The Great Nap Is Over

Lex Fridman opens in the early weeks of the coronavirus lockdown by asking whether World War II has anything to teach the present. Weinstein's first answer is collective action: the story that everyone should just do what they want and leave everyone else alone does not survive a global crisis. Fridman, whose grandfather served in the Soviet army, reaches for brotherhood and love under fire. Weinstein will not let him put Stalingrad and Covid in the same breath. Newlyweds in Russia still visit war memorials on their wedding day; Americans, he says, are only now restarting history.

On a Russian program he had already given the interval a name: the Great Nap, seventy-five years with, by historical standards, very little realized global tragedy. The hydrogen bomb was built during that nap. People felt fear; they knew anxiety. Most of the species' violent potential stayed potential energy. That is his quarrel with Steven Pinker's optimism. If you count the realized kinetic variables — longevity, poverty, deaths in war — things got much better for a long time. That *is* the nap. It is not the whole ledger.

Fragility grew in the same years. Dependence on electronic systems, vulnerability to disruption, supply chains pulled taut around a peacetime hospital census: the destructive potential skyrocketed while the button stayed unpushed. Bad news, Weinstein notes, arrives on a Wednesday. Good news bleeds in. When HIV went from a death sentence to a disease people could live with, it would have been a civic event if it had happened on a single day. It did not, so nobody celebrated. The moon landing did. So did the American-Soviet handshake in orbit. Those were Wednesdays. Covid, he suggests, is how a society wakes up when jubilation is not enough to get its attention.

Asked how bad the suffering will get, Weinstein says he is not smart enough to figure this one out. He is watching two storylines that refuse to collapse into each other. In one, doctors and nurses are using food-packaging lids as masks, and people are dying in triage who did not need to. In the other, ventilators are sitting somewhere unused, masks have not been released, and hospital-ship beds are empty. Both feel true. In any standard logic they cannot both be true. He cannot get either story to quiet down.

His working judgment is the sentence that sounds like a contradiction because it is one: the crisis is much more serious than people had understood, and not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be, *at the same time*. What is missing is an interpretation layer. Nobody is teaching the public how to read the data. The personal-protective-equipment shortage, he suspects, is a jurisdictional fight and a question of who pays, not a question of whether the gear exists. Something is wildly off in the country's ability to know where it is.

Fridman keeps returning to the quieter suffering: millions of jobs, perhaps half of small businesses, a numbness that will wear off into fear, then panic, then anger, especially if elections slip. Weinstein does not dismiss the causal chain from recession to depression to armed conflict. He also cannot stop seeing the lockdown as an experiment nobody would have been allowed to run — emissions, traffic, the vulnerability of retail as Amazon strengthened. One bright spot, if it is a bright spot: people ordered indoors may feel entitled to solidarity, and the usual American sermon of tough love after a layoff may find less of an audience. Fellow countrymen, he wonders, might start to mean something again to people who never wore a uniform.

Fridman's deepest fear is procedural: delayed elections, damaged democratic machinery, fear turning into anger. Weinstein's reply is that Americans already treat the founding documents as museum pieces. How often is the Constitution even amended? In the Jewish calendar there is a day, Simchat Torah, when a congregation takes a fragile, hand-calligraphed scroll — valuable, easy to ruin — and dances with it, as if Ginger Rogers were being led by Fred Astaire. That, he says, is how you become part of a country. You do not leave the thing in a glass case for the great-great-grandparents.

He is not predicting a coup. He is warning that this might be the year the museum comes alive in the wrong way: an election delayed, extraordinary powers used, some unmistakable signal that you are living through history rather than curating it. A person, he thinks, should amend the Constitution once or twice in a lifetime so the distance to the foundational text does not become permanent. Two generations on top still feel bought in. Three below are watching their parents ride the tricycle that was supposed to be passed down, streamers on the handlebars, still ringing the bell. Do you never get bored? Do you never pass the torch? Do you even want this?

The hunger for leadership, both men agree, is real and currently unanswered. Weinstein goes "wildly patriotic" on purpose. There is a dormant American population that loves country, freedom, and not being told what to do, and that would empty its hoarded supplies if the right person asked for PPE for nurses and physicians on the front line. What the country got instead was a surgeon general telling people masks do not really work, so please save them for professionals. Weinstein's rewrite is simple: masks work, they protect other people from you more than they protect you, and the person taking a huge viral load in a hospital has volunteered for sleepless nights. Level with people. Stop lying. They will hand the gear over.

Fridman presses the obvious next question: Weinstein has a platform, so why is he still shooting in from outside? Weinstein's answer is the gated institutional narrative, which he shortens to GIN. A hundred-year-old newspaper with almost no circulation still counts inside the club. A large internet show does not, even if more people watch it than watch Bill Maher or *The View*. The game is simple. If something happens outside the club, the institutions can pretend it never happened. Audience size is not the kiss that matters. The kiss is whether you are part of the interoperable, institution-friendly discussion, and whether, in an interview, you will file a flight plan and not deviate from it. He will not. That is why he is not allowed in the amplified conversation.

He also does not want the presidency. What he wants is to name the people currently holding the microphones. This, he says, is the last hurrah of the elderly, centrist kleptocrats. Elderly, as a joke that is also a date: people born at least a year before he was, on the cusp of the Boomer/Gen X divide. After Klobuchar dropped out, five septuagenarians born between 1941 and 1949 — Warren, Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg, Trump — were still running, any of whom would have been the oldest president at inauguration. Centrist, because he treats the mainstreams of both parties as one aggregate he sometimes calls the looting party. Kleptocracy, because the country has been treated like a trough: silver stolen, pictures cut from frames, elders living it up in a way that does not make sense to anyone underneath.

Then the list of people who should resign and will not: the head of the CDC, the surgeon general, Trump, Pelosi, de Blasio. Fridman says that is not how revolutions work — you do not wait, you step up and inspire the alternative. Weinstein thinks the visuals have not arrived yet. John Prine had just died of Covid; that was not enough. Americans were not even shown the falling man on 9/11. Something in the media changed after Vietnam, and people are now incensed that they cannot feel their own lives hard enough to act. Take over a few universities, he says. Forty years ago the median university president was fifty-one. Now the chairs are almost all Baby Boomer. Roger Penrose, in his late eighties on Weinstein's show, would not point to a successor. People treat you as crazy, Weinstein adds, for caring what the world looks like after you are dead.

One hopeful observation: the freaks, weirdos, mutants, gadflies, and, he adds, grifters were very often the earliest people on the coronavirus. They had already paid a social price. Being called xenophobic or a conspiracy theorist was not a new cost. Everyone inside an institution was terrified of looking like Chicken Little, which is how a mayor ends up telling a city to celebrate Chinese New Year in Chinatown. Weinstein reaches for Kurt Vonnegut's *Harrison Bergeron*, in which the smartest people are interrupted by a loud noise every few seconds so they cannot finish a thought. Belonging to an institution is a little like wearing that handicap. The surgeon general is the worst case: too many stakeholders, too much to protect, so the person tasked with telling the country the truth is the person least able to say it.

Socially minded friends told him they understood the mask episode perfectly: of course masks work, but officials were trying to stop a run on inventory. Weinstein's reply is not a policy tweak. It is a lab rule. You do not get to invent scientific fiction in order to run a social program. Get out of the lab. You are constitutionally incapable of being around a lab. Today's mask story is tomorrow's opening for the next fabrication, and the debt compounds the way skipped tests compound in a codebase.

Fridman objects, gently. Panic is always around the corner; one hundred percent honesty with a populace is not obviously the right move. Weinstein says he is not a child. In war you do not hand the enemy the battle plan. What he is saying is that the quality of your lies has to be very high, and they have to be public-spirited. A Harvard math classmate who had actually held a job put it this way: you can be friends with your boss, but only if you are doing a good job at work. The analog for a surgeon general or a CDC director is the same. If you are doing a terrible job, you resign. The next person says they inherited a mess, named their conditions — clear authority, resources, the freedom to level with the country — and those wishes were granted. Sleeves up Monday morning. Come back in two weeks. That, he says, is how you do it.

Why is basic competence missing? Because the nap lasted long enough for memory to fade. The conversation is recorded on Passover, and Weinstein leans on that on purpose. Every year the same story: there is a time when you do not wait for the bread to rise. Even people who lived through comfort deserve to know what it feels like to leave everything that has become comfortable and unworkable. Fridman finds it sad that comfort would make great, risk-taking leaders impossible. Weinstein says we already know what those people sound like. If Jocko Willink threw his hat in, the country would understand that the party was over and that 4:30 a.m. had returned. Alex Honnold on a rock face is the same species: a serious person who cannot afford your nonsense. Why do those people show up in climbing and not in national leadership? Because those skills were useless during the nap, and at the tail end of the nap they would get you fired.

The mechanism is a peacetime army. If you are a general whose main activity is war games, you can Moneyball the scoring until the skill that wins on paper diverges from the skill that wins a war. Promotion then tracks the proxy, not the thing the proxy was built to stand in for. Fridman, who cannot sit still inside a nap — guitar, jiu-jitsu, the podcast, taking risks — thinks a dormant public still wants to excel. Weinstein thinks the malware between American ears is different from Soviet double-mindedness, and that calling for a revolt on Joe Rogan already sounded quixotic. His practical version is smaller and ruder: mutiny inside existing institutions, inject fifteen or twenty percent disagreeable, dissident, aggressive loner mutant freaks, and stop pretending that everything good comes out of a twelve-hour inclusive meeting.

Weak leaders, he says, need to be removed and replaced with people more dangerous than the ones in the chairs — or you build new institutions, and good luck. A provost asked how research is going at Princeton will say it has perhaps never been better, in every field. That is nonsense 24/7, and everyone is used to it. The hope he will actually name is narrower: even the gadflies and grifters beat the institutional people, because the institutional people were playing with a giant mental handicap. That is not a hymn to cranks. It is an indictment of the handicap.

The conversation turns to the Oxford lecture Weinstein has just posted: Geometric Unity, thirty-plus years of work, a theory of everything. How does it feel? The great academic sin is to look like a non-serious person with delusions, skipping incremental publication and the departments that own the problem. He tried working inside that world. The most senior respectable people at the most senior respectable places struck him as functionally insane, the way a CDC director can be functionally stupid — recommendations based not on belief but on what the role is supposed to say. He used to carry the number fourteen as a closely guarded secret: four dimensions of space and time plus ten extra dimensions of rulers and protractors, or, for the cool kids, symmetric two-tensors. Many of us, he says, are in closets that have nothing to do with sexual orientation. He had stalking-horse interests so he could hide the real one.

Why now, on a lockdown April Fool's stretch? Covid, for him, is the end of the Great Nap. He had already tried seven years earlier at Oxford and it was too early. Two fears sat on the earlier attempt: that the idea would not be heard, and that he would be disconnected from his own work — ridiculed, immediately "improved," found to be derivative of a 1957 paper, policed with little-known regulations enforced against him alone. He does not believe a final theory can necessarily be reached inside the political economy of academics. The selective pressures of how scholars are tortured by each other, paid, and granted freedom will eliminate the people who would make real progress. Andrew Wiles isolating himself for Fermat is the romance; the first public steps are hell, and Wiles's first proof, Weinstein recalls, was unsalvageable. A second proof with Richard Taylor carried the day. The scale of critique coming for Geometric Unity, he warns, is not something outsiders should assume he already agrees with. Ask him before you decide he shares the community's procedures.

The goal of the theory, offered as if for a book called *Geometric Unity for Idiots*, is to start from something so bland it is as close to mathematical nothing as he can get. He cannot answer why there is something rather than nothing. If there must be a starting object, let it be a blank canvas: a four-dimensional manifold, the natural place for calculus and linear algebra to dance. Today's physics has a double origin story. General relativity is the canvas, gravity as the star, length and angle allowed to warp. The Standard Model is a foreign import: symmetries, three generations of sixteen particles, a Higgs field that arrives like a deus ex machina. Kaluza-Klein tried to grow one story from the other and did not work out. Geometric Unity is in that vein. The hard part, the Escher hands drawing each other, is whether the canvas can generate the artist, the brushes, and the paint. He will not do the religious version of who the artist is. He will say we may be the AGI trying to read our own source code.

The first technical debt of a four-dimensional canvas is Einstein's: flabby degrees of freedom are not enough, you need rulers and protractors. If you cannot choose a particular set, take the set of all of them. Four directions, four rulers, six possible angles: four plus four plus six is fourteen. That fourteen-dimensional world — *Y14* in his current naming — is a huge advance on the paycheck, because now you must explain why we do not perceive ten extra dimensions. His move is not to compactify them in the old style. It is to sample a four-dimensional filament inside the fourteen, a section of a bundle. More dimensions are not a gift unless you can get back down to the world we actually see.

Everything in the room, he reminds Fridman, is up quarks, down quarks, and electrons, stuck together with bosons. In ordinary physics those fermions come with spacetime indices and extra internal quantum numbers that give them personality. In fourteen dimensions he wants no internal quantum-number space at all — just spinors, unadorned. A manifold with length and angle, if it has no topological obstruction, comes with spinors whether you ordered them or not. They are, he says, the most important deep object he can tell you about: the panic room you find after you buy the house. They require seven hundred and twenty degrees of rotation to come back to normal. Dirac's string trick, or the Philippine wine-glass dance waitresses apparently learn, is the physical joke that makes the hidden space visible: over first, under second, drink without spilling, two full turns.

Dirac found them by taking a square root of the Klein-Gordon equation. Weinstein's construction takes the naturally occurring, naked spinors not on Y14 itself but on something closely tied to it that he calls the chimeric tangent bundle — the stand-in for the thing that should have had length and angle and just missed. Form spinors there, do not adorn them, pull the information back from fourteen down to four, and it miraculously looks like the festooned spinors of ordinary reality. The fourteen-dimensional world looks like four plus a ten-dimensional complement. That complement, a normal bundle, generates internal quantum numbers: charges of minus one-third or plus two-thirds, some quarks feeling the weak force and others not.

The census does not come out as three identical generations. You thought you needed three; you only got two. Then something he had never seen before broke apart on the journey, and one piece of it was another copy of what he already had two of. Two generations, plus an impostor third, plus a pile of unseen stuff with descriptions attached. Does it make falsifiable predictions? Yes, he says: the next matter you should see has particular properties that can be read off — weak isospin, weak hypercharge, responsiveness to the strong force. The one thing he cannot tell you is the energy scale. He is not a physicist, he repeats, not a quantum field theorist, and he does not know how you would look. Somebody else might.

Fridman wants a way in that is not just enjoying Weinstein's passion. Weinstein is impatient in a specific way. People ask him for a theory of everything when they have not digested the Dirac equation, which has been on the table since 1928. After Oxford, a *New Scientist* reporter covering a later version of the talk had never heard of it. That is not a knock on Fridman; almost nobody is caught up. It does not thereby become Weinstein's job to re-teach ninety years of physics every time. What he will do is replace the usual fog around gauge theory. Gauge theory, in his telling, is differentiation where the instantaneous rise-over-run is measured not from a flat horizontal but from a custom, endogenous reference level.

How high is Everest? People know the number. Above what? Sea level. Which sea, in landlocked Nepal? The imported reference is the geoid, and almost nobody who memorized the height knows what it is a height from. Standard calculus, he shows with a phone, measures a hand above a flat reference. Gauge theory lets the phone tilt; the reference level is chosen inside the theory. He has never heard anyone else teach it that way, and he is waiting for someone to jump out of the woodwork and say that this is, in fact, how you make Prometheus discuss fire with everybody else. Mathematicians and physicists, he thinks, have been trading Beethoven as sheet music because they cannot afford the orchestra. Visualize the actual models. Stop performing analogies.

For a finite syllabus he offers what his Portal community calls the graph-wall-tome project. One paragraph — from Edward Witten, almost all prose — claims to state humanity's deepest knowledge of the universe in three pointers: the Einstein field equation, the Dirac equation, and Maxwell. Those three equations sit on a wall at Stony Brook that Jim Simons funded, a gorgeous piece of art almost nobody knows is there. The owner's manual for the wall is Roger Penrose's *The Road to Reality*, a book written as if for no reader: too much refresh if you are a professional, apparently impenetrable if you are not. Find yourself in that transmission sequence, he tells Fridman, and join the Discord if you want a path with an endpoint instead of a vibe.

He also refuses to let the community date general relativity from the moment Einstein produced a divergence-free tensor later seen as the gradient of the Hilbert action. For Weinstein it began in 1913, with Einstein and Marcel Grossmann: this is differential geometry, and the final answer will look like curvature on one side and matter-energy on the other. That was enough. The Ricci version, the Einstein-tensor correction, the cosmological constant were walks along a path already chosen. He still has not decided which contraction his own construction should use — Einstein or Ricci — and he calls the choice a ship-in-a-bottle operator. The point of airing the disagreement is not pedantry. Do not assume, he says, that he mostly agrees with how the community handles these things. Try him. Ask first.

Fridman asks about Elon Musk, physics-engineering to Weinstein's physics-theory, and about getting off the planet. Weinstein calls Musk the other guy who is semi-serious about leaving; he counts two. Then the judgment that sounds ungrateful: Musk is not taking enough risk. Mars, the Moon, even Titan is not enough diversification. He also does not think Musk is fully serious about Mars. Mars is a narrative, a story to make the Moon jealous, a concrete tale to reacquaint a civilization with its need for space. What Musk showed is not that he is the most brilliant person on the planet. What he showed is that the rest of us forgot our capabilities. He is the one who kept the faith. Batteries are not sexy, so he put a car around them. That, to Weinstein, is how a sane person behaves. Everyone else looks insane.

The gap, he says, is not mainly money. It is cowardice: the fear that the era of Einsteins and Diracs is over and the rest of us are copyeditors. People with serious money are often not people whose middle finger you want to see; he wants to see Musk's. The nightmare is that we were supposed to have thousands of Musks, five deep, a cohort you could talk about in the context of peers. Instead we have Obi-Wan and Yoda after Order 66. A giraffe in the Arctic with no trees makes you ask about the neck. The filter he names is the distributed idea suppression complex. Musk snuck through while quality-adjustment was incomplete. Ask him on Rogan whether that is a joint, watch the stock price flinch, and you see the crazy-making machine that removes everyone else.

Where were those people supposed to come from? MIT and Harvard, Fridman says. Weinstein's name is Aaron Swartz. He wants MIT to go back to being Swartz's home. If you are the person who helped put a thirty-five-year sentence in that young man's face, you are not MIT; you are a traitorous, middlebrow, pencil-pushing fool who needs to get out of the president's chair. The people in those chairs are not there because they are uniquely evil. They wedded themselves to a system and adapted. They will not be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt. The institutions worth keeping, in his list, are Caltech, Reed, Deep Springs, MIT, and a part of Harvard — and when the sharp-elbow crowd comes for the sharp-mind crowd, the sharp minds are supposed to break the elbows.

He addresses MIT directly. You put a police car on the Great Dome. You built the Great Breast of Knowledge. You ran Tetris on the Green Building. They killed one of your own, and you cannot figure out how to defend Aaron Swartz? Fridman's preferred mechanism is to build an alternative so good that MIT has to change. Weinstein does not reject that. He rejects food fights and salt on the lawn. Do it through brilliance. Technical people, he says, act like a servant class: *get me two PhDs*. Become ungovernable as outdoor cats, not indoor ones. Super-capable people need to stop handing their power to a Geist or a committee. He is trying to lead a technical revolt, and he is furious at the story that Americans cannot do technical subjects so the family business must import cheap labor rather than pass the shop on. Fridman wants a better MIT without anger. Weinstein's shorter program is guts plus security: the freedom to refuse a diversity statement on a Friday and still have a job on Monday. Get out of my lab. It all begins from the middle finger.

Fridman quotes Nietzsche on fighting monsters and asks whether staring at institutional rot has damaged Weinstein's ability to see beauty. Weinstein says he is trying to save the buildings with a neutron bomb for the leadership class, not trash the universities. Professors will have to go back into training to remember how to be professors; they are cowards at the moment because if they are not cowards they are unemployed. Tenure, in practice, is not producing the fortitude Fridman hoped to find. Weinstein can be for inclusion and diversity and against Diversity and Inclusion as a trademarked movement — a sentence that would end a career inside the walls. Patience has a limit. String theory, counting from anomaly cancellation, is thirty-six years of nonsense he will not keep sitting through. Tom Lehrer was naughty because he was a badass; go break the law in a way filled with love, so that nobody wants to prosecute you.

Fridman then asks about the therapist story from the Jeffrey Epstein episode of *The Portal*. Weinstein will not go further than he already went. He was sent as a child to a broken person, was able to say no to the man, and was not able to say no to being sent back. The world had nuclear weapons for sexual misconduct and no language for "this is probably not a good role for you right now." After he complained carefully, he was returned to a second appointment with someone who now believed a child was about to tear down his career, who may have been near suicide, and who was furious that a "sacred confidence" had been breached. The academic Jennifer Freyd later gave him a name for the pattern: institutional betrayal, the trauma of being failed by something with a parental or fiduciary duty, which is not the same as being failed by a peer. He repeats a particular dance with authority: come in not following all the rules, then end up in a weird relationship with the chair.

A missing mask, a missing ventilator, a hospital that will not charge properly, a drug company that will not maximize benefit, a journalist who is not serving journalism: that is ubiquitous institutional betrayal. The early wound, he says, left him open to a thought most people find unbearable — that schools, hospitals, pharma, food, and the press could all be off at once, and that the common ideology might be growth. The institutions were built on growth. When growth left, the system promoted people who could keep quiet that the shop no longer worked. He calls them a privileged silent aristocracy: the people you can count on not to yell fire while the building burns. The psychological burden is huge. It is also, he admits, crushing to give up the warm blanket of MIT-as-family, especially after what the family did to Aaron Swartz.

Intellectually he cannot put the hope down; somebody has to carry the ledger. What he wants are specific acts of repair. Carol Greider coming forward to say she got a piece of the telomere story wrong and will not spend a career protecting the error. MIT saying Margo O'Toole was right about irreproducible work in David Baltimore's lab. An Aaron Swartz wing of computer science, or a Turing-Swartz college of computing; a Wu wing in physics; an Emmy Noether statue in front of math. That, he says, would be actual diversity and inclusion: celebrating the best people structural bigotry kept out, instead of being handed heroes and fumbling them into the trash. On everyone's cecum, in a line he knows is crude, he wants the tattoo: if you can read this, you are too close. He does not want vengeance on named presidents. He wants the rot cleared. The chairs are the problem more than the humans who currently warm them.

The Harvard story starts with coffee and Croatian friends, music and dance and math. An MIT instructor named Gordana asked, without smiling, whether she would see him tomorrow at the secret seminar. He thought it was a joke — his adviser running a closed meeting on a topic he cared about, possibly Chern-Simons. She gave a room number and a time. He arrived fifteen minutes early at a room in Harvard's Science Center, outside the math department. Empty. Then a graduate student walked in, did a double take, and the geometry and topology faculty filed in, each of them disconcerted. His adviser went white. The secret seminar was true. The department was running Rudolf's reindeer games, and he was not invited. That was the beginning of the odyssey in which publication, blind refereeing, and open transmission of scientific information revealed themselves, at the top, as the guest lobby of a hotel that also has a workers' cafe and a second set of corridors.

Fridman wants this to be a pocket of assholes you can swim around. Weinstein will not grant the map. The person who later rescued his PhD was one of the people who filed into that room. They know most of their children will not survive, and they cannot say so. Before the early 1970s a professor might have twenty students who all became professors with twenty students of their own; the powers of twenty do not fit in a steady-state world. The honest fix would be to shut most PhD programs and let a few top places populate teaching and research departments that do not mint more doctorates. Nobody wants that, because graduate students are cheap labor. The ruthless adaptation is interference competition: orcas covering a minke whale's blowhole. Universities make you unviable without them — grants, overhead, fringe rates. Douglas Prasher did foundational green-fluorescent-protein work, ran out of money, gave the research away, watched it win a Nobel, and drove a shuttle bus for thirty-five thousand a year. As an academic, Weinstein says, Prasher was dead for a long time. Weinstein's own problem was that he was not interested in dying.

His ambition now is to revolutionize a field with an h-index of zero, to show that the proxies are institutional nonsense. The Math Genealogy Project requires an adviser, so in one version he is his own adviser and the tree loops; Wikipedia lists Raoul Bott, which he says is not true. Elon Musk as a Caltech professor of physics and engineering one day a month would be a shot in the arm, and the reason it will not happen is the same reason Weinstein will not be booked on *The View*: they need to know what you will do before you go on. He would rather be asked whether the theory is right than whether he is avoiding his critics. He thinks it is right. He does not think it will be immediately seen to be right. He hopes it changes the relationship of people outside the institutional framework to the institutions, and inflicts those people back into the places where they can do the most good.

On *The Portal* he still has an unsolved problem: guests find their grooved answers, and he is not interested in the answer he could have gotten on someone else's show. The complaint that he talks over people is, he admits, weirdly correct. He was insufferable on the episode with his brother Bret; he also thinks he was right. The guests he admires sometimes sit down and become fake within two seconds, unwilling to be too critical or to name names. A University of Chicago philosopher who defended an indefensible system with the courage of her convictions was, by contrast, great, because she knew he cared about her. Garry Kasparov made him nervous enough to open in Russian and get a word wrong. Asked about death, he notes the parallel of releasing a theory during a disease that kills older people. He does not want it to die with him. The legacy he wants is accurate — accomplishments, not how the community dinged him while he was alive. What is he most proud of? Trying. The voice said stop, you are hurting your family, you are a fraud, save yourself, for thirty-five or thirty-seven years. He did not ultimately listen. Fridman hopes he never does. Weinstein says that is why Fridman is an inspiration, and tells him to keep bringing to the game whatever made their last, unconventional conversation so many listeners' favorite.