that we see Russia as completely different,

00:33:49.300 and Constantine jumping in if I get this incorrect, is that we don't see them as Western

00:33:55.300 because of the way they treat the individual.

00:33:58.300 The individual in Russia is expendable. 0.67

00:34:00.300 And we saw that by the way they treated their soldiers in World War II,

00:34:04.300 whereby as long as, you know, however men had to die, that's however many men had to die,

00:34:10.300 but they had to move forward, dig a trench, throw them in, cover the trench, we keep moving.

00:34:17.300 America is, and the US, and the UK is, you know, we leave no man behind.

00:34:22.300 So I feel that that's the way that we see Russia as a completely alien culture because of that. 0.96

00:34:28.300 Because we see it as a cold, brutal way of looking at its own populace.

00:34:33.300 My God, I don't agree with this at all.

00:34:36.300 I believe, I'm sorry.

00:34:38.300 No, you do. Go ahead.

00:34:39.300 I've never actually had this out, so it would be great to push back a little bit and see where it goes.

00:34:44.300 Yeah, and we're also all thinking out loud.

00:34:46.300 This isn't something we came pre-packaged to, right?

00:34:48.300 I don't think that this is true.

00:34:51.300 I think that there's an issue of geography.

00:34:54.300 And geography has a lot to do with how people die in war.

00:34:59.300 So in general, for example, Austria is Alpine Germany.

00:35:03.300 It's a very hilly place, whereas a lot of Germany is much flatter. 0.89

00:35:09.300 That is going to affect how tanks and other things roll through, how defensible something is.

00:35:15.300 You have a piece of geography in Eastern Europe which leads to incredible killing and movable borders.

00:35:22.300 So if you look at just a historical timeline of how, let's say, Lithuanian-Polish Empire expanded and contracted and everything's moving around,

00:35:31.300 it really doesn't get still until the nuclear weapons come in.

00:35:34.300 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.

00:35:44.300 So you have the same situation in some sense with the Jews during the 1930s and 40s.

00:35:50.300 You had a fantastic percentage of the world's Jewish population put to death. 1.00

00:35:56.300 And one thing that could have happened is that we would have found that we had adjusted to the concept of the expendable Jew.

00:36:05.300 And the Jews said, under no terms is this going to happen.

00:36:11.300 We're going to treat every Jewish life as precious.

00:36:13.300 We will bargain a thousand people for the return of a single Jewish hostage. 0.98

00:36:17.300 It, in fact, gets us into trouble.

00:36:19.300 So my feeling about this is Poland experienced quite like a fifth or a fourth of its population dying during World War II.

00:36:29.300 I don't feel that way about Poles at all.

00:36:31.300 And it is true what you say, Francis, about expendability in terms of risk tolerance.

00:36:38.300 Have you been over in Russia?

00:36:40.300 No, I've never been to Russia.

00:36:42.300 It's just different.

00:36:44.300 People have a different level of risk tolerance.

00:36:50.300 And I believe that that is culture.

00:36:53.300 But if you move a Russian to Bel Air or Beverly Hills, they very quickly acclimatize to the idea that their safety matters.

00:37:02.300 And my feeling about this is this is the luxury 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.

00:37:22.300 And it's an accident.

00:37:24.300 Almost 100% of who I am came from Russia and Ukraine and Moldova and Romania.

00:37:31.300 And Latvia.

00:37:33.300 I think we just have to get out of this mindset.

00:37:36.300 I think that those I think that they are us.

00:37:39.300 And they are a spicy, weirder, stranger version of us.

00:37:43.300 But in the grand scheme of things, it's not Africa.

00:37:46.300 It's not East Asia.

00:37:48.300 It's not the Pacific Islands.

00:37:50.300 That's us.

00:37:51.300 And we have I wish that we were oriented differently.

00:37:55.300 But I don't agree with that, actually.

00:37:58.300 But there's also a lot to unpack elsewhere.

00:38:00.300 I mean, the greatest objection, I think, to what you're saying is that Russia sees itself as being a separate civilization.

00:38:09.300 Russia sees itself as the descendant of the Eastern Christian civilization.

00:38:15.300 And there's a continuation of it, in fact.

00:38:18.300 So the idea that an alliance is possible, but I think what you're talking about, which is absorption, I don't think there's ever been any appetite for that.

00:38:31.300 Well, I think that there was.

00:38:32.300 I think that we may have blown that.

00:38:33.300 I think there was a period of time when Russia, and if we're just going to be honest, because we both know both cultures, there was a desire to say, don't you see us as you?

00:38:44.300 You know, the concept that somebody has really made it, if they've made it in the West.

00:38:51.300 The Russians were, in some ways, in my opinion, like many other civilizations, partially poo-pooing and partially desirous of being seen. 0.99

00:39:03.300 And I believe that, in part, it was up to NATO and the West to not treat this as we won, you lost, haha, but instead to be gracious in victory and say this was not a defeat of Russia.

00:39:18.300 This was a defeat of communism, which had settled over Russia.

00:39:22.300 But even once you've done that, look, Russia has a brief experiment with democracy in the 90s.

00:39:29.300 It doesn't work out.

00:39:30.300 And, you know, people will say, oh, the evil Americans came and ruined.

00:39:33.300 That's not what happened.

00:39:34.300 That's not what happened at all.

00:39:35.300 Sure, there were some Western people who came and did business and profited.

00:39:39.300 It was actually Russians that used the moment to steal as much wealth as they could. 1.00

00:39:46.300 And after that finishes and all the chaos of that eight-year period finishes, you've got a former KGB colonel who comes in.

00:39:53.300 He's not elected.

00:39:54.300 He's appointed by the previous president to make sure that his corruption doesn't get prosecuted.

00:39:59.300 And the Russian people are perfectly happy with 26 years of a KGB colonel being in charge. 0.75

00:40:06.300 Well, it's Putin's all the way down.

00:40:08.300 There's also this yearning for the strong man to stop chaos.

00:40:12.300 Right, exactly.

00:40:13.300 And it comes from, you know, hundreds of years history.

00:40:15.300 I don't know if I've ever talked about this on air, but it comes from the times of trouble, really.

00:40:20.300 But also before that, which is the time Russians learned that instability is worse than anything else, literally.

00:40:26.300 So you can have the worst tyrant ever, but that's still better than chaos.

00:40:30.300 What is the great quote?

00:40:32.300 The great quote.

00:40:33.300 Something like, better 30 years of tyranny than a single night of anarchy.

00:40:36.300 Well, yes.

00:40:37.300 Well, because, you know, the times of trouble is a period of time when a very short time due to political instability and some other things that happen, like a third of the Russian population gets wiped out.

00:40:50.300 You have foreign fake rule after foreign fake rule after foreign fake rule coming in and people go, OK, we've got to have stability.

00:40:59.300 Right.

00:41:00.300 I mean, that's precisely my point, is people with that mental attitude might be right for their geography, might be wrong for their geography.

00:41:07.300 But what it does is it creates a group, a culture that I think is not compatible with the way that we do things.

00:41:15.300 And the evidence is there. I mean, the Polish people or the Ukrainian people, they didn't go down the same path as Russia after 1991, after 1989, because Russia wants to be a power center.

00:41:27.300 It doesn't want to be part of a thing where it's not the main thing.

00:41:32.300 That's my argument.

00:41:34.300 You as a Briton, you as a Russian, who's talking here? 0.98

00:41:38.300 I have access to both perspectives.

00:41:40.300 I understand that.

00:41:41.300 But do you reserve that for yourself?

00:41:43.300 I'm sorry?

00:41:44.300 You're talking about a guy from Russia talking to a guy whose family came from Umay.

00:41:51.300 It's a little rich that we're having this conversation in Los Angeles. It's not really...

00:41:55.300 I don't think so at all.

00:41:56.300 Tell me more.

00:41:57.300 Well, because people within...

00:41:58.300 I have friends who are Westerners who live in Russia and love it there.

00:42:02.300 Yeah.

00:42:03.300 But they don't love it in the West.

00:42:05.300 Because their mindset is not suited to this culture, it's suited to that culture.

00:42:11.300 But communism was entirely foreign to this place.

00:42:15.300 Well, that's not what I'm saying. I mean, like, right now.

00:42:18.300 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.

00:42:29.300 When there was uncertainty, if instead of trying an isolated democracy with, you know, American economists meddling in post-Cold War reconstruction, whatever, if we tried something different, I think there was an opportunity.

00:42:44.300 Something different how? Like, what should we have tried?

00:42:47.300 Or should we have tried?

00:42:48.300 I don't know. You know, there was a period of denazification after World War II.

00:42:51.300 But that requires admission of defeat, which is the thing you've just said we shouldn't have done.

00:42:54.300 No.

00:42:55.300 You said we should have been, you know...

00:42:57.300 Right?

00:42:58.300 What did I say? That what was important to defeat was communism.

00:43:02.300 Yeah.

00:43:03.300 This is what we did with Germany, is that we made a point about defeating Nazism, and we allowed the German people the ability, which was not entirely true, to say, oh, yes, those Nazis were terrible. That wasn't us.

00:43:17.300 Yes.

00:43:18.300 Yes, but what happened in Russia, you're right, is we didn't defeat communism as the ideology.

00:43:25.300 We didn't say, you went through this terrible period of communism, all of these terrible communist leaders, they were bad, whatever.

00:43:32.300 But, you know, a lot of people in Russia don't think communism was a great period in Russian history.

00:43:36.300 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.

00:43:46.300 And the thing that many Russians feel humiliated by is not that the evil American economists came and ruined everything.

00:43:52.300 It's actually the fact, I remember this as a kid in Russia, being given humanitarian aid.

00:43:58.300 And the view is, well, you know, these people, they gave us these crumbs off their table. How insulting.

00:44:05.300 We will build ourselves up again, and we will be strong, and we will show them.

00:44:08.300 I do think it was kind of insulting.

00:44:09.300 Well, should we have done that?

00:44:10.300 I don't know.

00:44:12.300 Look, I think in part, I'm in awe of Russia.

00:44:19.300 And I'm in awe of Russia in its brutality, its backwardness, its horror. 0.98

00:44:28.300 I'm in awe of its accomplishments, its achievements, its high culture.

00:44:33.300 I think about Russia a lot.

00:44:35.300 Most of my American friends do not.

00:44:38.300 You know, just as a side note, I'm very worried about my family losing its familiarity with its Eastern European heritage.

00:44:47.300 I make a point of, my son and I go on kvass runs, and we try to figure out who's got the best kvass from all of the Armenian stores that carry it.

00:44:56.300 And just talking a lot about the Soviet schools of mathematics under Gelfand, and under physics, under Lev Landau, and what these cultures were about and what they meant.

00:45:09.300 I care tremendously about Russia, and I feel connected to it.

00:45:15.300 I don't feel that way with China.

00:45:17.300 I mean, a Chinese-American can say, I feel that, but I do feel a continuity from Austria to Hungary to Moscow.

00:45:28.300 I just, I don't think that's, with all respect, a very strong argument when we're talking about the thing that we're talking about.

00:45:34.300 Because if you say, we should have done something else, I don't know what.

00:45:37.300 Well, I said.

00:45:38.300 It's hard to be persuaded.

00:45:39.300 I really think that we should have separated two things.

00:45:41.300 We should have separated out the communist overlay and the Russian substrate. 0.69

00:45:45.300 And we should have been celebrating not only Russia, to be blunt, but, you know, there's Ukrainian opera.

00:45:51.300 There's the incredible savoir-faire and joie de vivre of the Georgians, the proud histories of the Armenians.

00:46:00.300 And, you know, there's so much over there that we don't even know exists as Americans.

00:46:06.300 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, their science.

00:46:19.300 I just think it's a crime.

00:46:21.300 Even in mathematics, we make up two different names for the same theorem, depending upon whether we want to claim that it was done in the West or it was done in Eastern Europe.

00:46:31.300 But look, we don't need to labor.

00:46:33.300 I think we have a difference of opinion.

00:46:35.300 I think that it's not an easy sell, but it's not impossible.

00:46:40.300 And I think you think it's more difficult.

00:46:42.300 And I will have to say that you probably know far more about these two cultures than I do.

00:46:46.300 Well, I agree with your point about respecting different cultures and their many achievements.

00:46:53.300 The reason 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.

00:47:07.300 And I'm sure you can find plenty of individual examples of where that's absolutely the case.

00:47:12.300 But overall, my contention is that Russia is a separate civilization that doesn't want to be part of our civilization, doesn't see itself as part of our civilization. 0.89

00:47:22.300 And the only viable, friendly relationship with Russia is one of alliance.

00:47:27.300 Right now, was that achievable?

00:47:29.300 Maybe.

00:47:30.300 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 going to win that war collectively.

00:47:42.300 But the cost was tremendous.

00:47:44.300 The cost was the subjugation of all of Eastern Europe. 0.57

00:47:47.300 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 the very geographical reasons that you lay out. 0.91

00:48:06.300 A while back, I pushed myself in training because I'm a bit of a legend.

00:48:13.300 But ended up with a back strain that took far longer to recover from than it ever used to.

00:48:18.300 Nothing dramatic.

00:48:20.300 Just one of those moments where you realize your body isn't snapping back the way it once did.

00:48:25.300 And as you get older, those moments start adding up.

00:48:28.300 Turns out there's a real reason for that.

00:48:30.300 Your stem cells are the repair system your body relies on.

00:48:33.300 They're the internal maintenance crew that keeps you healing, recovering and functioning.

00:48:37.300 But that system slows with age.

00:48:39.300 Fewer cells, weaker signals, slower bounce back.

00:48:42.300 That's exactly why Qualia built their stem cell formula. 0.99

00:48:46.300 It uses well-researched ingredients like sea buckthorn and royal jelly to support your repair system so your body can keep doing what it's meant to do.

00:48:55.300 And it isn't something you take every day.

00:48:57.300 Just four days a month to help maintain your regenerative capacity over time.

00:49:02.300 So if you've ever felt like your body just doesn't bounce back like it used to, whether it's after a tough workout, getting sick or the wear and tear of life, Qualia Stem Cell is for you.

00:49:13.300 Qualia Stem Cell was designed to support your body's natural repair systems, helping you heal, recover and keep going strong.

00:49:20.300 And right now you can try it for up to 50% off at qualialife.com slash trig.

00:49:26.300 And here's a bonus.

00:49:27.300 Use the code trig for an additional 15% off your order.

00:49:30.300 That's Q-U-A-L-I-A life.com slash trig.

00:49:37.300 Your body's built to repair itself.

00:49:39.300 Qualia helps it to do that better.

00:49:41.300 Big thanks to Qualia for sponsoring this episode.

00:49:44.300 Got PC Optimum points?

00:49:47.300 Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.

00:49:51.300 Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 11th.

00:49:53.300 Valid in-store and online.

00:49:55.300 You know, this gets into, I think it's very unfortunate that certain civilizations in the boundary land between what is clearly Western Europe and Russia.

00:50:12.300 But, 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.

00:50:22.300 The way the western crust of Turkey looks to Anatolia and says there be dragons, you know, even though it's their country.

00:50:30.300 So there's a great deal of intracountry alienation.

00:50:33.300 You know, where Chernovsi looks to the Donbass and says, wow, that's, that's some freaky stuff.

00:50:43.300 Particularly with Lvov, which I think of as being a Polish city, even though it's in Ukraine.

00:50:48.300 Look, it's Eastern European, Eastern Europe is complicated.

00:50:53.300 And you have to think not in terms of, boy, it's really sad that Riga can't simply be part of the west.

00:51:01.300 My feeling is, is that if we were in-grouping Russia, we would be getting a better deal for Latvia than saying, okay, Latvia, you're with us.

00:51:10.300 And then antagonizing Russia, but this is about my pay grade. 0.70

00:51:17.300 This is just my caring about each of these places individually and caring about different places within, you know, just to tell a tiny little anecdote.

00:51:27.300 I got my great aunt in Kiev to take me to Umayn, where my family was from.

00:51:32.300 And she said, do you want to see the park where your grandfather used to walk with me?

00:51:37.300 And I said, sure, you know, and it was like Versailles.

00:51:41.300 It was, it was some park on a scale you couldn't even believe called Sofivka.

00:51:45.300 Nobody in the west has ever heard of this place. 0.96

00:51:48.300 That's ridiculous.

00:51:50.300 You know, this should be a famous site throughout the world. 0.82

00:51:54.300 And I don't know how that happened.

00:51:57.300 So what I think we need to do is to recognize that we have an exaggerated blindness when it comes to Eastern Europe.

00:52:03.300 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 Brits used to have their foreign service be very well informed about all four far flung provinces where they could see the world because they had an empire to take care of.

00:52:21.300 I think the U.S. should be honest that it's had an empire and it should care 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, et cetera, et cetera.

00:52:34.300 Look, I agree with you with the argument in that sense.

00:52:37.300 And look, the arguments you make 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.

00:52:49.300 You know, you're Venezuelan, you're Mexican, you're Argentine, you're Mexican, you're Colombian, you're Mexican.

00:52:53.300 And they would make that point.

00:52:56.300 And in some ways it's probably merited.

00:52:59.300 I think one of the challenges that America faces is that the geographical isolation of your country.

00:53:06.300 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 bank of water. 0.76

00:53:18.300 So we, we have to be more engaged than you do at the moment.

00:53:23.300 And that might change.

00:53:24.300 Hmm.

00:53:25.300 I mean, I might, your tiny little island was like this superpower.

00:53:30.300 Once upon a time, it ain't anymore, Eric.

00:53:32.300 Once upon a, come on, man.

00:53:33.300 But it ain't anymore, Eric.

00:53:35.300 A hundred years ago.

00:53:36.300 A hundred.

00:53:37.300 I mean, 1948 is within living memory and the Suez crisis.

00:53:42.300 I just think this is not true, Francis.

00:53:44.300 I think this is much more recent.

00:53:46.300 Um, you, you have to understand I married into, uh, into an, an Indian family.

00:53:53.300 And so I go to your British clubs, uh, in Bombay that are now, uh, populated by Indians.

00:54:00.300 And, and I look at the, you know, the club members who died during the great war and it's all British names.

00:54:05.300 You know, I, I feel connected.

00:54:07.300 The arguments we get into in, in Bombay are very often arguments about what, were the Brits that bad?

00:54:15.300 How, how much was positive?

00:54:16.300 How much was negative?

00:54:17.300 Of course, you're not around to hear them.

00:54:19.300 I'm sure if you were around people would be angry.

00:54:21.300 Um, and you know, I'm, that's what we do.

00:54:23.300 But like, 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.

00:54:32.300 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.

00:54:47.300 Agreed.

00:54:48.300 And that system eventually gave way to the American system.

00:54:52.300 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.

00:55:03.300 And, and there's something about the British that is necessary to keep the world in order, right? 0.51

00:55:08.300 It's, it's sort of a, it's a post empire vision for a powerful, strong, virile Britain.

00:55:17.300 I, 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.

00:55:27.300 It doesn't exist.

00:55:28.300 We are financially bankrupt.

00:55:31.300 Our army is tiny.

00:55:33.300 Our Navy is practically non-existent.

00:55:36.300 When it comes to our political might, no one really listens to us anymore.

00:55:40.300 You could see that by the way Keir Starmer spoke about, you know, recognizing a Palestinian state.

00:55:45.300 And to be honest with you, when it came to Netanyahu, he recorded it as a mere, as a mere irritant.

00:55:52.300 I was invited by one Dr. David Tong to go to Trinity College in Cambridge.

00:56:01.300 And I can't tell you how priceless that day I spent with David was.

00:56:06.300 Yeah.

00:56:07.300 You know, I went to the portico where he said Newton measured the speed of sound by clapping.

00:56:11.300 And I saw the, you know, the notes in the first edition of the Principia about what should be fixed in the second.

00:56:17.300 And I was thinking, okay, this is, you know, this is Michael Atiyah and Isaac Newton.

00:56:24.300 All of that stuff is still in the UK.

00:56:28.300 That magic is still in the UK.

00:56:30.300 I'm in the UK often enough to know that the UK's biggest problem is that it's got to get over this negative view of itself.

00:56:39.300 We in the States have a much more positive view of the UK.

00:56:43.300 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.

00:56:51.300 It is essential that you become the UK.

00:56:53.300 We don't know exactly who we are if you're moping about. 0.99

00:56:57.300 So it's really important to just cut the crap. 0.99

00:56:59.300 Look, I agree that we need a stronger view of ourselves. 0.99

00:57:02.300 I think we need to stop apologizing.

00:57:04.300 I think we need to stop seeing ourselves as the worst people in history.

00:57:08.300 I completely agree.

00:57:09.300 What I'm dealing, what I'm talking to you about, Eric, are just the facts of where the UK is at the moment.

00:57:14.300 I'm not saying in a, you know, if we don't sort ourselves out in 40, 50 years' time, we can't be that.

00:57:19.300 Didn't the US go through a Great Depression?

00:57:21.300 We did.

00:57:22.300 Okay?

00:57:23.300 So we were in the Great Depression.

00:57:25.300 Couldn't figure out our way out.

00:57:26.300 You know, my feeling is that you need to be stronger.

00:57:31.300 And you need to tap into some extremely dangerous stuff.

00:57:34.300 And I'm sorry about that.

00:57:35.300 But part of the issue is liberal societies go illiberal in one of two ways.

00:57:42.300 They go illiberal through hyper-liberal illiberalism and hypo-liberal illiberalism.

00:57:49.300 So the US has been experimenting with hyper-liberal illiberalism.

00:57:53.300 Maybe we shouldn't have a border because all people are, no person is illegal.

00:57:58.300 Maybe you can be any gender you want, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:58:01.300 That is not liberalism.

00:58:03.300 That's revolutionary thinking.

00:58:06.300 That's going to get reversed by hypo-liberal illiberalism, which is like the Donald Trump,

00:58:11.300 MAGA, let's blow up a boat, which we hope is filled with drugs and ask questions later. 1.00

00:58:17.300 You know, that kind of super-masculine, we're going to send the National Guard in, 0.99

00:58:21.300 we're going to send ICE in, we're going to throw people out.

00:58:24.300 And one way of looking at it is that it's a turn towards fascism.

00:58:29.300 It's possible.

00:58:30.300 But another way of looking at it is that it is necessary to counter the negative effects

00:58:35.300 of a spate of hyper-liberal illiberalism with hypo-liberal illiberalism.

00:58:41.300 That's a little confusing.

00:58:43.300 I'm sorry.

00:58:44.300 But one thing that we're doing is we are undoing some of the excesses with excesses

00:58:50.300 that are currently in favor for this group.

00:58:52.300 And my feeling about this is the UK may have to experiment.

00:58:56.300 And as a guy who has a preference for not only a liberal state,

00:59:01.300 but I would probably err on the hyper-liberal.

00:59:04.300 But I don't like hyper-liberal illiberalism.

00:59:08.300 You may have to experiment with hypo-liberal illiberalism to get rid of the sense of weakness

00:59:16.300 and not being able to defend yourselves and not knowing who you are.

00:59:19.300 This question about what does it mean to be English?

00:59:22.300 What does it mean to be British?

00:59:24.300 Enough.

00:59:25.300 We all know what it means.

00:59:28.300 One of the things is that you guys are a human software producer.

00:59:32.300 So if I think about, you know, Michael Attia,

00:59:35.300 who's one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century,

00:59:38.300 come to Harvard, played ping-pong with him.

00:59:41.300 He was absolutely British.

00:59:43.300 But the name Attia indicates that his family is from Lebanon.

00:59:47.300 Paul Dirac, the great English physicist, had a French last name.

00:59:51.300 But the Israeli, you know, so many great people from the UK

00:59:56.300 have clearly been from somewhere else.

00:59:59.300 My feeling is you have to be more proud of the software that you built.

01:00:03.300 The software that you built is second to none.

01:00:06.300 It's the envy of the world.

01:00:08.300 And you've got to stop this madness of self-hatred.

01:00:13.300 So what is the British software?

01:00:17.300 My God, it's irreverent.

01:00:21.300 It loves oddities.

01:00:23.300 It's extremely dry in its humor.

01:00:29.300 It's incredibly bold and daring in its creativity.

01:00:33.300 It mixes irreverence and reverence like nobody's business.

01:00:38.300 It's elitist as the day is long.

01:00:41.300 It's elitist in multiple senses, both in the landed sense,

01:00:44.300 which I don't love, but it's part of your system.

01:00:46.300 And in the sense of being a meritocracy.

01:00:50.300 I love the fact that when you guys can't do things initially,

01:00:54.300 you do them better.

01:00:55.300 For example, you can't grow wine to save your life.

01:00:58.300 So what did you do?

01:00:59.300 You turned France into a parlor game 1.00

01:01:02.300 where you could guess the vintage and the Chateau.

01:01:06.300 And, you know, you created French wine.

01:01:08.300 You don't think of it that way, but you did.

01:01:10.300 And then when they went to war with you

01:01:12.300 and you couldn't get access to French wine,

01:01:14.300 you created your own wine houses in Portugal

01:01:16.300 where they didn't have any noble grapes.

01:01:18.300 So what did you do?

01:01:19.300 You created crazy numbers of minor grapes

01:01:22.300 as if they were noble grapes to create port.

01:01:25.300 That's why they all have English.

01:01:26.300 I mean, just one cool thing.

01:01:28.300 Or the blues.

01:01:31.300 I'm very proud of what we did with the blues

01:01:33.300 up until Skiffle, which was terrible.

01:01:37.300 You guys came up with Skiffle

01:01:38.300 and I think it's almost unlistenable.

01:01:39.300 I mean, it produced the Beatles, but let's not get into that.

01:01:42.300 It produced a lot beyond the Beatles.

01:01:45.300 The aftermath of Skiffle

01:01:48.300 was the elevation of the blues

01:01:50.300 into this unbelievable virtuosic art form.

01:01:53.300 We didn't know what we had.

01:01:55.300 And you sent it back.

01:01:57.300 That's what the British invasion 0.88

01:01:59.300 is in large measure

01:02:01.300 the UK telling us what we had

01:02:03.300 and didn't appreciate it in ourselves.

01:02:05.300 We had to send you Jimi Hendrix

01:02:07.300 before we had understood what he was.

01:02:08.300 I love these stories.

01:02:10.300 And, you know, my feeling about it

01:02:13.300 is you also have a bit of a barbell culture,

01:02:18.300 which we love.

01:02:19.300 You know, the guys who brawl

01:02:21.300 at the football games and the pubs

01:02:25.300 are connected to the people who have, without question,

01:02:29.300 the world's finest sensibilities about art,

01:02:32.300 the greatest historians and masters of language.

01:02:36.300 One of the things that I think is terrible

01:02:38.300 is that you don't know your own culture often.

01:02:40.300 I grew up as a Jewish kid from a Ukrainian Jewish family

01:02:46.300 in L.A. fetishizing Chaucer.

01:02:50.300 And, you know, when I taught my kids drinking songs,

01:02:53.300 I went back to Ravenscroft in 1609, you know,

01:02:58.300 and looking at this canon,

01:03:02.300 my daughter fell in love with Henry Purcell.

01:03:04.300 You know, we played Gilbert and Sullivan in the house

01:03:07.300 and Flanders and Swan and all of the,

01:03:10.300 or, you know, the great British American projects.

01:03:14.300 T.S. Eliot is this marriage of the UK and Missouri.

01:03:18.300 Or I had Jim Watson in my office

01:03:21.300 who discovered the three-dimensional structure of DNA.

01:03:24.300 And I got a chance to play Francis Crick,

01:03:27.300 a little video of him on my screen in my office.

01:03:30.300 And I watched Jim tear up.

01:03:32.300 It was clear that there was no person on Earth

01:03:35.300 that was ever going to be for him what Francis was.

01:03:38.300 And, you know, I got a chance to ask him.

01:03:41.300 I said, you know, if I read your book very carefully,

01:03:44.300 you shared an office with Jerry Donahue

01:03:47.300 from Linus Pauling's lab at Caltech,

01:03:49.300 and he told you that all of the textbooks were wrong,

01:03:52.300 that the hydrogen atom was in the wrong place

01:03:54.300 in the nucleotides.

01:03:55.300 In the next page, you've figured out

01:03:57.300 the base pairing arrangement through hydrogen bonds.

01:04:00.300 Didn't you really do the double helix

01:04:02.300 and not you and Francis?

01:04:04.300 And he looks at me and he says, oh, no.

01:04:07.300 He says, absolutely, you're right.

01:04:09.300 I did the inside of the double helix.

01:04:11.300 But look at the beautiful sugar phosphate backbone

01:04:14.300 twirling around the outside.

01:04:15.300 That's off 100% Francis.

01:04:17.300 And so you look at it and you think, okay,

01:04:19.300 the world's greatest scientific partnership ever.

01:04:23.300 It's the US on the inside and the UK on the outside.

01:04:27.300 I mean, it just doesn't get better than that for me.

01:04:30.300 And I could go on and on and on about what I got from the UK

01:04:34.300 that I could never have gotten from anything else.

01:04:37.300 You're in charge of that legacy.

01:04:39.300 And you're screwing it up.

01:04:45.300 We want the confidence.

01:04:46.300 We want you guys to be the great orators of our time.

01:04:53.300 You know, how much do we, how much do we lean on Churchill?

01:04:57.300 Again, a complex product of America and the UK.

01:05:01.300 It's very important to us if we are going to be the major power

01:05:05.300 that the UK play its role.

01:05:07.300 If you watch or listen to trigonometry regularly, this won't surprise you.

01:05:11.300 The cost of everyday life has crept up to the point where even sensible people

01:05:15.300 are feeling the squeeze.

01:05:17.300 You do the right things.

01:05:18.300 You work, you budget, and somehow the money still doesn't go as far as it used to.

01:05:22.300 Food costs more.

01:05:23.300 Insurance costs more.

01:05:24.300 Everything costs more.

01:05:25.300 And more people than you think are quietly filling the gap with credit cards charging

01:05:29.300 20 or 30% interest.

01:05:31.300 If you're a homeowner and that sounds familiar, there is a better way.

01:05:34.300 Right now, mortgage rates are at a three-year low.

01:05:37.300 And American financing is helping homeowners roll high interest debt into rates in the low fives.

01:05:42.300 What makes them different is how they operate.

01:05:44.300 Their mortgage consultants are salaried.

01:05:46.300 No commission, no pressure.

01:05:47.300 American financing are there to build an exit strategy from debt, not to push a product.

01:05:52.300 On average, their customers are saving around $800 a month.

01:05:55.300 That is real breathing room.

01:05:57.300 And if you start the process now, you may even be able to delay your next two mortgage payments.

01:06:01.300 There are no upfront fees and no obligation to find out what your options are.

01:06:04.300 If you want a serious plan instead of a financial whack-a-mole, this is worth a call.

01:06:09.300 America's home for home loans is American Financing.

01:06:12.300 Call 866-885-1948.

01:06:16.300 That's 866-885-1948.

01:06:19.300 Or go to americanfinancing.net slash trigonometry.

01:06:24.300 So we've returned to where we started through the medium of hydrogen.

01:06:28.300 And where we started was, your point was that a lot of the people who now have control over nuclear weapons are second string.

01:06:36.300 Or in the case of, you know, some countries who are pursuing nuclear weapons might be outright, you know, crazy.

01:06:43.300 I think there are people like that as well.

01:06:45.300 But what I don't understand is how does the testing of nuclear weapons to demonstrate to us just how destructive they are address that problem?

01:06:53.300 Well, in multiple ways, first of all.

01:06:56.300 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 80 years of peace.

01:07:08.300 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.

01:07:19.300 We've lost a lot of knowledge about how these weapons behave by letting that atrophy.

01:07:26.300 So it really matters a great deal, whether it's underground, whether it's above ground or underground nuclear testing.

01:07:37.300 You know, the underground stuff doesn't have the same impact and the above ground stuff has terrible consequences.

01:07:43.300 I'm not the person to design this and I don't think we're doing it in a smart way.

01:07:48.300 I think what we're doing is that we're all playing chicken again.

01:07:51.300 And by the way, there's a lot of stuff that can happen beyond nuclear weapons.

01:07:55.300 It doesn't need to have the same raw terror.

01:07:58.300 But if you can figure out how to send energy through the Earth and have it refocus at some other point so that you could vaporize something at a cell phone cohort.

01:08:10.300 Right now, we don't know how to do that because the only thing that you can send through the Earth would be neutrinos, which are hard to catch on the other side, or gravity waves.

01:08:22.300 You can't send photons through the Earth, particularly, or electrons.

01:08:28.300 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.

01:08:37.300 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.

01:08:48.300 Is that something that concerns you, Eric?

01:08:50.300 The way...

01:08:51.300 That's not how I would phrase it.

01:08:52.300 Okay.

01:08:53.300 Will you push back on my inadequate phrase?

01:08:56.300 We're just playing with fire.

01:08:59.300 And we don't know what fire we're playing with.

01:09:02.300 So you can view it as America versus China.

01:09:05.300 By the way, don't sell DeepMind in the UK short.

01:09:09.300 Figured out AlphaFold.

01:09:10.300 Well done, gentlemen.

01:09:12.300 We don't really know what this game is like.

01:09:14.300 We don't know what it's about.

01:09:16.300 We're playing it as if it was an old-style game.

01:09:19.300 But DeepSeq migrated very quickly.

01:09:22.300 And I've talked to some of the major players.

01:09:24.300 I said, how are you going to keep secrets from China?

01:09:26.300 They said, we can't.

01:09:27.300 So, essentially, we can't keep secrets from China. 0.73

01:09:31.300 Therefore, what we have, they will have, and vice versa. 0.82

01:09:34.300 Maybe.

01:09:35.300 Or maybe the issue is the bottleneck is the chips.

01:09:38.300 Or maybe somebody will figure out something about chip architecture

01:09:41.300 where it's not as essential to use this scheme.

01:09:45.300 And maybe the energy needs are going to dwarf anything.

01:09:48.300 Or maybe the energy needs are suddenly going to collapse.

01:09:50.300 We're at the beginning.

01:09:52.300 We're at the infancy of something that is astounding.

01:09:57.300 And we already know how astounding it is.

01:10:00.300 And it can only be this astounding or more.

01:10:03.300 And we're acting as if it's not that big of a deal

01:10:06.300 because it hasn't changed our lives that much yet.

01:10:09.300 That's one reason.

01:10:10.300 The other reason we're acting this way

01:10:12.300 is that human beings have not come up with a way

01:10:15.300 of preventing people from playing with fire.

01:10:17.300 We can't.

01:10:18.300 It just isn't going to happen, right?

01:10:20.300 Even if the entire West, let's say, agreed not to do this,

01:10:23.300 even if the entire world agreed not to do this,

01:10:25.300 someone somewhere would still do it.

01:10:27.300 Because the advantage of being the one that's doing it

01:10:30.300 is so tremendous, right?

01:10:32.300 So there's actually nothing we can do

01:10:34.300 to stop people playing with this fire, right?

01:10:36.300 Is that fair?

01:10:37.300 That's according to you.

01:10:38.300 I'm asking you.

01:10:39.300 Well, the test ban treaty,

01:10:41.300 I have this feeling that if we were talking in the 50s,

01:10:44.300 you would have said that the test ban treaty was impossible

01:10:47.300 because you can't stop people from playing with fire.

01:10:49.300 Explain to us what the test ban treaty is.

01:10:51.300 We agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons among the major players.

01:10:56.300 That hasn't prevented the existence of nuclear weapons

01:10:59.300 or their continued development, right?

01:11:01.300 It has certainly slowed down.

01:11:04.300 It's antiquated the weapons a great deal.

01:11:06.300 It stopped the atmospheric testing that caused radioactive decay products

01:11:13.300 to blow in the wind.

01:11:15.300 We had things like, what is it, Operation Starfish,

01:11:19.300 where we exploded a weapon in space and knocked out the grid in Hawaii.

01:11:24.300 We retarded ourselves a great deal,

01:11:27.300 and then we signed the bioweapons conventions in the 70s,

01:11:31.300 which had a big effect on how we do research.

01:11:34.300 We have scared ourselves before into some kind of cooperation that does something.

01:11:40.300 But isn't the challenge with that, and I think it's a very good example,

01:11:45.300 but nuclear weapons are mainly used for one thing and one thing only.

01:11:50.300 AI is multipurpose.

01:11:52.300 Well, first of all, Russia doesn't agree with you.

01:11:53.300 Russia used nuclear weapons for engineering purposes.

01:11:56.300 They would use them to dig holes or put out fires or do all sorts of crazy things.

01:12:00.300 It's a crazy thing.

01:12:01.300 So even that is not quite true.

01:12:03.300 And then with respect to AI, things don't always spread just because they're known.

01:12:09.300 I keep giving this example, like if I ask people, do you know the formula for black powder?

01:12:14.300 No.

01:12:15.300 Do you?

01:12:16.300 No.

01:12:17.300 75% saltpeter, 10% sulfur, 15% charcoal.

01:12:22.300 Okay, now everybody at home knows, but they'll forget it.

01:12:27.300 We, in general, don't see people taking advantage of these huge leverage opportunities.

01:12:32.300 Right now, we're in some race because we don't know what we're racing for.

01:12:37.300 We just know that if the other guy had something that we didn't have, that feels vulnerable.

01:12:42.300 But the problem is, the other guy may become the AI itself.

01:12:45.300 So the US and China may get into a race to get this thing, and then the thing says,

01:12:50.300 you dear sweet children.

01:12:53.300 Nobody even knows what we're talking about.

01:12:56.300 Right.

01:12:57.300 So doesn't that mean that that's even more dangerous?

01:13:01.300 Because with nuclear weapons, we know what we're talking about.

01:13:05.300 Okay.

01:13:06.300 We have been at death's door.

01:13:08.300 I mean, am I right that we were just gentlemen at the cave of the apocalypse together?

01:13:12.300 In Greece.

01:13:13.300 In Greece.

01:13:14.300 Yeah.

01:13:15.300 Yeah.

01:13:16.300 Okay.

01:13:17.300 So, my feeling is, we've been thinking about the apocalypse for a long time, and we should

01:13:21.300 have been thinking about the apocalypse every week since 1952-53.

01:13:26.300 Suddenly we're back to thinking about it.

01:13:28.300 My friend Peter Thiel is giving lectures about the Antichrist, people are talking about Armageddon,

01:13:33.300 the AI apocalypse.

01:13:35.300 We need to be thinking about this.

01:13:37.300 I don't know how we got out of thinking about this.

01:13:39.300 Now that we're thinking about it again, it's what I said at the ARC conference.

01:13:42.300 It's a race.

01:13:43.300 It's a sprint to the finish.

01:13:45.300 Right now, the world has woken up. 0.98

01:13:48.300 Holy crap. 0.94

01:13:49.300 The World War II order is crashing as we speak. 0.72

01:13:53.300 People around J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin have no patience for this anymore.

01:13:58.300 Nobody's maintaining it.

01:14:00.300 Okay.

01:14:01.300 So the question is, what are we doing?

01:14:04.300 And this is so clear to me, I can't understand why everyone isn't animated by it, and I could

01:14:09.300 pretend that I'm crazy and that you all are sane, but I'm pretty sure it's the reverse.

01:14:14.300 No, I really think that.

01:14:15.300 I really think I'm somehow not affected by some sort of universal mind virus, and I can't

01:14:20.300 figure out why.

01:14:21.300 So the argument is, this is the time to run like hell.

01:14:27.300 This has been in our future for forever, and we're here.

01:14:31.300 And right now, the thing to do is to try to figure out how to spread out and run as many

01:14:38.300 experiments as we can and recognize that it's not just that Eastern Europe is going to get

01:14:43.300 sacrificed to Russia.

01:14:45.300 Planets are going to die because the technology is just too powerful.

01:14:49.300 We should be honest where we are, and if we're honest, right now, the thing to do is to colonize

01:14:56.300 as many planets as we can find in the heavens.

01:15:00.300 And that seems crazy to people, but I just had a conversation on my way over with a person

01:15:06.300 who doesn't exist, who told me all sorts of points that I made were good, others were weak.

01:15:11.300 She knows all about every aspect of the world.

01:15:15.300 If I ask her to tell me a doctor joke, I can say, tell it to me in Urdu, tell it to me in Yiddish,

01:15:20.300 tell it to me in Russian.

01:15:23.300 We are already living science fiction lives.

01:15:26.300 Why can we not understand that this is the time to lead a science fiction life about getting

01:15:33.300 out of the solar system and finding the largest number of planets and spreading out and running

01:15:39.300 the largest number of experiments we can?

01:15:41.300 Everything that has one planet and us trying to make sure nothing goes wrong here is completely

01:15:48.300 enervating.

01:15:49.300 But somehow none of you are energized as I am, and I don't know why, to say, we are Ferdinand

01:15:59.300 and Isabella.

01:16:00.300 It is time to find Columbus and try to reach something new, whether it's a new route to India

01:16:06.300 or whether it's new land entirely.

01:16:08.300 It's time to do something new.

01:16:10.300 The last major landmass that was found on earth was found off the north coast of Siberia

01:16:15.300 about 100 years ago.

01:16:17.300 We've gone out of the habit of finding new worlds.

01:16:22.300 And my feeling about this is that this should be energizing us.

01:16:25.300 We have a brief period to sprint.

01:16:28.300 We should create new institutions, new science.

01:16:31.300 We should take on Einstein and defeat him.

01:16:34.300 We should get excited.

01:16:36.300 We should, you know, dance harder, sing longer, do more partial differential equations into the

01:16:43.300 night and try to realize that we're on the eve of destruction and take a Jewish attitude,

01:16:48.300 which is survival at all costs.

01:16:50.300 Something will work out.

01:16:52.300 Something will provide.

01:16:53.300 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.

01:17:03.300 And that's what, you know, really as a Jew, what I want to bring to a diverse audience of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists, I don't care.

01:17:15.300 There's something about the Jewish will to survive that is not infecting planet Earth.

01:17:21.300 I just see everybody basically on the couch with their remote solving minor problems.

01:17:26.300 And it's time to recognize, no, no, no.

01:17:28.300 This is the end.

01:17:29.300 This is the apocalypse.

01:17:30.300 This is the phase transition.

01:17:31.300 And it's been clear as day since 52, 53.

01:17:34.300 And we're just now waking up to it with AI for reasons that are completely unclear.

01:17:38.300 But that's always been the problem, Francis.

01:17:41.300 It's always been the problem.

01:17:43.300 Eric, it's been a fantastic conversation as always.

01:17:47.300 It feels a bit weird saying this considering what we've been talking about over the previous an hour or so.

01:17:55.300 So what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:17:59.300 That a lot of our problems are mediated by our phones.

01:18:06.300 That the phone is not an appliance.

01:18:09.300 It's a brain-scrambling device.

01:18:12.300 And that, in general, we're making things out to be much harder than they're meant to be.

01:18:18.300 We have grand challenges.

01:18:20.300 We have the ability to fall in love, form families, drive each other crazy,

01:18:24.300 and not screw up this whole beautiful experiment.

01:18:27.300 And my feeling about it is that we've decided somehow that there's something wrong with us.

01:18:33.300 And I think that we're just making things out to be much more difficult than they are.

01:18:39.300 There are glorious, wonderful challenges.

01:18:41.300 There are places to visit that are still remarkably undiscovered on Earth.

01:18:47.300 And we're going to wake up hopefully in the next couple of years to the idea that with the machine's help,

01:18:55.300 we can solve all sorts of problems that we thought were intractable.

01:18:58.300 And so I think the thing that we're not talking enough about is that this is the sprint to the finish,

01:19:05.300 and it can be glorious even though it's incredibly dangerous.

01:19:09.300 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,

01:19:18.300 and we get back to being those people who did so much, instead of visiting the monuments built by our ancestors,

01:19:25.300 I think we could imagine that unlike this period of stability and safety for the last 80 years,

01:19:32.300 this could be a period of incredible chaos, great peril, lots of fear, but unparalleled fun, excitement, wonder, glory.

01:19:41.300 We don't even feel comfortable with the word glory.

01:19:44.300 We can say Slava Ukraina, but we can't say glory to us.

01:19:47.300 And I think it should just be a glorious age filled with hope, and I think we can get out of here.

01:19:51.300 And I love the fact that I'm back on the show, and I can end on a positive note like that.

01:19:56.300 So thank you both.

01:19:57.300 Well, thank you as always, Eric.

01:20:00.300 And make sure to join us over on Substack.

01:20:02.300 We get to ask Eric your questions, and we get to carry on the conversation.

01:20:06.300 Everyone focuses on the US versus Russia relationship to be the one to set off a bomb.

01:20:12.300 But which lesser known conflict competitive pairing should we also pay attention to in terms of setting off a nuclear exchange?

01:20:36.300 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick.

01:20:48.300 I like to be prepared.

01:20:50.300 That's why I remember 988 Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline.

01:20:54.300 It's good to know, just in case.

01:20:56.300 Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a trained responder, anytime.

01:21:01.300 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded by the government in Canada.

01:21:05.300 Thank you very much.

01:21:06.300 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - February 11, 2026

Is This The End of Humanity？ - Eric Weinstein

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript