Is This The End of Humanity?
In this episode of Triggernometry, mathematical physicist Eric Weinstein returns for a gripping discussion on the existential threats facing humanity, ranging from the legacy of thermonuclear weapons to the rise of AI. Weinstein argues that we are living in a “BC/AD” moment of human history, defined by our god-like power over the atom and the cell, and warns that our current global leaders may lack the skill to navigate the “escape room” of our solar system. He makes a provocative case for resuming nuclear testing to reinstill a necessary fear of these weapons while urging a radical “sprint to the finish” to colonize other planets and transcend the limits of Einsteinian physics.
TRANSCRIPT:
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Eric, welcome back to TRIGGERnometry.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Thanks, guys. Great to be here.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s great to have you back on. We’ve had three previous conversations, all of them extremely popular with our audience. People loved it. But the one thing that we’ve always felt that they’ve missed out is some of the conversations we’ve had with you in private.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We really shouldn’t talk about that.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: We should talk about some of the conversations. Some of the conversation 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.
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. We don’t know the detail of that, but this seems to be a thing that we’ve talked about in the past. So just take us through it. Take it away, Professor.
The Forgotten Danger of Nuclear Weapons
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, it’s awfully nice to see the two of you. And onto nuclear weapons. I’ve been talking about this for a while. Somehow there was a crazy idea. At the end of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell, nukes became a non-issue, which was never true. And there was never a peace dividend, because there will never be a peace dividend as long as we know how to create this technology from physics.
And this issue about fictionalizing nukes and what they mean and how to think about them so that we can live our lives. I mean, right now we’re looking out at Los Angeles and there exist websites that will allow you to simulate the effect of any of the tests with any epicenter you like chosen at any point here. And whether or not you’re going to have gamma radiation as you will from the thermonuclear weapons, or cesium from fission weapons or dirty bombs, or who knows what.
All of our cities, other than two in Japan, have been untested as to how they’ll perform under these circumstances. So it’s not clear that it even makes sense to build cities. But because no one’s used a nuclear weapon in anger since 1945, we don’t know whether this is a silly thing to be worried about or the most important thing to be worried about.
So for years I’ve been calling for a return to rare above ground nuclear tests, which I think were ended by the Test Ban Treaty of, what is it, 62. So it’s been over 60 years since we’ve had above ground nuclear testing. And as a result we’ve just forgotten the power of the strong force and the electromagnetic force together. It’s just astounding and just, if I can say from a physics perspective we would call this SU Gauge theory. It’s just a technical thing that leads to engineering abilities that are sort of unthinkable.
I mean, I don’t know how to put it. I don’t think we can really think through the effect of thermonuclear weapons on urban centers. And the fact that this comes from physics and comes from science. Even my colleagues in physics are completely disconnected from their Manhattan Project colleagues. And that ethos, it was so long in the past that it’s sort of like modern Greeks thinking about Ulysses. There’s just no direct connection. It’s some sort of mythological thing.
So anyway, I’ve been talking about this nonstop till I’m blue in the face. Many people are bored of hearing it from me, but it was always going to be the main issue.
The Peace Dividend Myth
KONSTANTIN KISIN: So first of all, you said a lot of things there I want to pick up on. But the first one is you said there’s no peace dividend. Is that really true, Eric? I mean, we had historian Dominic Sandbrook on one of the Rest is History. Guys, we had a great, it’s one of our most popular conversations and one of the things we talked about is the reason there has not been another world war is because of nuclear weapons. They are sufficient deterrent for major powers to get direct conflict between them. Is that not true?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It’s worked for 80 years, exactly as you say. And if you’re settled, if you’re happy with 80 years, you could even double it to 160 years, which is a drop in the bucket when it comes to geological time, even human time. So, yes, they make the world much safer in the short run, much safer than it’s ever been. So if you like to think in short term thinking, nuclear weapons are the best thing that ever happened to humanity.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Surely, though, as those weapons become more and more powerful and one of the things you’ve talked about is the transition from nuclear weapons to thermonuclear weapons and the impact of that. But beyond that, I mean, Russia is developing what they call a tsunami bomb, which is basically a giant nuclear torpedo.
It explodes in the water outside Los Angeles and, you know, the entire western seaboard basically gets swept off the map. Same on the eastern side, Eastern seaboard.
As the potential damage becomes greater, isn’t that a greater disincentive for those weapons to be used? And therefore we are more likely to not have a world war?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You’re more likely to not have a world war if everyone is convinced of the calculus and everyone remains rational. But this is sort of the whole idea behind playing chicken. People always fancy themselves excellent chicken players. And so it’s sort of 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.
I don’t view the current crop of leaders as particularly skilled. I mean, I would say that Putin would be the most skilled of the current crop of leaders and Xi, but they’re not world class talents in this department, I don’t think. And nobody’s used these weapons in so long, they’re not even positive whether they’ll work.
And so the fear of God also has to be reinstilled in the population through, let’s say through music. I mean, there was a song called “The Eve of Destruction” that your listeners can find or “On the Beach” or “Dr. Strangelove.” And all of these stories we’ve stopped telling so that we no longer think of these things as immediate.
So I don’t think it works as well as you think it does. But if you’re satisfied with that short term cessation of hostilities because everyone’s so terrified of the consequence, absolutely. That’s the major positive externality of Armageddon and the apocalypse is that it keeps the peace very well in the short term.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, my thinking is you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Right. And you know that. Which is, I think one of the reasons you’re saying we should be testing nuclear weapons is your rationale that we should be doing this to remind people.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Just how dangerous. We should remind ourselves. You know, I don’t think there’s this sort of cavalier attitude that you develop when you know how men who’ve never gone to war. I’ve never been to war. Men who’ve never gone to war tend to talk tough because they have no idea what they’re saying.
And so I’m always interested when I see people who are, you’ve got a tough guy and you’ve got a guy who’s actually been in Special Forces at the same table. And the guys who talk stuff will go on at great length, and the guy who’s actually seen some stuff will just remain silent. It’s not even worth having the conversation.
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.
The Element of Luck
FRANCIS FOSTER: Eric, when we talk about nuclear weapons, what we sometimes fail to acknowledge is there’s an element of luck to this peace because we came quite close, didn’t we, in the Cuban Missile Crisis to everything going disastrously awry.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: 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. 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. 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.
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. And that doesn’t seem to animate anyone. To me, it’s clearly the world’s most important question. I’ve spent my entire life on this question. I’m not really on the podcast circuit. That’s what I really do.
And no one’s interested. No government is interested. There’s no institute, there’s no fund. There’s nothing you can apply for. No one is interested in the idea that the solar system is an escape room and that Einstein is our jailer. We’ve got to get past Einstein before the thing goes off. It’s as clear as day to me.
The Iran Question
FRANCIS FOSTER: I think the thing is, is that 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.
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 they look at Israel and they’re, they’ve said in their own words, they want Israel wiped off the map. Isn’t that the most dangerous outcome if someone like Iran has nuclear weapon as opposed to Russia or any other country?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: 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. One more Hindu religion, one more Hindu, one more Muslim. 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.
You know, if I think about the Taiwan Strait and China in its calculation, versus the U.S., that’s incredibly dangerous. We have a half proxy war between Russia, Ukraine, with Ukraine representing NATO and the US 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, Estonia. Sorry.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yes. Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. Sorry. And the 1999 provocation of Poland, which I think was entirely defensible as a Warsaw Pact entry into Article 5 status. I don’t know what we’re doing. I think we seem insane. Let me put it on the table. I don’t think anybody’s thinking rationally.
FRANCIS FOSTER: Why do you say that?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Because I think I’m thinking rationally. I think I can defend everything that I’m saying, and I think no one can handle it because nobody actually is motivated to go behind. If general relativity holds, gentlemen, we’re in real trouble. It’s very hard. Einstein is the problem.
FRANCIS FOSTER: What do you mean by that, Eric?
We’re four light years away from the nearest star. So if you think about habitable planetary surfaces, if you could grant science fiction powers to Elon, and he could terraform the moon and Mars, we’d have three spheres that we could get to sort of by chemical rockets. That is not enough diversification for humanity. It’s nowhere close.
So then you have this issue, okay, where do we get the supply of spheres? The issue is atmospheres. We’re all connected by the same atmosphere. So you saw that with, like, Chernobyl, the cloud doesn’t stay in Ukraine. The only place to find new planetary surfaces, if we’re not going to make artificial platforms, which is very difficult, is to be able to get very far away very quickly.
And you can sort of do this with something called time dilation. But if you were to do a round trip and traveling just at the speed of light, by taking a short jump to the nearest star and back, you’d lose eight years relative to your relatives. That’s not practical. It’s not going to work. You can’t really traverse the cosmos if general relativity is in force.
So we know general relativity isn’t the last word. We know Einstein isn’t the final sage. And for some reason, because his theory hasn’t budged for over 100 years, basically 110, we’re demotivated. We just have decided that we live in space time, which is totally untrue. We don’t live in space time. Space time is a model of where we live.
And in that model, there’s no out. We can prove that you can’t go faster than the speed of light. And as a result, we’re trapped here. This is like the greatest puzzle ever. It tells you that everything that we’re good at, science, physics, introspection, mathematics, can be brought to bear on the question of our survival.
And if we can crack this one problem, we can split up. You can have a planet. You can have a planet. The Oprah principle of the cosmos. And then we don’t all have to have the same fate if one planet goes stupid, and most of them will go stupid.
FRANCIS FOSTER: I mean, I see what you’re saying, but I think for the vast majority of government and people, they see their concerns are more real world. And by real world, I think things are happening in the here and now.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: More short term, I guess.
FRANCIS FOSTER: I guess so. The point is, to then propose these things, they may be in the long term a good idea. A lot of people will go, but we don’t have enough money in this country. We’ve got a huge deficit in the economy.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: The allocation is zero. And by the way, let’s stop talking about normal people. Normal people just don’t matter. The goal is to save normal people. And to save normal people you need extraordinary people. You see who endangered these normal people? It was two guys, Stanislav Ulam and Edward Teller. And these two guys came up with a piece of geometry. Do you know how the thermonuclear weapon works?
FRANCIS FOSTER: No.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: You should explain how a nuclear weapon works then how a thermonuclear weapon works. And then also, what have been some of the developments since the thermonuclear weapons were invented? Like I mentioned the tsunami bomb, etc.
The Birth of Thermonuclear Weapons
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay, so the first thing is, why didn’t we have these crazy weapons during the Civil War? Civil War was very close to World War II in human history. 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.
The key issue is that we didn’t understand that there was something called the neutron. We knew about protons and electrons before we knew that there were neutrons. About 1911, I think Ernest Rutherford said, maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton inside of the atom. And that was the most dangerous idea, in my opinion, any human ever had. Just that one idea. Maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton.
Why is that? Because if you send a proton as a bullet into a very large atomic nucleus, that’s a lot of protons stuck together. So as magnets, they’re all trying to run away from each other. But there’s some extra force called the strong force that is even crazier than the super strong force of electromagnetism that’s pushing.
But if you send this proton in, as it gets closer and closer, it gets repelled because everything is charged, like with like. But what if you have something that doesn’t feel that charge, but it’s just like a proton that’s like a bullet that then taps this thing. And this thing is already straining to stay together under the strong force. So it blows apart. And what does it do? It releases more bullets, these neutrons. And that’s what a chain reaction is. It’s bullets creating bullets, creating bullets tapping at these.
Think about a bunch of magnets velcroed together so that they stay together and don’t repel. And then suddenly when you tap them, the velcro comes apart because it’s just at that critical thing. So that would be called a subcritical mass of heavy elements like uranium. And now the idea is that if you push that together, it goes from subcritical, not enough bullets to start the chain reaction, to critical enough bullets. That’s what causes the reaction.
So what you do is you take a subcritical mass of radioactive material and you wrap it in a sphere of chemical explosives, and you push that thing from subcritical to critical so that the density of the bullets means that there are enough targets for them to hit. That’s the first stage, and that’s fission. And that’s what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and at Trinity.
Now, why did it take seven years to come up with thermonuclear weapons? Because what you want to do there is you want to actually fuse hydrogen into helium to release the energy that you get in the sun. And for that you need a detonator that is already the atomic weapon of madness from 1945. And now you’re going to just use that as the detonator.
So what you do is you create sort of like a lipstick like tube and you put the detonator fission weapon in the top part of the tube. And what Stanislav Ulam and Edward Teller figured out was that you could bounce the consequences of that weapon on some geometric pattern and have the reflected waves come down to a rod and compress hydrogen into helium in the second stage.
And the key problem there, as I understand it, is that because you’re using an atomic bomb as a detonator, the top part’s going to blow apart the tertiary stage and therefore it won’t work. But there’s one thing that can get there fast enough so that you don’t blow up the design before it’s ready, and that’s light.
And so my understanding is that what you do is that you take the light that comes off of the initial explosion and you focus it with geometry to concentrate it in the tube to create the tertiary state. So chemical is the primary, subcritical to critical is the secondary. Reflected light to compressing hydrogen to helium is the tertiary. And that thing was Ivy Mike in November of ’52. And that is the BCAD, my friends, of science.
FRANCIS FOSTER: What does that mean? BCAD?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You know, there’s like before Christ and after Christ and they’re just very different. Before November of 1952 with the test known as Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb. And in the publication in April of 1953, less than six months later, with the double helix giving the structure of DNA, we didn’t have the power of the twin nuclei, the nucleus of the atom and the nucleus of the cell.
And then after that, suddenly we were like gods. And that is the BCAD of human history that’s much more important than the birth of Christ. Before that time we didn’t have the power of gods, and after that time we did.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what is the difference between the nuclear weapon as it originally was, the detonator, and the second generation, the hydrogen bomb, etc.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, there was no point to ducking cover. I mean, you weren’t going to survive this thing. It was just at a different scale. I mean, you’re talking about orders of magnitude bigger bombs than what already caused the Emperor to surrender in Japan. We’re just talking inconceivable levels of destruction.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, give me an, let’s conceive it.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: My guess is that one or two devices means that Los Angeles is no more.
FRANCIS FOSTER: By no more you mean completely flattened and raised to the ground?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, I mean there was a, the Soviets of course, were slightly late to the game. Sakharov was a father of that bomb. And of course they had to go big or go home. So they did this Tsar bomb. And the Tsar bomb, I think it’s in Nova Zemlya.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Nova Zemla, yeah. New land.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: New land.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: New land, yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: And this was at a scale that wasn’t conceivable. I wish I had, the American comparable device was this thing called Castle Bravo, which was way bigger than we had expected. We didn’t know how well we could control it. But if I’ve played on the simulators, all of these concentrated cities are just instantly uninhabitable.
FRANCIS FOSTER: 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, etc.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, my understanding is that the hydrogen ones are actually cleaner, that you really have gamma radiation in the form of photons that are very hard to guard against. The other ones have these radioactive isotopes that linger on for forever. But I’ve never really cared that much about the post war scenarios. My feeling is that once you get going, everything that you know about life as we’ve led it is gone.
The Reality of Nuclear War
KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Even if it didn’t, you’re talking about setting back everything that we know of as life, 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. It’s too much. And by the way, there’s a comparable version of this for pandemic, and we’re talking about playing with things where we’re just not. If you saw what happened with COVID just took over the planet.
FRANCIS FOSTER: I guess the question is if you have weapons of that magnitude does not therefore instill a certain humility in the people wielding them. For instance, you look at Putin. Glad 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 assured your own destruction.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: What conversation are we even having? These people are nuts, Francis.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which people?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Oh, Sinwar was clearly crazy.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yep.
The Nuclear Threat and Global Leadership
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Khomeini. Putin is absolutely up for brinksmanship. Xi, I think, thinks he can calculate this fairly well. Donald Trump is famous for promoting himself as a wild card, my friends, in order to confuse his negotiating partners. 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. I don’t see this level of skill.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 what I think about the invasion of Ukraine? I think it’s an abomination from Putin. I agree, 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 ever address is the argument that I always make on this, which is ultimately, every time Russia is strong, it seeks to cushion itself westwards, create a bigger cushion between Moscow and its western frontier.
And so if you don’t expand NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that’s fine, but what you will end up with is a Russian dominated Eastern Europe in the way that you had before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, some people will see that as a price worth paying, others not. But ultimately my point is you are going to find yourself in a confrontation with Russia at some point, unless you have no red lines whatsoever.
Unless you and Putin is on record as saying America is evil. Because what they did is they upset the post World War II order. They went reneged on the agreement of the post World War II order. Well, the post World War II order was Russian tanks in Berlin. Right. So, and half of Germany being effectively controlled by the USSR.
So unless you’re prepared to tolerate that, you are always going to get into a standoff with Russia. And therefore, if you don’t expand NATO into Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, they just become, they get taken over by Russia in some form. And if we say, well, Russia’s got nuclear weapons, we always just, we got to be careful. Well, when does that end? At some point there is a tension that has to be addressed. Even in a nuclear world, isn’t that inevitable?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Eric, I’m just a mathematician. I mean, I guess you’re doing your…
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Whole I’m just a comedian thing now. No, we’re free America. Well, you’re free American.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, you will soon be free Americans. My friends, I believe we are going to have to redefine the west to include a lot of Eastern Europe. And I wish that we would do that to include Russia. It’s a very weird thing to have to say. Russia both is and is not the West.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Correct.
Russia and the Definition of the West
ERIC WEINSTEIN: And I feel like we haven’t spent enough time thinking about Russia. The differences between Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, I have to say, I think it’s just really important that we recognize that the west probably made a bad line of division between Austria and Hungary, where we sort of stopped seeing ourselves at some point. How is Poland not us?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Poland increasingly is us, but Russia isn’t.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: But Chopin was us and Tchaikovsky was us. And Putin that Putin, Pushkin should be us. Dostoevsky is certainly us. I mean, in many ways, my feeling, particularly as a mathematical physics guy, it was a different mathematical physics culture, different musical culture.
This is why, for example, Van Clyburn’s winning of the competition in Russia was so powerful that America recognized that in the style of play, the Russians were dominant. They were the experts. And I have to say that Russia is a barbell culture. It’s the highest of the high and the lowest of the low, and we just don’t understand it well enough.
So I’ve spent a great deal of my life appreciating Eastern Europe, in awe of Eastern Europe. And I’m sad to say that in general, I don’t think we give Eastern Europe its due. The two men who gave America its thermonuclear strength came from Budapest and Lvov, which is, I’m now told, is Lviv.
But Stanislav Ulam came from the mathematical school of Banach and Hausdorff in the Scottish Cafe. And Edward Teller came from Laszlo Ratz’s math classroom at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest. And these fine Americans who signed our death warrant were Eastern Europeans.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes, but neither of those places is in Russia, Eric. Then we’re talking about.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, but I’m saying. But I am saying that we are already over the line. When Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were absorbed into NATO, we acknowledged that we have the wrong line. We said, those are us. If we say Ukraine is us. Ukraine’s old name was Little Russia.
The key issue is that Russia is the strongest part of that universe, and we would have had to make an accommodation. That said, we recognize your strength, we respect your strength, your brilliance, and I think it was the right thing to do.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sorry, go ahead.
Cultural Differences and the Value of the Individual
FRANCIS FOSTER: I think one of the issues is the way that we see Russia is completely different. And Constantin Jumping. And if I get this incorrect, is that we don’t see them as Western because of the way they treat the individual. The individual in Russia is expendable.
And we saw that by the way they treated their soldiers in World War II, whereby as long as, you know, if, however, men had to die, that’s however many men had to die. But they had to move forward, dig a trench, throw them in, cover the trench, we keep moving. America is, and the US and the UK is, you know, we leave no man behind.
So I feel that that’s the way that we see Russia, as a completely alien culture because of that. Because we see it as a cold, brutal way of looking at its own populace.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: My God, I don’t agree with this at all. I believe. I’m sorry, let me.
FRANCIS FOSTER: No, deep, go ahead.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’ve never actually had this out, so it’d be great to push back a little bit and see where it goes.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And we’re also all thinking out loud, this isn’t something we came prepackaged to. Right.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t think that this is true. I think that there’s an issue of geography, and geography has a lot to do with how people die in war. So in general, for example, Austria is Alpine Germany. It’s a very hilly place, whereas a lot of Germany is much flatter. That is going to affect how tanks and other things roll through, how defensible something is.
You have a piece of geography in Eastern Europe which leads to incredible killing and movable borders. So if you look at just a historical timeline of how, let’s say, Lithuanian Polish Empire expanded and contracted and everything’s moving around, it really doesn’t get still until the nuclear weapons come in. So you have a situation in which these people have been subjected to very high levels of uncertainty and warfare because of a bad accident.
So you have the same situation in some sense with the Jews. During the 1930s and 40s, you had fantastic percentage of the world’s Jewish population put to death. And one thing that could have happened is that we would have found that we had adjusted to the concept of the expendable Jew. And the Jews said, under no terms is this going to happen. We are going to treat every Jewish life as precious. We will bargain a thousand people for the return of a single Jewish hostage. It, in fact gets us into trouble.
So my feeling about this is Poland experienced what, like a fifth or a fourth of its population dying during World War II. I don’t feel that way about polls at all. And it is true what you say Francis, about expendability in terms of risk tolerances. Have you been over in Russia?
FRANCIS FOSTER: No, I’ve never been to Russia.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It’s just different. People have a different level of risk tolerance, and I believe that that is culture. But if you move a Russian to Bel Air or Beverly Hills, they very quickly acclimatize to the idea that their safety matters.
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 and it’s an accident.
Almost 100% of who I am came from Russia and Ukraine and Moldova and Romania and Latvia. I think we just have to get out of this mindset. I think that they are us and they are a spicy, weirder, stranger version of us. But in the grand scheme of thing, it’s not Africa, it’s not East Asia, it’s not the Pacific Islands. That’s us. And we have. I wish that we were oriented differently.
Russia as a Separate Civilization
KONSTANTIN KISIN: But I don’t agree with that, actually. But there’s also a lot to unpack elsewhere. I mean, the greatest objection, I think, to what you’re saying is that Russia sees itself as being a separate civilization. Russia sees itself as the descendant of the Eastern Christian civilization, and there’s a continuation of it, in fact. So the idea that they, 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.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, I think that there was. I think that we may have blown that. I think there was a period of time when Russia, and if we’re just going to be honest, because we both know both cultures, there was a desire to say, don’t you see us as you. You know, the concept that somebody’s really made it, if they’ve made it in the West?
The Russians were, in some ways, in my opinion, like many other civilizations, partially pooh poohing and partially desirous of being seen. And I believe that in part, it was up to NATO and the west to not treat this as we won, you lost. Ha ha. But instead to be gracious in victory and say, this was not a defeat of Russia, this was a defeat of communism, which had settled over Russia.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: But even once you’ve done that, look, Russia has a brief experiment with democracy in the 90s. Doesn’t work out, and, you know, people will say, oh, the evil Americans came, and that’s not what happened. It’s not what happened at all. Sure, there were some western people who came and did business and profited. It was actually Russians that used the moment to steal as much wealth as they could.
And after that finishes and all the chaos of that eight year period finishes, you’ve got a former KGB colonel who comes in. He’s not elected, he’s appointed by the previous president to make sure that his corruption doesn’t get prosecuted. And the Russian people are perfectly happy with 26 years of a KGB colonel being in charge.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, it’s Putin’s all the way down. There’s also this yearning for the strongman to stop chaos.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right, exactly. And it comes from hundreds of year history. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this on air, but it comes from the times of trouble, really. But also before that, which is the time Russians learned that instability is worse than anything else. Literally. So you can have the worst tyrant ever, but that’s still better than chaos.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: What is the great quote? The great quote, something like better 30 years of tyranny than a single night of anarchy?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, yes, well, because 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. You have foreign, foreign fake rule after foreign fake rule after foreign fake ruler coming in. And people go, okay, we’ve got to have stability. Right.
But that’s precisely my point is people with that mental attitude might be right for their geography, might be wrong for their geography, but what it does is it creates a culture that I think is not compatible with the way that we do things. 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. It doesn’t want to be part of a thing where it’s not the main thing. That’s my argument.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You as a Britain, you as a Russian, you who’s talking here?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I have access to both perspectives.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I understand that. What I’m saying is, but do you that for yourself? I’m sorry, you’re talking about a guy from Russia talking to a guy whose family came from Umay. It’s a little rich that we’re having this conversation in Los Angeles. It’s not really.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think so at all.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Tell me more.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, because people within there are, I have friends who are Westerners who live in Russia and love it there. Yeah, but they don’t love it in the west because their mindset is not suited to this culture. It’s suited to that culture.
The communism was entirely foreign to this place.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s not what I’m saying. I mean, like, right now.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Sure, I understand. What I’m trying to say is I believe that we had opportunities that may no longer be present for a greater union after this battle was over, when there was uncertainty. If instead of trying an isolated democracy with American economists meddling in post Cold War reconstruction, whatever, if we tried something different, I think there was an opportunity.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Something different how? Like, what should we have tried?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t know. There was a period of denazification after.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: World War II, but that requires admission of defeat, which is the thing you’ve just said we shouldn’t have done. You said we should have been.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: What did I say? That what was important to defeat was Communism. 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.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes, yes, but what happened in Russia, you’re right, is we didn’t defeat communism as the ideology. We didn’t say you went through this terrible period of communism. All of these terrible communist leaders, they were bad, whatever. But, you know, a lot of people in Russia don’t think communism was a great period in Russian history.
But my point is, in order to have gone through that, Russia would have felt even more humiliated. Or some Russians would have felt even more humiliated than they ended up doing. And the thing that many Russians feel humiliated by is not that the evil American economists came and ruined everything.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s actually the fact. I remember this as a kid in Russia being given humanitarian aid. And the view is, well, you know, these people, they gave us these crumbs off their table. How insulting. We will build ourselves up again and we will be strong and we will shine.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I do think it was kind of insulting.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, should we have done that?
Russia’s Complex Legacy
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t know. Look, I think in part I’m in awe of Russia. And I’m in awe of Russia in its brutality, its backwardness, its horror. I’m in awe of its accomplishments, its achievements, its high culture. I think about Russia a lot. Most of my American friends do not.
Just as a side note, I’m very worried about my family losing its familiarity with its Eastern European heritage. 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. Just talking a lot about the Soviet schools of mathematics under Gelfond and under physics under Lev Landau and what these cultures were about and what they meant.
I care tremendously about Russia, and I feel connected to it. I don’t feel that way with China. I mean, a Chinese American can say I feel that, but I do feel a continuity from Austria to Hungary to Moscow.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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. Because if you say we should have done something else, I don’t know what taught to be persuaded.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I said, I really think that we should have separated two things. We should have separated out the Communist overlay and the Russian substrate. We should have been celebrating not only Russia, to be blunt, but there’s Ukrainian opera, there’s the incredible savoir faire and joie de vivre of the Georgians, the proud histories of the Armenians. And, you know, there’s so much over there that we don’t even know exists as Americans.
And I really feel like I wish we treated these places with the respect that I have for them and all of their accomplishments, their literature, their music, their science. I just think it’s a crime. 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.
But look, we don’t need to labor. I think we have a difference of opinion. I think that it’s not an easy sell, but it’s not impossible. And I think you think it’s more difficult. And I will have to say that you probably know far more about these two cultures than I do.
Russia as a Separate Civilization
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I agree with your point about respecting different cultures and their many achievements. I am not 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. And I’m sure you can find plenty of individual examples of where that’s absolutely the case.
But overall, my contention is that Russia is a separate civilization that doesn’t want to be part of our civilization, doesn’t see itself as part of our civilization, and the only viable friendly relationship with Russia is one of alliance right now. Was that achievable? Maybe. But it would have been achievable at cost in the same way that the alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II was necessary for the west and unavoidable if we were going to win that war collectively.
But the cost was tremendous. The cost was the subjugation of all of Eastern Europe. And what I’m saying is, unless we took the position that we took, we would have ended up allowing Russia to overrun not just half of Ukraine as it now has, but all of Eastern Europe is the inevitable destination of that. For very much for the very geographical reasons that you lay out a while back.
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The Complexity of Eastern Europe
ERIC WEINSTEIN: 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. 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. The way the western crust of Turkey looks to Anatolia and says there be dragons, even though it’s their country.
So there’s a great deal of intra country alienation where Chernowc looks to the Donbass and says, wow, that’s some freaky stuff. Particularly with Lwow, which I think of as being a Polish city, even though it’s in Ukraine. Look, Eastern Europe is complicated and you have to think not in terms of, boy, it’s really sad that Riga can’t simply be part of the West.
My feeling 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, and then antagonizing Russia. But this is above my pay grade. This is just my caring about each of these places individually and caring about different places within.
Just to tell a tiny little anecdote. I got my great aunt in Kiev to take me to Umayn, where my family was from, and she said, do you want to see the park where your grandfather used to walk with me? I said, sure. You know, and it was like Versailles. It was some park on a scale you couldn’t even believe called Sofivka. Nobody in the west has ever heard of this place. That’s ridiculous. This should be a famous site throughout the world. And I don’t know how that happened.
So what I think we need to do is to recognize that we have an exaggerated blindness when it comes to Eastern Europe. And a lot more of us should try to speak, you know, a regional language. And a lot more of us should care. Just the way the 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.
I think the US 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.
America’s Geographical Isolation
FRANCIS FOSTER: Look, I agree with you with the argument in that sense and the arguments you’re making about Eastern Europe. There’s a lot of people in Latin America who feel very bitter towards the United States because they would put forward the same arguments. You’re Venezuelan, you’re Mexican, you’re Argentine, you’re Mexican, you’re Colombian, you’re Mexican. And they would make that point. And in some ways it’s probably merited.
I think one of the challenges that America faces is that the geographical isolation of your country, you don’t have to engage with the world the same way The British do because we’re a tiny little island and we are in Europe separated by a small bank of water. So we have to be more engaged than you do at the moment. Now that might change.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Man, my. Your tiny little island was like this.
FRANCIS FOSTER: Superpower once upon a time. It ain’t anymore.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Come on, man.
FRANCIS FOSTER: But it ain’t anymore.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: 100 years ago.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: A hundred. I mean, 1948 is within living memory. And the Suez crisis. I just think this is not true, Francis. I think this is much more recent. You have to understand. I married into an Indian family. And so I go to your British clubs in Bombay that are now populated by Indians and I look at the club members who died during the Great War and it’s all British names.
I feel connected. The arguments we get into in Bombay are very often arguments about were the Brits that bad, how much was positive, how much was negative. Of course you’re not around to hear them. I’m sure if you were around people would be angrier.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s what we do.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: But I’m talking. The guy who mostly comes from Ukraine is talking to the guys from Russia and Venezuela. As if you’re British and I’m American. There is something a little rich about all this. 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.
FRANCIS FOSTER: Agreed.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: And that system eventually gave way to the American system. I think one thing people don’t understand or appreciate about James Bond is that James Bond was created because Felix, who works for the CIA has to be a less than character. And there’s something about the British that is necessary to keep the world in order. Right. It’s sort of a. It’s a post empire vision for a powerful, strong, virile Britain.
Britain’s Diminished Status
FRANCIS FOSTER: Look what you were talking about in my opinion, and as someone who lives in the UK, you’re talking about a Britain that sadly no longer exists. Eric, it doesn’t exist. We are financially bankrupt. Our army is tiny, our navy is practically non existent. When it comes to our political might, no one really listens to us anymore. You could see that, by the way, Keir Starmer spoke about recognizing a Palestinian state. And to be honest, you, when it came to Netanyahu, he regarded it as a mere. As a mere irritant.
The UK’s Hidden Strengths
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I was invited by one Dr. David Tong to go to Trinity College in Cambridge. And I can’t tell you how priceless that day I spent with David was. I went to the Portico where he said Newton measured the speed of sound by clapping. And I saw the notes in the first edition of the Principia about what should be fixed in the second. And I was thinking, okay, this is Michael Attia and Isaac Newton. All of that stuff is still in the UK. That magic is still in the UK.
I’m in the UK often enough to know that the UK’s biggest problem is that it’s got to get over this negative view of itself. We in the States have a much more positive view of the UK. And my feeling is, for God’s sakes, man, get it together, slough it off, pick yourself up and get back to being the UK. It is essential that you become the UK. We don’t know exactly who we are if you’re moping about, so it’s really important to just cut the crap.
FRANCIS FOSTER: Look, I agree that we need a stronger view of ourselves. I think we need to stop apologizing. I think we need to stop seeing ourselves as the worst people in history. I completely agree. What I’m dealing, what I’m talking to you about, Eric, are just the facts of where the UK is at the moment. I’m not saying if we don’t sort ourselves out in 40, 50 years time, we can’t beat that.
Hyper Liberal vs Hypo Liberal Illiberalism
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Didn’t the US go through a Great Depression? We did. Okay, so we were in the Great Depression, couldn’t figure out our way out. You know, my feeling is that you need to be stronger and you need to tap into some extremely dangerous stuff. And I’m sorry about that.
But part of the issue is liberal societies go illiberal in one of two ways. They go illiberal through hyper liberal illiberalism and hypo liberal illiberalism. So the US has been experimenting with hyper liberal illiberalism. Maybe we shouldn’t have a border because all people are, no person is illegal. Maybe you can be any gender you want, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is not liberalism. That’s revolutionary thinking.
That’s going to get reversed by hypo liberal illiberalism, which is like the Donald Trump MAGA. Let’s blow up a boat which we hope is filled with drugs and ask questions later. That kind of super masculine. We’re going to send the National Guard in, we’re going to send ICE in, we’re going to throw people out. And one way of looking at it is that it’s a turn towards fascism. It’s possible.
But another way of looking at it is that it is necessary to counter the negative effects of a spate of hyper liberal illiberalism with hypo liberal illiberalism. That’s a little confusing. I’m sorry, but one thing that we’re doing is we are undoing some of the excesses with excesses that are currently in favor for this group.
And my feeling about this is the UK may have to experiment. And as a guy who has a preference for not only a liberal state, but I would probably err on the hyper liberal. But I don’t like hyper liberal illiberalism. You may have to experiment with hypo liberal illiberalism to get rid of the sense of weakness and not being able to defend yourselves and not knowing who you are.
This question about what does it mean to be English? What does it mean to be British? Enough, we all know what it means. One of the things is that you guys are a human software producer. So if I think about Michael Attia, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, come to Harvard, I played ping pong with him. He was absolutely British. But the name Atiya indicates that his family is from Lebanon. Paul Dirac, the great English physicist, had a French last name. Whether Disraeli. So many great people from the UK have clearly been from somewhere else.
My feeling is you have to be more proud of the software that you built. The software that you built is second to none. It’s the envy of the world and you’ve got to stop this madness of self hatred.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: So what is the British software?
Defining British Excellence
ERIC WEINSTEIN: My God. It’s irreverent. It loves oddities. It’s extremely dry in its humor. It’s incredibly bold and daring in its creativity. It mixes irreverence and reverence like nobody’s business. It’s elitist as the day is long. It’s elitist in multiple senses, both in the landed sense, which I don’t love, but it’s part of your system and in the sense of being a meritocracy.
I love the fact that when you guys can’t do things, initially you do them better. For example, you can’t grow wine to save your life. So what did you do? You turned France into a parlor game where you could guess the vintage and the chateau, and you created French wine. You don’t think of it that way, but you did. And then when they went to war with you and you couldn’t get access to French wine, you created your own wine houses in Portugal where they didn’t have any noble grapes. So what did you do? You created crazy numbers of minor grapes as if they were noble grapes to create port. That’s why they all have English.
I mean, just one cool thing or the blues. I’m very proud of what we did with the blues up until Skiffle, which was terrible. You guys came up with Skiffle and I think it’s almost unlistenable.
FRANCIS FOSTER: I mean, it produced the Beatles, but let’s not get into that.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It produced a lot beyond the Beatles. The aftermath of Skiffle was the elevation of the blues into this unbelievable virtuosic art form. We didn’t know what we had and you sent it back. That’s what the British Invasion is in large measure, the UK telling us what we had and didn’t appreciate in ourselves. We had to send you Jimi Hendrix before we understood what he was. I love these stories.
And, you know, my feeling about it is you also have a bit of a barbell culture, which we love. You know, the guys who brawl at the football games and the pubs are connected to the people who have, without question, the world’s finest sensibilities about art, the greatest historians and masters of language.
One of the things that I think is terrible is that you don’t know your own culture often enough. I grew up as a Jewish kid from a Ukrainian Jewish family in LA fetishizing Chaucer. And, you know, when I taught my kids drinking songs, I went back to Ravenscroft in 1609, you know, and looking at this canon, my daughter fell in love with Henry Purcell. You know, we played Gilbert and Sullivan in the house and Flanders and Swan and all the, or, you know, the great British American projects.
T.S. Eliot is this marriage of the UK and Missouri where I had Jim Watson in my office who discovered three dimensional structure of DNA. And I got a chance to play Francis Crick. A little video of him on my screen in my office. And I watched Jim tear up because it was clear that there was no person on earth that was ever going to be for him what Francis was.
And I got a chance to ask him. I said, I read your book very carefully. You shared an office with Jerry Donahue from Linus Pauling’s lab at Caltech. And he told you that all of the textbooks were wrong, that the hydrogen atom was in the wrong place in the nucleotides in the next page. You figured out the base pairing arrangement through hydrogen bonds. Didn’t you really do the double helix and not you and Francis?
He looks at me and he says, oh, no. He says, absolutely. You’re right. I did the inside of the double helix. But look at the beautiful sugar phosphate backbone twirling around the outside. That’s 100% Francis. And so you look at it, you think, okay, the world’s greatest scientific partnership ever. It’s the US on the inside and the UK on the outside. I mean, it just doesn’t get better than that for me.
And I could go on and on and on about what I got from the UK that I could never have gotten from anything else. You’re in charge of that legacy and you’re screwing it up. We want the confidence, we want you guys to be the great orators of our time. How much do we lean on Churchill again, a complex product of America and the UK. It’s very important to us if we are going to be the major power, that the UK play its role.
Nuclear Testing and Modern Threats
KONSTANTIN KISIN: So we’ve returned to where we started through the medium of hydrogen. And where we started was your point was that a lot of the people who now have control over nuclear weapons are second string. Or in the case of, you know, some countries who are pursuing nuclear weapons might be outright, you know, crazy. I think there are people like that as well. 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?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, in multiple ways. First of all, there was a question about testing a 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.
But the other thing is if we test them within our scientific programs, then we will have more lethal weapons because we will be more assured that we know how they behave. We’ve lost a lot of knowledge about how these weapons behave by letting that atrophy. So it really matters a great deal whether it’s underground, whether it’s above ground or underground. Nuclear testing, you know, the underground stuff doesn’t have the same impact and the above ground stuff has terrible consequences.
I’m not the person to design this and I don’t think we’re doing it in a smart way. I think what we’re doing is that we’re all playing chicken again. And by the way, there’s a lot of stuff that can happen beyond nuclear weapons. It doesn’t need to have the same raw terror.
But if you can figure out how to send energy through the earth and have it refocus at some other point so that you could vaporize something at a cell phone coordinate. Right now we don’t know how to do that because the only thing that you can send through the Earth would be like neutrinos, which are hard to catch on the other side, or gravity waves. You can’t send photons through the earth particularly, or electrons. But if you do further research in physics, you may be able to create all kinds of weapons that you can’t possibly imagine, including time weapons.
The AI Arms Race
FRANCIS FOSTER: Which brings us nicely to AI because it currently feels that we’re in an arms race when it comes to AI between America and China. Is that something that concerns you, Eric?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That’s not how I would phrase it.
FRANCIS FOSTER: Okay, well, you push back on my inadequate phrase.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We’re just playing with fire and we don’t know what fire we’re playing with. So you can view it as America versus China. By the way, don’t sell DeepMind in the UK short. They figured out AlphaFold. Well done, gentlemen.
We don’t really know what this game is like. We don’t know what it’s about. We’re playing it as if it was an old style game. But DeepSeek migrated very quickly. And I’ve talked to some of the major players. I said, how are you going to keep secrets from China? They said, we can’t.
FRANCIS FOSTER: So essentially, we can’t keep secrets from China. Therefore, what we have, they will have. And vice versa.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Maybe. Or maybe the issue is the bottleneck is the chips. Or maybe somebody will figure out something about chip architecture where it’s not as essential to use this scheme. And maybe the energy needs are going to dwarf anything. Or maybe the energy needs are suddenly going to collapse.
We’re at the beginning, we’re at the infancy of something that is astounding. And we already know how astounding it is. And it can only be this astounding or more. And we’re acting as if it’s not that big of a deal because it hasn’t changed our lives that much yet.
The Challenge of Preventing Dangerous Innovation
KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s one reason. The other reason we’re acting this way is that human beings have not come up with a way of preventing people from playing with fire. We can’t. It just isn’t going to happen. Even if the entire west, let’s say, agreed not to do this, even if the entire world agreed not to do this, someone somewhere would still do it because the advantage of being the one that’s doing it is so tremendous. So there’s actually nothing we can do to stop people playing with this fire. Is that fair?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That’s according to you.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, I’m asking you.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, the Test Ban Treaty. I have this feeling that if we were talking in the 50s, you would have said that the Test Ban Treaty was impossible because you can’t stop people from playing with fire.
FRANCIS FOSTER: Explain to us what the Test Ban Treaty is.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons among the major players.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: That hasn’t prevented the existence of nuclear weapons or their continued development.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It has certainly slowed down. It’s antiquated the weapons a great deal. It stopped the atmospheric testing that caused radioactive decay products to blow in the wind. We had things like, what is it, Operation Starfish, where we exploded a weapon in space, knocked out the grid in Hawaii. We retarded ourselves a great deal. And then we signed the bioweapons conventions in the 70s, which had a big effect on how we do research. We have scared ourselves before into some kind of cooperation that does something.
The Multipurpose Nature of AI
FRANCIS FOSTER: But isn’t the challenge with that? And I think it’s a very good example. But nuclear weapons are mainly used for one thing and one thing only. AI is multipurpose.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, first of all, Russia doesn’t agree with you. Russia used nuclear weapons for engineering purposes. They would use them to dig holes or put out fires or do all sorts of crazy things. So even that is not quite true.
And then with respect to AI, things don’t always spread just because they’re known. I keep giving this example, like, if I ask people, do you know the formula for black powder?
FRANCIS FOSTER: No.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Do you? No. 75% saltpeter, 10% sulfur, 15% charcoal. Okay, now everybody at home knows, but they’ll forget it. We in general don’t see people taking advantage of these huge leverage opportunities.
Right now, we’re in some race because we don’t know what we’re racing for. We just know that if the other guy had something that we didn’t have, that feels vulnerable. But the problem is the other guy may become the AI itself. So the US and China may get into a race to get this thing, and then the thing says, you dear, sweet children, nobody even knows what we’re talking about.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right?
FRANCIS FOSTER: So doesn’t that mean that that’s even more dangerous? Because with nuclear weapons, we know what we’re talking about.
Living at Death’s Door
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay? We have been at death’s door. I mean, am I right that we were just gentlemen at the Cave of the Apocalypse together in Greece? In Greece, yeah. Okay, so my feeling is we’ve been thinking about the apocalypse for a long time, and we should have been thinking about the apocalypse every week since 1952, 1953.
Suddenly we’re back to thinking about it. My friend Peter Thiel is giving lectures about the Antichrist. People are talking about Armageddon, the AI Apocalypse. We need to be thinking about this. I don’t know how we got out of thinking about this now that we’re thinking about it again.
It’s what I said at the ARC Conference. It’s a race. It’s a sprint to the finish. Right now, the world has woken up. Holy crap. The World War II order is crashing as we speak. People around J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin have no patience for this anymore. Nobody’s maintaining it.
Okay, so the question is, what are we doing? This is so clear to me. I can’t understand why everyone isn’t animated by it. And I could pretend that I’m crazy and that you all are sane, but I’m pretty sure it’s the reverse. No, I really think that. I really think I’m somehow not affected by some sort of universal mind virus, and I can’t figure out why.
So the argument is, this is the time to run like hell. This has been in our future for forever. And we’re here. And right now, the thing to do is to try to figure out how to spread out and run as many experiments as we can and recognize that it’s not just that Eastern Europe is going to get sacrificed to Russia. Planets are going to die because the technology is just too powerful.
We should be honest where we are. And if we’re honest, right now, the thing to do is to colonize as many planets as we can find in the heavens. And that seems crazy to people, but I just had a conversation on my way over with a person who doesn’t exist, who told me all sorts of points that I made were good, others were weak. She knows all about every aspect of the world. If I ask her to tell me a doctor joke, I can say, tell it to me in Urdu, tell it to me in Yiddish, tell it to me in Russian.
We are already living science fiction lives. Why can we not understand that this is the time to lead a science fiction life about getting out of the solar system and finding the largest number of planets and spreading out and running the largest number of experiments we can?
Everything that has one planet and us trying to make sure nothing goes wrong here is completely enervating. But somehow none of you are energized as I am. And I don’t know why to say we are Ferdinand and Isabella. It is time to find Columbus and try to reach something new. Whether it’s a new route to India or whether it’s new land entirely, it’s time to do something new.
The last major landmass that was found on Earth was found off the north coast of Siberia about 100 years ago. We’ve gone out of the habit of finding new worlds. And my feeling about this is that this should be energizing us. We have a brief period to sprint. We should create new institutions, new science. We should take on Einstein and defeat him. We should get excited. We should dance harder, sing longer, do more partial differential equations into the night and try to realize that we’re on the eve of destruction.
And take a Jewish attitude, which is survival at all costs. Something will work out, something will provide. If we just believe and work hard enough and risk everything. Our history tells us that it’s always possible to survive. And that’s what, really, as a Jew, what I want to bring to a diverse audience of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists, I don’t care.
There’s something about the Jewish will to survive that is not infecting planet Earth. I just see everybody basically on the couch with their remote, solving minor problems. And it’s time to recognize, no, no, no, this is the end. This is the apocalypse. This is the phase transition. And it’s been clear as day since 1952, 1953. And we’re just now waking up to it with AI for reasons that are completely unclear. But that’s always been the problem, Francis. It’s always been the problem.
A Call for Glory and Hope
FRANCIS FOSTER: Eric, it’s been a fantastic conversation, as always. It feels a bit weird saying this, considering what we’ve been talking about over the previous hour, hour and a half or so. So what is the one thing that we’re not talking about that we really should be?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That a lot of our problems are mediated by our phones. That the phone is not an appliance, it’s a brain scrambling device. And that in general, we’re making things out to be much harder than they’re meant to be.
We have grand challenges. We have the ability to fall in love, form families, drive each other crazy, and not screw up this whole beautiful experiment. And my feeling about it is that we’ve decided somehow that there’s something wrong with us. And I think that it’s, we’re just making things out to be much more difficult than they are.
There are glorious, wonderful challenges. There are places to visit that are still remarkably undiscovered on Earth. And we’re going to wake up hopefully in the next couple of years to the idea that with the machine’s help, we can solve all sorts of problems that we thought were intractable.
And so I think the thing that we’re not talking enough about is that this is the sprint to the finish and it can be glorious, even though it’s incredibly dangerous. And that if we just have a completely different attitude, which is that we are the original badasses that changed everything in such a short period of time. We get back to being those people who did so much instead of visiting the monuments built by our ancestors.
I think we could imagine that unlike this period of stability and safety for the last 80 years, this could be a period of incredible chaos, great peril, lots of fear, but unparalleled fun, excitement, wonder, glory. We don’t even feel comfortable with the word glory. We can say Slava, Ukraina, but we can’t say glory to us.
And I think it should just be a glorious age filled with hope. And I think we can get out of here. And I love the fact that I’m back on the show and I can end on a positive note like that. So thank you both.
FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, thank you as always, Eric. And make sure to join us over on Substack where you get to ask Eric your questions and we get to carry on the conversation. Everyone focuses on the US versus Russia relationship to be the one to set off a bomb, but which lesser known conflict competitive pairing should we also pay attention to in terms of setting off a nuclear exchange?