Speech Was a Bundle, and the Internet Unbundled It

Eric Weinstein's fourth appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast opens with a blunt question. Weinstein often says humans have to get off this planet, yet he rarely talks about intelligent life elsewhere. Does he wonder about it? He does, he says, but he tries not to wonder in a particular way. Speculating about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and space aliens is, in his view, a recreation for when things are not going well. He is more worried that the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion: people cannot quite believe enough to go to church, synagogue, or mosque, so they take up a theory that resembles the coding they do at work.

The more interesting tell, he argues, is what happens in listeners' heads the moment he says we have to leave Earth. A huge number of people assume he means faster-than-light travel, which itself assumes an Einsteinian spacetime that some small adjustment then breaks. "It shows me that our failure to imagine what could be being said is profound," he says. As a mental exercise he asks Fridman to think about worlds with more than one temporal dimension — something almost nobody studies, because most of mathematics sits in Euclidean signature, and the Lorentzian case of one time plus space would be an obscure curiosity if relativity had never arrived.

He compresses a large chunk of modern physics into garlic bread and chewing gum. Open your mouth and the gum between your lips can form a minimal surface, an elliptic object. Pop it and the sound travels by a wave equation, which is hyperbolic. The garlic breath then diffuses toward your companion by a heat equation, which is parabolic. Mathematicians spend much of their time in the elliptic case; physicists live in the hyperbolic one. Extra time dimensions fall outside almost everyone's training. To make the strangeness concrete, he restages a New York meeting: Third Avenue, 34th Street, the 17th floor, noon. Then he trades the height coordinate for a second time and asks Fridman to meet him at 5 p.m. *and* 12 noon on the same corner.

He takes off a Fitbit, puts it on Fridman's empty wrist, and jokes that Fridman can now live in two spatial and two temporal dimensions while Weinstein, stuck with four spatial ones, is frozen. Behind the gag is a claim about geometric unity: 2-2, 3-1, 1-3, 0-4, and 4-0 are sectors of the theory, each with some physical reality. We happen to live in a 1-3 sector, one time and three spaces. When talk turns to Pentagon UFO videos, he is less interested in the crafts than in the trust cost. Trained skeptics had the rug pulled; the door is now open to every stupid theory, including "my aunt saw a ghost." He does not think the government really exists at the moment. The line comes from Michael Teitelbaum, formerly of the Sloan Foundation, who once asked him what made him think two offices had ever coordinated. War, Weinstein says, forced a government of people, mission, capacity, and ideology; after 1945 that coherence mostly decayed. His analogy is a house he bought whose plans were never updated. One switch is labeled "privacy." He still does not know whether it turns on an electromagnetic field or drops lead shielding. The people who inherited these structures have no idea why their grandparents built them.

The shift Weinstein thinks the public slept through is simple. Electronic and digital speech dwarfs print and shouting in a park, and because there is no public option, every important conversation now goes through a private company. Someone named Sundar, Jack, or Mark controls whether you can speak, how that speech appears, and whose material is weighted more highly. Silicon Valley, he says, wears a libertarian and progressive sheen at Burning Man, then imposes speech rules on everyone who is not in the elite, because people are too busy making money to uphold the values they advertise.

Fridman asks what the ideal of free speech even means. Weinstein is tired of being lectured by people who do not grasp how much power the Supreme Court has to work with abstractions. He distinguishes the letter of the law from its spirit. Speech that matters should be free at the level of ideas; he is not claiming a right to endanger someone's life or dump their private information. The court, in his view, should abstract that idea-level freedom and impose it on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon as infrastructure. He likes the search-and-seizure analogy: if you type private data at home and store it on someone else's server, does the protected perimeter stop at the house, or does the password extend "your house" to the disk outside it? Internet hyenas, his name for people with ready-made answers, love to say it is a private company that can do whatever it wants. Courts exist, he replies, to decide what the abstraction is, the way *Griswold* found a penumbra because the Constitution contained too little to list every implied right.

Fridman was bothered when Amazon kicked Parler off its cloud. In his mind, the infrastructure on which competing platforms can exist deserves a different speech standard than the platforms themselves. Cutting the substrate kills competition among tools and among communication frameworks, and that felt more dangerous. Weinstein first offers the hyena answer — build your own Amazon — then grants that it is shallow and also not wholly empty, because the game has layers. He points to sex work rather than politics. Ashley Matthews, the woman behind Riley Reid, told him she could not get a Mailchimp account. Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration, payday lenders, and inflated credit-card chargeback rates are, in his telling, an unofficial harassment policy. Legal businesses get squeezed by finance when someone powerful simply dislikes them.

He suspects Davos coordination, including "Build Back Better," is partly about treating American extremism as a Republican problem. He thinks the GOP did get extreme under Trump, and that this was a response to how extreme Democrats became under Clinton, Obama, and Hillary. On Trump's Twitter ban, he asks a practical question: if Twitter had refused, what were the odds the antitrust division would arrive at full force? He imagines the hymnal: we are all committed to free speech, but we have to draw a line on extremism. Violence, he says, is overplayed as a universal charge. Then he turns on Fridman's generation. People in their mid-twenties to late forties have never seen functional institutions; those institutions have been compromised for so long that "you've probably never seen an adult." An adult, as he defines it, weighs the future beyond a single lifespan, knows how to get things done, is not addicted to punishment, and prefers breaking ground to rent-seeking. Elon Musk, told he was the world's richest person, said that was interesting and went back to work. Weinstein once noted that the world's richest person knows what a Lagrangian is; Musk returned a pun on potentials. The hyenas, he predicts, will call Musk a fraud who pumps his stock. His reply: shut up and look at the world seriously. The idealism of every era, in a line he repeats, is "the cover story of its greatest thefts," and Silicon Valley's abundance talk is Marc Andreessen's software eating the world.

Weinstein takes his phone off airplane mode, photographs Fridman, and tweets it. That picture plus a scrap of text, if the stats are honest, reaches just under half a million accounts, then more via sharing, some of them dead, so nobody really knows how far it went. "The key issue with that tweet is that that is a non-local phenomenon," he says. Someone in Uganda is reading it at the same time as someone in Uruguay. There is no known solution for that many people having non-local reach, because locality, friction, and several other properties were packed into the implicit nature of speech inside the Constitution.

If speech is a bundle, digital life unbundled it. The features we counted on to retard its impact are gone, and nobody has the courage to ask whether the First Amendment still applies in the same way. Either we amend the Constitution or we abstract it properly; we are doing neither, only looking backward. He uses firearms: nobody loading a musket imagined a Gatling gun on the field. Fridman agrees that a freedom foundational to the country is changing completely, and still feels it was wrong to ban Trump — even while granting that incitement, if real, is a different case. Some Parler users were scheduling physical meetings. Weinstein pulls the discussion back to the abstraction: extract the bundle into the digital era. He has ideas, but the more important point is that he is not welcome in mainstream media. Those outlets, he says, tend a gated institutional narrative in which MSNBC talks to CNN about what was in the *New York Times* as covered by the *Washington Post* — professional wrestling, the Undertaker against Hulk Hogan.

The center, left and right, is in the process of stealing the wealth that was built up, and it has organized the extremes into two laughing teams he has named Mangosteen and Walkerston. Almost no one outside that complex can earn a living watching the mad people play. In finance, when price action makes no sense, someone sometimes says it is just the locals stealing from each other. That, he claims, is the national picture: team captains sponsored by the center as a distraction while they steal the silver and cut the paintings out of the frames. Long-form podcasting is almost the only remaining sandbox, protected in part by RSS, which is why Joe Rogan's Spotify deal is a tense dance. Along the way he coins a dark joke about "fuck-you money": many tech billionaires do not have it, because FU money has to insulate everything you care about, not just you, and children plus private security change the number.

The war, Weinstein says, is on academic freedom. The old bargain was that society trusted its elite. The new mood is populist: you want to lord it over us. Tenure is deferred forever, then confined to a tiny micro-subject; grants are controlled; teaching loads are stacked. "If we don't like who you are, we'll make your life absolutely impossible." Peer review, which he calls a disaster, replaced genuine freedom. Funding ceased to guarantee that you could do research no matter what you said. People will not refuse a diversity-and-inclusion loyalty oath when money is attached. The whole point of academic freedom, borrowing a line he attributes to Ralph Gomory of the Sloan Foundation and IBM Research, was that top minds would have a billionaire's freedom on a much smaller scale. Lose that freedom and you lose the only prize those minds actually value. Weinstein puts his ability to raise a middle finger as an American almost above everything else.

Fridman names another way freedom leaks: not a cage, but a scare that shrinks the option set. Banning Trump or Parler plants a little doubt in millions of technical people and entrepreneurs. Weinstein presses a related test. How certain are you the COVID virus did not come from the Wuhan BSL-4 lab — and notice that both of you are supposed to say, robotically, that the lab idea is a discredited conspiracy. He should be tweeting about Jeffrey Epstein all the time, he says, and asking where the financial records and SEC filings are, and whether any intelligence service will go on the record. He praises the 1971 Media, Pennsylvania break-in by the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI as disciplined civil disobedience, the kind of risk that earns a right to blow a lid off. He is not volunteering to break into anything. He would be satisfied to learn that what controls public life is incentive structures, selective pressure, emergence, a domestic intelligence program, or penetration by China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. He just wants an explanation of things like the Portland courthouse firebombing, which is not normal, while cable news plays what he calls the Shaggy defense: it wasn't me.

Asked to honor Aaron Swartz, he starts with JSTOR. Taxpayers pay for research; researchers do the work for companies that then charge thirty dollars an article to read what the public already funded, and failing to cite those articles is treated as a violation. "Fuck JSTOR, fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer. Who the fuck are these people?" He believes in great-man and great-woman history, in editors over peer reviewers, in letting wrong things into the literature, and in gatekeeping driven toward zero because distribution is cheap. Blind review, especially of the young by the old, hands competitors the right of first look. He tells the Italian legend of the Mugnaia, the miller's daughter who seemed to consent to the lord's mythical first night, hid a dagger, and killed him. That, he says, is the spirit required now: resist the *droit du seigneur* of first look. The Matthew principle (to him who has, more will be given) and the Matilda principle (work by women attributed to men) are not new; older scientists laugh that science proceeds funeral by funeral. The revolutionary act is to stop living like that.

"We are the product of our trauma," Weinstein says. When people take countermeasures against forces that look imaginary, they are often replaying things that actually happened. He has watched the system rewrite the lives of the minds he is counting on to cure disease, build industries, and keep the country safe. Then he drops the line that still sounds like a conspiracy even when he says it: the first person outside himself to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein. "How did he know I was working on this? I don't know." He was pushed to talk to Epstein as one of the only people who could help. He notes that his old conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel met in a hall he believes was built with Epstein's money, and he has wondered whether Jewish students at Harvard all passed through that bottleneck.

Hanging around scientists, he thinks, was not the same program as compromising politicians, businesspeople, and entertainment figures. Two different programs ran through one individual. He found Epstein glib rather than smooth, his mysticism meretricious, with a talent for deflecting any conversation that might reveal he did not know what he was talking about. Whenever the rubber was about to hit the road, it never did. Close friends did not know what Weinstein was working on; Epstein apparently did. As for the U.S. government, the general case is zero interest in him, less than zero. Behind a half-silvered mirror you see only your own reflection, but your intuition can still hold.

Fridman leans toward Epstein as a source of evil rather than a front for something underneath. Weinstein says their Bayesian priors were trained by different lives. If you share Sam Harris's fear that people fill their heads with nonsense, you will want order and you will watch people build castles in the air and then move in. Coming from a progressive family that learned what it feels like when the government really does send spies, run disinformation, and smear you, you acquire a Howard Zinn understanding. Both have merit; the skill is knowing when to express more Harris and when to express more Zinn. People see faces in clouds, and there is also tremendous pressure not to see conspiracies even though conspiracies are more common than anti-conspiracy rhetoric admits. Outside the NSF, NIH, Howard Hughes, and the Department of Energy, hungry theorists were told that if the system had become too timid to fund something truly new, Jeffrey Epstein was your guy. You get called to the great man's house. When you are starved, someone shows you a feast; when you are dehydrated, someone mentions a well. His demand is crude: get money into the science system so that "super creeps" are not the ones learning secrets ahead of time. Without this country, he tells the scientific establishment, you would be speaking German.

Weinstein built a channel, he says, because it is much harder to roll someone with a large following in an alley. He did not want celebrity; he thinks he may be the math Ph.D. with the most Twitter followers. Fridman notes that Joe Rogan let a lot of people through a gate — Roger Penrose, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Abby Martin, Bari Weiss, and Fridman himself — which is exactly why people are angry at him. Fridman now walks around with a duffel of equipment and has something like CNN's reach to people who matter, without a board, shareholders, or SEC and FCC filings. How do you control that? "The best answer they have is, well, we just have to destroy reputations." Weinstein will fight general reputational attack not because nobody deserves mud, but because the tool is too powerful to hand to CNN, MSNBC, Princeton, Harvard, and the State Department. He does not see why people with good ideas must lead perfectly clean lives. Avi Loeb, he notes, dismissed Elon Musk as "the guy who smoked weed." Weinstein's counter: you should be allowed to be messy, even to have consensual drug-filled orgies. "Respectability is the unique prison where all of the gates are open and the inmates beg to stay inside."

Better to have bad people in the system, he argues, than to no-platform everyone beyond the pale, because the latter is too simple a silencing technique. He announces a new policy: he does not care what his friends have done; he will not disavow them. Maybe they did the wrong thing; he often does not know. What is friendship worth if it fails at that moment? After allegations around Brian Callen, a man he had known only briefly in Los Angeles, he still refuses the ritual. Everyone is entitled to friends because isolated people are a danger we cannot afford. If friends do terrible things, you raise it privately. Even his hypothetical — if he learned Fridman were selling heroin to elementary students — would not produce a public disavowal. Mass murderers get more dangerous as they become more isolated. Isolated people, in a heavily armed society, are among the most dangerous things we can create.

He once came downstairs to a hotel dinner and found Kevin Spacey at the table. They talked specifically about Spacey being canceled; Weinstein will not recount it, and he does not think the world has heard that story because Spacey has to be outgrouped. Do we disavow the space program because it touched Wernher von Braun, or quantum mechanics because Pascual Jordan and Werner Heisenberg passed through it? Is a theorem false because its author murdered a child? Humans are humans. Even the most oppressed people, now fetishized as oracles of lived experience, are not necessarily good. Everyone is entitled to a hypocrisy budget, a mendacity budget, an aggression budget. Purging people who have not blown through those budgets is the problem.

He asks whether everything in the *National Enquirer* is false. The John Edwards extramarital-child story, he believes, was broken there; the *Times* could then report the claim without substantiating it. Why are some people entitled to talk to everyone and others to no one? That, he says, is how the Catholic Church used to issue indulgences. He used to appear on NPR and the *NewsHour* and place stories in the *Post* and the *Times*; the circle has tightened. It does not matter how many times Joe said the N-word, any more than you can unprove a theorem because the Unabomber proved it. Charles Manson's "Look at Your Game Girl," he insists, is a genuinely good song. The purge of badness is like teenage cutting: destroying ourselves in search of perfection. If we silence everyone a laser beam can be pointed at, "kiss the whole thing goodbye."

Alex Jones, James O'Keefe, the *National Enquirer*: the method, Weinstein says, is to ask what you are long and what you are short. A mutual fund is all long; a hedge fund does relative-value trades, long Microsoft and short Google because one is unfairly maligned and the other over-loved. A reporter who cannot name one good thing Donald Trump did is not a reporter. He even asks what Hitler did that was good, and answers with the Rosenstrasse protest, in which non-Jewish women campaigned to have their Jewish men returned from almost-certain death. He is not celebrating Hitler; he is rejecting the idea that everything a hated person does is a lie and everything is evil. That simplicity of mind, he says, is one humanity cannot afford. Is Google or Amazon evil for selling *Mein Kampf*? Should a scholar lose a job for using the N-word? "Come on, grow the hell up."

Allegations, he adds, are now cheap, so he does not treat every set of them as binding. Speech itself can be modeled as mutual manipulation; Fridman still wants a threshold of respect for common humanity. Weinstein recalls an anti-pornography documentary, *Rated X*, whose conceit was to put pornographers on camera with no commentary and let them talk. He has spoken with Stefan Molyneux, who makes good points and bad points, often in bad ways; Weinstein feels no duty to give him a Portal episode, but he did not want him banned from social media. Many bans, he suspects, happen because people worry a speaker is right rather than wrong.

Curtis Yarvin is the hard case. He says many interesting things and many horrible, stupid, provocative ones. Weinstein has not invited him on and has not sworn he never will. The real question is how much work you have to put into reading Yarvin before you can talk about "the problem of Curtis Yarvin." Smart people in Silicon Valley discuss him in hushed tones and file the asinine, dangerous remarks under "that's Curtis." Weinstein expects more care from someone that insightful. He keeps meeting vapid blanket claims — vaccines are 100 percent safe, believe all women, climate science is settled — that later retreat into something modest, a move he calls Martin Baily: "no more police" meaning only that police should not do mental-health duty. He has little interest in putting a man who seems giddy about who makes good slaves on his show. The metaphor he lands on is puffer fish: you can eat it, a little of the poison organ tingles the tongue, but he does not know how to serve Yarvin. Too much poison organ, not enough fish.

Michael Malice has changed Weinstein's mind; he would now call him a friend and thinks he is, underneath, a genuinely kind person, with real care for the powerless. The first time Weinstein met Yarvin, Yarvin introduced himself as the most right-wing person Weinstein had ever met. The conversation, Weinstein felt, was already over: theatrical in a way that blocks connection. Malice can be an intermediary. Weinstein's friendship rule still applies. For Yarvin he remains an acquaintance who hangs around people Weinstein knows, intermingled past the point of plating.

Fridman asks about the state of the Intellectual Dark Web, the phrase Weinstein coined. It never existed, Weinstein says. What he learned in the internet age is the desire to pin people down: who is in it, what are the criteria. He understands the demarcation game. The point of the game is to make everything outside the line instantly null and void. So he refused to say who was in, what it was, or that Bari Weiss's article was definitive. He did not want those twilight photographs; a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer decided everyone would be shot at dusk. He did not even want to do the article. Bari convinced him. She was right, he was wrong. The key point is that nothing can grow in this environment. "There's a reason we're not building." They have not found a way to grow anything organic, good, and decent that is needed right now.

For him the term meant people who point at the elephant in the room, or at the emperor with no clothes, and who are more interested in seeing the totality of elephants than in spotting the other guy's while missing their own. They were not an institutional base, so examining their own hypocrisy was not the highest priority. That is where friendship comes in, and where Sam Harris turning an imaginary club membership into "the IDW" produced, in Weinstein's view, some very silly talk. Integrity, as currently confused, means calling out your friends in front of the world. He chooses friends carefully. If you want to recuse him as a source because he will not throw those friends under the bus, exit the feed. He knew they were all flawed. He loves people who have to earn a living even if you call them grifters; he loves that Trump did not start new wars; he loves people who fight structural oppression without believing it is hiding everywhere. Empty the magazine of prerecorded clips — both-sides, loony-left campus madness — and then have a conversation. Labels, as Fridman's son put it, should be resisted and cannot be done without. Generalizations, like effective theories in science, have to mean something without becoming so broad they mean nothing or so rigid they fail the first test.

Weinstein is astounded that people with independent means are too demotivated to build new structures, while the people who want to build them are often wild-eyed and underfunded. A third-year chemistry student in South Dakota with a great idea is not the same as someone who has already proven themselves, has billions softly circled, and wants to know what a new university would take to protect academic freedom. He imagines Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg founding a university-cum-social-media entity whose purpose is to keep academic freedom from perishing, with a governance system that locks the founders out. Instead, people with brains and resources would rather sit in the current system and figure out where to flee if it comes apart. Fridman offers DeepMind and Boston Dynamics as attempts at radical work. Weinstein's reply is that innovation is being treated as dessert after an insoluble main course of self-perfection.

The United States, in his old stagnation thesis, is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise of unending innovation. Brilliant minds will kill each other without growth. Growth is like an immune system: pathogens are always present, but without growth you cannot fight them, and right now they are spreading. The system expects growth and has been starved of it. The madness people notice is the immune failure, not a new disease. Diversity matters to him for that reason, and for geopolitics. Ashkenazi Jews, Chinese, Indians, and Japanese are known to be strong in technical fields; those communities are thoroughly drilled. Under a Pareto idea of diminishing returns, a community that has never been mined may yield amazing people first, the way undrilled ground may hold oil. He wants to displace reliance on military competitors in Asian labs by putting women, African Americans, and Latinos into those roles, and to pay them market rates instead of using visas as a substitute for payment.

He thinks the analytic contribution of African Americans to music may be fungible to science — not as proven fact, but as a bet he wants stress-tested. He is excited by the image of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field theory, or Art Tatum on protein folding. If you really believe in structural oppression, he says, you do not want affirmative action as currently practiced; you want huge resources so people can get themselves into position. He wants Klein bottles as Easter eggs in rap videos. He wants STEM recruits paid, not used as cheap substitutes for white men who have already learned there is no money in the fields. Baby boomers who cannot see the mess should be gone from the universities. Diversity and inclusion should be driven by greed for the country's future, not by shame and guilt, which he thinks is destroying the social fabric. Fridman calls it the best diversity statement he has heard.

Weinstein pretends to be an economist in the hope that economists will object, so he can advance gauge-theoretic, field-theoretic economics — an innovation he says happened about twenty-five years ago and that the profession has failed to acknowledge. He does not think economists understand what a price index measuring inflation is, or what a quantity index measuring GDP is. They do not grasp the basics of index construction, so they cannot review the work. Imagine every price and every quantity of output is the same at year-end as at year-start, even though prices and quantities meandered during the year. Standard practice would report a price index of 1.0 and a quantity index of 1.0. That, he says, is clearly wrong. The economy is curved, not flat; path dependence is the cycling "problem" the field needs to understand, and economists who treat it as a bug are the flat-earth society of market analysis.

Bob and Carol run one hedge fund, Ted and Alice another. The women are chief investment officers; the men are chief marketing officers, raising money and stopping redemptions. Both funds end the year with the same asset prices and the same exposures. Carol is crushing it: every security she buys goes up. Bob is a disastrous marketer, drunk, off-color, hemorrhaging redemptions, so the fund does not grow. Alice cannot buy a base hit, but Ted's marketing brings subscriptions and halts withdrawals. Price indices, Weinstein says, should track how Carol and Alice are compensated; quantity indices should track Bob and Ted. A third couple, Tristan and Isolde, sits in cash with no subscriptions or redemptions: no bonuses, but nobody fired. Even with closed loops, the path tells you who did what. Economists, he claims, do not see that this is what their indices were for, or that ordinal agents can change preferences and still have a Konüs cost-of-living adjustment. François Divisia's work since 1925 already captures such dynamics; the profession has not understood what a Divisia index truly is.

A field-theoretic subject would treat the representative consumer as a probability distribution over possible consumers, weighted by the chance of drawing each one. "We should not have a single gauge of inflation... any more than you should be able to say it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on Earth yesterday." Because economic theory missed the right marginal revolution, it missed that the differential calculus of markets is gauge theory, not ordinary calculus. Finance already stumbled onto stochastic calculus; modern theory still sits on the wrong version. Gold is a theory in the same sense. Physical gold is up and down quarks, gluons, electrons, photons, occasional weak decays — all gauge theories. Markets, he says, come from the same mathematics. A Bitcoin transaction is a locally enforced conservation law and should rest on a different principle than a blockchain: tokens as excitations on a network of nodes, custody moving the way you slide a glass across a table. Why alert the global community every time a token changes hands? Call a constructor on your glass and a destructor on mine at the same moment. Nature, the one system known never to throw an exception, already chose theory and geometry as her language. He wants credit shared with Malani, his coauthor on mid-1990s Harvard work that showed modern economic theory is a naturally occurring gauge theory and was then buried for reasons that, he says, make no analytic sense.

The abundance economy celebrated in what remains of Silicon Valley is, in his view, a threat. Software eating the world pushes private goods into public ones; public goods cannot keep price tied to value, so people produce enormous value and cannot capture it. That disaster, he argues, reduces human freedom. Satoshi's real innovation is locally, or semi-locally, enforced conservation, like gold, which is hard to create or destroy because it is made in stars and violent stellar events. Physics determines custodianship: what I no longer have, you now have. Match that abstraction. The blockchain is a vulnerability — the 51 percent problem, race conditions, and the rest — while gauge theory already solves these things somehow. He will stand by the claim that one of the greatest feats in the history of economic theory already happened and was instantly buried. "Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you." Fridman asks if he is Satoshi. He is not. He does not have that kind of ability. He does other things.

Weinstein has used April 1 to try to start a tradition: one day a year you can say heretical things without Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg boot you, and without someone's PR office calling. Mankind, he says, needs a jubilee from centralized control. He is considering releasing a printed version of the geometric-unity lecture on that date, in part because he finds it funny that physics claims it cannot decode video and must have a paper. There will be a steady stream of new complaints until the work fits a narrative they like. Working alone outside departments into his fifties, he kept the theory in pieces so it could not be steered; the pieces never got fully assembled. He has them, and some glue code — algebraic operations he has forgotten — may or may not be recovered by April 1. It is like a violinist who has not touched the instrument for fifteen years: the pieces are roughly there, the tone is off. He will get the ship to the harbor; a tugboat would help; if none arrives he will dock it himself.

If the theory is right, he does not know what it unlocks, which is why releasing it felt dangerous. If it is wrong, it will be the first fool's gold that really looks like a theory of everything — the iron pyrite of physics — and in his opinion physics has not even had fool's gold yet. Why does it look right? "It's way smarter than I am." In computer-science terms, theories accumulate technical debt: you commit crimes against reality and hope to pay them back later, which usually becomes check-kiting or a startup drowning in pivots and epicycles. Geometric unity feels like a summit. He is proud of the route. The summit cannot be his, any more than Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay created Everest. They found a way up.

He thinks the physics community has said many slightly wrong things that block progress. He does not believe there are three generations of matter, but two, plus a third collection that only looks like a generation at low energy. Chirality, matter knowing left from right, is in his view emergent rather than fundamental. Spacetime is not the fundamental geometric object; he calls that object the observers. Garrett Lisi gets many phenomenological hits — chirality, uniqueness from E8, Weyl fermions, Cartan connections joining Riemannian and Erlangen geometries, fermions quantized differently from bosons — but Weinstein does not think Lisi's theory works and says it has a simple mortal wound, using the Yang-Mills norm squared as a cost function the way a neural net would. String theory may have a renormalizable gravity, some black-hole results, and unexpected mathematical truths; he is underwhelmed given how many people worked on it and how little supports the everything-theory claim. He does not yet take Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata as a find, and he views Max Tegmark as a philosopher taking credit for Platonism. Loop quantum gravity grew from hopes in the GR community that have not shown particle-theoretic realism. The conceptual gap between an effective theory and a theory of everything is, he thinks, like Escher's drawing hands: how do two hands draw themselves into existence?

Asked for something beautiful an outsider could visualize, he holds up a scrunchie he picked up on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. The disks rotate independently. Rotate groups of them continuously but not uniformly and you are doing a gauge transformation on a torus, seen as a circle bundle over a one-dimensional spacetime that is itself a circle, with a little circle above every point. A rubber band around it is a function from the circle to the circle. Twist the scrunchie and the function is mostly constant, with a dip and return; you can transform the function and the derivative together so that the derivative still says zero. That is a gauge transformation: if a function was constant under one derivative, the new function is constant under the new derivative. In quantum electrodynamics, roughly, electrons are functions and photons are derivatives. A theory is the simultaneous shift of both so the underlying physics is unharmed. He offers to sit with Fridman for a little over two months and visualize the components rather than leaping straight to the full theory. Fridman takes the challenge. Weinstein then praises Fridman's hard-core streak in jiu-jitsu, guitar, and podcasting, held together with a public case for love. We had better get tougher, he says, or we will get into a world of pain, and it is good to have people who do not crack when it is time to lead.

Fridman invites Weinstein's son Zev in and asks what advice a flawed, mortal father has. Weinstein's first problem, he says, is that he has to stop giving quite so much advice. Early on he saw Zev's possibilities and challenges through his own childhood and did not want to doom him to the same outcomes. At fifteen, Zev has a better head and is better adjusted; Weinstein needs to recognize that the early job was done well enough. The advice that remains is a burden, not a slogan. Zev will need to be incredibly, even pathologically self-confident. The antidote is radical humility, carried on board, held in a dialectical tension that is never resolved. He will also have to forgive people who do not appreciate gifts that are clearly evident, because many will have to pretend not to see them. Seeing them would force a question about their whole approach to education, employment, or critical thinking. Forgive them, and realize you do not have to take care of them in order to survive.

Fridman turns the question around. Zev's newer view of parenting is that it is a task no human is really supposed to be prepared for. In Jewish tradition, the Torah and Talmud compare the parent's role to God's. No one is prepared to play God and create and guide a life, and we are forced into it anyway. Children have to budget for parental failure, because parents occupy a role they are not worthy of and devote themselves to it until it becomes who they are. Zev hopes to keep realistic expectations of a human being, not godly ones. He is glad his father has been open, has not pretended to be a god, and has been a guide who allows Zev to see himself. Under Weinstein's own teaching paradigm, Zev will have to guide himself; accurate self-sight is one of the greatest gifts in the room.

Weinstein does not buy the role he is supposed to fake. He remembers the mathematician David Kazhdan — their families had known each other in the Soviet Union — telling him that in the areas they were discussing, Weinstein was no longer the student but the teacher, a sentence he was not prepared to hear. He is now learning from Zev at an astonishing rate. At age four, Zev said things that sounded crazy and were entirely sensible; nobody else could put them together. Fridman thanks him, and thanks him for the watch. The episode began with a borrowed Fitbit as a joke about extra time dimensions. It ends as a gift between friends, with Weinstein's claim that the proudest achievement is, in a certain sense, not having taught his son, and having shared this much anyway.