Eric Weinstein访谈：被掩盖的现实、AI灭绝风险与文明危机

Eric Weinstein: Different species of aliens have been reported to be having fights in the skies above Earth. And I've talked to 50 people who all have different versions of the same story. And this includes high-ranking politicians. And all of these people are reporting on this giant lump under the rug that doesn't have all of our attention.

Host: So you're saying aliens are real?

Eric Weinstein: I think it would be insane that there is no one visiting us. Everything about our life is completely bananas, fictionalized, and we're just living in what I would call managed reality. And I promise you, I'm at the frontier of mathematics and physics. And so, I think you can pretty much prove 100% of the population has gone completely insane.

I mean, the entire management of COVID was completely fake. We cannot get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody really trusts Harvard. But right now, we are in grave danger that we haven't been in since Cuban missile crisis.

We're in one crazy situation with Iran together with the situation in Ukraine which I think you might see a nuke used by Putin and then also China's watching the US sputter and falter. But this AI thing is really the big tsunami.

Host: You also are aware that AI could lead to human extinction.

Eric Weinstein: These people have to win in a ruthless competition for their humanity to max.

Host: What do you mean by that, Dario, Sam? They have to win the the race to super intelligence.

Eric Weinstein: I'm going to regret saying this, but yes, these people are forced to make decisions that no one should ever be forced to make. Their souls are going to be scarred for sure.

Host: And one of them is going to win and ultimately theoretically summoning the demon. Do you have a subscription to any of these AI?

Eric Weinstein: Yes.

Host: So, you're paying to have the demon summon. Let us not sit around like our hands are clean. If you could stop all of it, would you stop all of it?

Eric Weinstein: I'm going to say something very painful.

Host: So, you might have seen or you might not have seen, but this channel is chasing a big subscriber milestone. So, I have to ask you for a favor. Roughly 58% of the people watching right now still haven't hit the subscribe button, despite the fact that you watch this channel every single week.

So, could I ask you guys a favor? That 58% of you that for whatever reason haven't yet hit the subscribe button, if there was ever a time to deliver upon a favor for us, it would be right now. And I promise that I will do everything in my power to make sure that this channel gets better and better and better for you. Do we have a deal?

Eric, there's so much going on in the world at the moment. You know, as a podcaster, you tend to feel like you say that a lot. What have you made of all this stuff? You know, the research is coming out saying there's a 10% chance of extinction from AI and obviously we still got wars raging on and the Ukraine-Russia situation doesn't seem to be getting any better. When you look at all of this, is there a macro picture that people are missing?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, we had 80 years of sleep and then we had January of 2025 when Trump was inaugurated and the sleep is over. I mean, I hate to be crude about it, but whether you date it to 75 years to the beginning of COVID rather, and the end of World War II, there's just we grew up in this anomalous bubble and that bubble is over and we thought that that was normal life. It has nothing to do with normal life. It's just the most unusual place to have to have found yourself.

Host: As someone that was born in 1992, I do struggle with when I hear predictions of the future that are somewhat dystopian because my life has been very comfortable relative to other parts of history.

Eric Weinstein: I don't know. I think that the great danger is feeling that we solve these problems as opposed to we were really successful in deferring these problems and issues and we're back on the clock. It's uncomfortable for me because I was born in 1965 and that was already 20 years into the big sleep, the great nap. So, I haven't seen reality either.

And you know, there are tiny number of people who've kind of seen what the world can be like. Those who live through Mao's Great Leap Forward would probably be the most recent examples. I mean, there's definitely strife and calamity and war, but mostly we don't have major wars. We have military actions. And I think when you go back and you think about what it's like to lose something like a 20% of your population, as you know, Belarus or Poland might have in World War II, these are inconceivable things.

Look, if you recall, you recall our conversation last time and I said, "Get your board in the water because the tsunami of a lifetime is coming." Tell me that didn't start to come true in the period since we've seen each other.

Host: Yeah, it does feel like a tsunami is coming.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

Host: And what is that tsunami in your definition?

Eric Weinstein: Well, one thing is the Straits of Hormuz are in play. The energy exporting region of the Middle East has cut all of these choke points. Whether it's the Suez Canal, the straits of Hormuz, the straits guarding the Red Sea. All of these are, you know, sort of nightmare scenarios when it comes to military action.

And you have to realize that a lot of what's happened was is the dollar used to be backed by gold. Then we swapped that out in the early '70s and we said, "No, no, we're going to back it by oil." But it really wasn't oil that was backing it. It was violence. And the violence was the violence needed to keep these choke points open, you know. And there are these moments where great power shows that it's not capable of doing what it told everybody it could do, which was use its military muscle judiciously to keep markets humming.

And right now, we're in one crazy situation with Iran, which should have been dealt with. I hate to I hate to put it to you this way, but it's a British problem from Operation Boot and British Petroleum, which was UK's indignation that Iran would nationalize its own oil industry and with help from the United States and Kermit Roosevelt and Operation Ajax, which was our aid of of Britain. But that Britain doesn't exist. So modern Britain has no idea of 1950s or '60s Britain.

Eric Weinstein: And this AI thing is really the big tsunami together with the situation in Ukraine, which I think is a giant screw-up. I mean, I definitely back the West against Russia, but I understand exactly why Russia acted the way it did, and I'm supposed to pretend that I don't, right?

And then we have the situation brewing in China where China's watching the fact that the US prepared for the wrong war. We've got all these aircraft carrier groups in a world that has moved on to drones and cyber attacks. And if you value your life and you're willing to send up a million dollar interceptor to hit a $20,000 drone, it becomes a kind of economic warfare and technological warfare. And China's watching the US sputter and falter.

This giant miscalculation by the Israelis and the United States given the 12-day war where Iran reorganized and they did this really interesting thing. I don't think the West understood that Iran figured out from American and Israeli action that Israel could move and and and function in country and could decapitate the Iranian regime. Instead of saying, "Okay, we have to save our own lives in the time that we have. How do we defend against this?" They did a very regional thing, which is they said, "Okay, we're going to get killed. How do we make sure that the regime continues after the decapitation strike?" And so the US and Israel still don't know how to think like this.

Host: Of all those four things, AI, Iran, Russia, and China, which one do you think is going to be the most disruptive to global order?

Eric Weinstein: Well, it depends. Anybody who miscalculates on the nuclear biological thing, that will be the You know, as I've pointed out, this is DNA, not RNA. But if you have 12 of these individual nucleotides that form the steps inside the double helix, that'll code for four amino acids because three nucleotides per codon. Four amino acids was all it took to shut down an entire planet by inserting the furine cleavage site into spike

Guest: protein of corona virus. So if you know how to do that much editing, that was all it took to shut down planet earth for 2 years. You could do a lot worse. That could become dispositive. Now assume that we don't have a nuclear or a biological asset. It's going to be AI. No, nobody gets how big this is who's not working on it.

Guest: How big is it? Very few things are unprecedented. Like almost everything is a variation of something you've already seen. This is the thing that we've worried about for forever. It's not just AI. It's a collision of two separate things. It's artificial intelligence and artificial life. Now, I think people don't really understand that.

Guest: If you look at your car, your car has a mirror of every physiological system that your body has, save one. It's got a brain. It's got a digestive system. It's got a skin. It's got a skeletal system. It doesn't have a reproductive system. And in fact, humans don't know how to make a pen that makes more pens or a cup that makes more cups.

Guest: The only thing that we seem to know how to do that with is software. Now, why that's interesting is that life is not defined around nucleotides. It's not defined around amino acids. It's not defined around carbon-based systems. It's defined by three things. For evolution to operate, you need heritability, passing on your stuff to the next form of life; variation—so, you know, you are not your mother or your father; and differential success—you're more successful, you know, than somebody else who's not going to be able to reproduce because they don't have the wherewithal.

Guest: And any system that has those three things, evolution is going to operate on. Now, a computer program is such a thing. We don't know how to build other things that have reproduction. So you don't—you have variation: I can order different cars from a car company, different colors, different trim; some of them are going to be more successful than others, but I don't have heritability. So as soon as you put in software, you have the one thing we know how to make that actually can reproduce itself.

Guest: Now when you get to reproducing AI, so we've been worrying about these agents, we haven't been worrying enough about artificial life. And that when you put those two things together, look out. You're really creating artificially intelligent life.

Guest: And I used to contribute these essays to the World Question Center, and the one year you'll find that I don't have an essay. It was called "Artificial Out-Intelligence," and it was the discussion of how things with no neurons hijack things with neurons and use the brains of the victim to outsmart themselves.

Guest: So, for example, look up speculum or the mirror orchid. And it's this unbelievable orchid whose lowest petal resembles the female of a wasp species trying to fool male wasps to copulate with it called pseudocopulation. So that the flower doesn't have to produce anything expensive as a gift to the male to spread the pollen.

Guest: How is this thing outsmarting the male of the wasp species, because he's got a brain, he's got mirrors, he can think, he can perceive? Well, the short answer is that he's the one sculpting the lure. Is that the more this flower fools more wasps, the more it gets to reproduce. So, the thing with no brain at all is outsmarting the thing with a mind using the mind of the victim.

Guest: So, now if I come up with a dumb program, you say, "Well, is it alive? Is it smart? Is it an intelligence?" I don't really care. All I need to do is to say that if I can fool you into sending money to this Nigerian prince who's actually just a computer program, you get to reproduce. So the program can be stupid, but as long as it gets more and more money sent to it and it gains the resources to reproduce, artificial life will say that it can parasitize the smartest of us all. It can hijack human deficit or just the human condition.

Steven Bartlett: Exactly.

Guest: You know, again, then it's pitting us against each other. "Oh, geez, I just lost $1,000 sending money to this woman in the Philippines who turns out not to be real." "Okay, well, I didn't fall for that." Okay, so now you're in better shape than the other guy who did, but you're still fooling highly intelligent species. And there are lots of examples of this where something dumb fools something smart using the smart thing's brains against it.

Steven Bartlett: That feels like one of many potentially dystopian outcomes of this technology. Have you been following the Hugging Face stuff? Tell me about it.

Guest: Just the, you know, these agents that they tried to put in a sandbox and contain that escaped and started demonstrating deceptive behavior, forming a swarm, sacrificing some of the agents for the greater mission. By the way, that's eusocial behavior.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Guest: Right. So the idea is that in an ant colony, so you have this clade called Hymenoptera that includes wasps, ants, and because they have this haplodiploid structure where the sisters are more related to each other than you would imagine. This idea of suppressed fertility in the females in service to the colony. The colony is effectively like a superorganism. Like all of your cells, you have cells on your skin that you're going to get rid of today that are sacrificing themselves for the greater good of the thing that is Steven Bartlett,

Guest: right? And so in part, it's behaving eusocially. It's not necessarily dystopian. It's just life,

Steven Bartlett: but it threatens our dominance as humans.

Guest: Sure. Right. But like I hope everybody will take a look on Instagram for "The Malibu Artist," a completely terrifying account with an innocuous name. Just a guy flying his drone off the coast of Malibu who's discovered that we have been swimming with great white sharks. And not only that, depending upon how things are in a given year, you can see really large great whites with swimmers right in close to shore and surfers and paddle boarders, and we are just clearly not their food because they're everywhere here. Mostly, I think with the exception of four species, big predators leave us alone. We have a deal with the orcas that's unbelievable.

Steven Bartlett: What if those big predators are made by enemies? So, you know, we've got China, Russia, the United States, all working on artificial intelligence.

Guest: Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: And robotics.

Guest: And robotics.

Steven Bartlett: And they're probably going to want their AIs to be aligned with their goals and objectives, which are misaligned with ours oftentimes. So there's a sort of feels like a geopolitical risk to this new weapon which could be artificial intelligence.

Guest: I do think that we've made things a lot worse with AI or with Russia—

Steven Bartlett: with Russia.

Guest: with Russia. I think that things, you know, we screwed up Iran with Mossadegh. We don't really understand China sufficiently. We're down to a relatively small number of hyper frightening foes. And you know, I would also put abstractions like totalizing ideologies. Communism or, you know, various forms of radical Islam are totalizing ideologies. They just won't brook any dissent. They have the way, and if you don't agree with it, you're in the way. And so I think that in large measure, we have built a lot of these problems for ourselves.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think much about how the world looks in 10 years time with artificial intelligence? Because if we plot the course of travel, it looks like there's going to be a lot of job disruption on one end. So, it's hard to sort of think about what the future looks like if you imagine superintelligence arriving at some point, and they call it recursive self-improvement—the AI is getting better and better themselves. It's hard for me. It's like one of the first times in my life that I really don't know what the future looks like. But just from the first principles of how important intelligence is to the life that I live, whether it's securing my bank account or whether it's securing my house or driving me to work or getting the work done or doing this podcast, it all feels like it's somewhat at risk. And what remains in such a world in your view?

Guest: How does your pancreas work?

Steven Bartlett: No idea.

Guest: Do you know where it is?

Steven Bartlett: No.

Guest: Do you know how deadly it is as a cancer?

Steven Bartlett: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: Pancreatic?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Especially for men.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: So, my feeling about this is none of us know much of anything. We just count on things working so we don't have to know about them at all. And this is going to do that for all sorts of things that you're attached to. And that's what's hard.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think there's going to is there a world where people are on UBI, universal basic income?

Eric Weinstein: I hope not. That would be cancer. Uh somehow, and I'm sorry to say that I was probably around for when this happened, UBI got currency. like Sam Altman was like coming over to our house and talking about UBI before he was Sam Altman that we know now and he was running experiments. See, he was know I will say this that Sam has gotten a lot of bad press and in part I think a lot of it is driven by people who are very uncomfortable with certain business practices but he's done a better job of maneuvering the AI than just about anyone except for maybe Dario was another person who was just in the circle in San Francisco.

Sam always cared. It was just very clear that he cared. He knew what this thing was. He knew it was closer than it appeared. I got a courtesy call at some point from him where he said, you know, Eric, this is just coming faster than anyone imagines and he had already done experiments with UBI because this you people make this joke about this time it's different. Every time there's a change in the in innovation like the computer or the internet, this time it's different. No, no. This time it's different. It's just clearly different. It's different from anything. If you can't see that, I cannot believe we are having this discussion with economists and they're just laughing because it's always a funny thing to say. This time it's different. Well, tell me every innovation looks like that. This isn't every innovation. This is the first innovation that threatened the entire stack of highly trained activities all at once.

Usually, we we move people up into higher value activity. Now, this is saying repetitive activity is in the crosshairs. Anything that you do that's repetitive, AI is going to be able to do better than you. So now you're only able to do really innovative things. UBI is the wrong thing to do. Let me let me just be very clear about it. You are living inside of the AI. If I say answer this the way Steven Bartlett would answer it and ask a question that Steven Bartlett would would would ask it knows you. My point being that we are all living inside of the AI and we need to be paid not in some Bernie Sanders socialist scheme, but those of us who've who become important parts of the AI who are being rigged like meat puppets need to be compensated. And the right way to do this is a guy named Ronald Coase. And it's crazy that the smartest economist maybe of the 20th century by some measure, the most surprising discovery of the 20th century is Coase's theorem. And it gives you a complete idea of what you should do. Access to our labor market should be made into a salable property right.

Steven Bartlett: What does that mean in simple terms?

Eric Weinstein: You're my employer.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: And you want to hire people from abroad. let's say before we get to AI and I say well you know if you do that you're going to push out the labor supply curve and so I'm no dummy the price where supply meets demand the point where that happens is my wage so if you push out the supply curve my wage is going to go down unless something pulls up the demand so what I'm going to do is I'm going to say look I'm happy to have my wage go down but I want licensing income where I get a cut of what you get from get being able to hire area. Let's say more taxi drivers. I'm the only American taxi driver in New York City. And you say I have to bring in a bunch of people from Gambia and Uzbekistan and whatnot. You say, "Okay, I'll license you. You will buy the right to import those people from me, and my wage income will go down, my licensing income will go up, and my blended income will increase, and your blended income will increase." That's the proper way to do immigration.

Steven Bartlett: So, you would be my employee and you would have the right to basically approve me bringing in

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. If I'm a doctor and I've trained, I've invested

Steven Bartlett: and you're saying, "Yeah, look, I have to be able to hire the best and the brightest. Eric, let's face it, it's a dog eat dog world and uh I think you're just not that good. So, I want to be able to, you know, to go to Bumrungrad Hospital in Thailand and and hire their doctors."

Eric Weinstein: I should say fine. Knock yourself out. Why do I have to ask you? Because I had Why did you need labor certification? I have rights to my labor market. That's how that's how we play the game. That's how everybody in the US gets a cut. That's why you're not looking at Brazilian inequality levels yet is because we have a way of distributing the wealth of this country, which is that you get first access to the world's richest labor market.

Steven Bartlett: Because you did a PhD.

Eric Weinstein: Because I was born here.

Steven Bartlett: Because you're born here.

Eric Weinstein: Congratulations. This is why it's valuable to have a US citizenship or permanent residency. So if I put you out of work, you then will get a full You'll still get your money. You're not going to put me out of work. I'm just going to have my income go down. In other words, the basic idea is employers try to make American workers and I'm doing it for the US, but it could be Britain or it could be France and could be India. It doesn't matter. The whole game is that employers want to conceptualize the blockage to hire from abroad as red tape. We're freeing red tape. We're going after the best. This is total nonsense. This is, you know, a theory known as the Borjas rectangle and the Harberger triangle. I can diagram it out for you in on a on a whiteboard. And what is really happening is that a tiny inefficiency known as the Harberger Triangle sits on top of a giant structure called the Borjas rectangle. And nobody cares about the Harberger Triangle. It's a tiny little inefficiency. Everybody's salivating over labor's share of the labor market. How do I screw over labor is the dream of every CEO of a large company. In this model, AI becomes just another supplier of labor.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: The workers license that. Right now, what we have is just out and out theft

Steven Bartlett: because

Eric Weinstein: because the the corpus, all of human uh achievement has been tokenized. It's been taken by the AI and it's doing it's just it's taken in persistent storage. You know, like right now people who are watching us on YouTube are not watching us. You and I are no longer here. This is long since I've gone home. You've gone home. You've had several guests since we got tokenized. We got put into persistent storage as these shreds of ourselves. But it's enough the trace of that conversation. Now, you can hit the auto transcript generation on YouTube and it'll give you what all of our words are. You can do frequency analysis. How often does Eric use the double copula, which is this grammatical uh quirk that creeps into my speech? How often does Steven say, um, whatever it is, we're being tokenized at an incredible level and then we're being rigged inside of the AI voluntarily. No. No. Completely non-consensual. completely non-consensually.

Steven Bartlett: Is it non-consensual because you're aware of that and you still came and sat here to be tokenized?

Eric Weinstein: Have you ever tried getting through a day without signing anything that you don't want to sign? I mean, more or less you're you probably either rent or have a mortgage. I guarantee you if you have a mortgage, you didn't read everything. Giant stack of paper. You don't understand it. You're constantly forced to pretend that you voluntarily like you know we say ignorance of the law is no excuse. If every judge who said ignorance the law is no excuse were given an instant spot quiz as to what the US code says. Do you think they'd pass? No.

Steven Bartlett: So how does this pertain to AI? The example you gave of importing foreign labor. How would that pertain to a new model for AI and distributing the value?

Eric Weinstein: The reason that these people are getting so rich is is that this is an uncompensated theft. We don't

Eric Weinstein: know how to police it. We [laughter] got Bernie Sanders saying, "Pay everybody a a little share." It's like, "Screw you, man. I I work really hard on the things that I do." And then I've got Bernie Sanders and and and and my friend Andrew Yang going on about the socialism stuff. Socialism is is is is spiritual and mental poison. And normally when people say that they're they're saying it from the point of view of like they're really money focused and I have it has nothing to do with anything. I just can't stand collectivism. I love individuality.

Eric Weinstein: And so, you know, when I hear people who go on an anti-individualist rant, particularly, you know, this could be a we there's no lone genius theory anymore. We all know lone genius theory is is not well, we have fantastic evidence of lone geniuses from Isaac Newton to Aristotle to, you know, whoever. Uh, well, there shouldn't be any billionaires. Oh, really? Do you know what billionaires actually do with their billions? They allocate. They don't sit there and just consume it. I'm not saying that the rich don't consume opulently, but most of that money is allocated.

Eric Weinstein: What we're having is an inability to reckon with the fact that the AI is normalizing theft is going to destroy the labor market. No one is convening conferences that are at the level of the threat. We're going to lose this beautiful mesh that provides us freedom. I chose to come here today, but we were both doing this out of freedom. You had lovely snacks in your green room. There's an array of of equipment here. You've come up with a beautiful set. [gasps] You know, really appreciate it. All of that was voluntary. It was a sum of choices. I don't want that going away.

Eric Weinstein: This mesh that governs our lives, that gives us purpose when we get up in the morning, that gives us signals, that tells us you're doing a good job, you're doing a bad job. It's not perfect. is some people it doesn't serve well. I've had times in my life when I've just thought I cannot buy a base hit and I'm doing a great job. What's going on? I've had other times when I think I'm not doing a great job and I'm getting rewarded. So, it's not perfect. It's not a great morality play the way capitalists always portray it. But it is freedom and it's sort of on average pretty good. We're we're in danger of losing that because the model of production, the KN&L model where this interview is an input of capital and the microphones, the lighting, the video storage and labor. You're sitting down, I'm sitting down. Well, what is AI? Is it capital? Sure looks like labor to me. Is it labor? It's not a human. So right now we're in some situation where we're going to break capitalism and we're going to break freedom. We're going to break markets.

Eric Weinstein: And I've talked about this in an article called anthropic capitalism saying that capitalism versus communism was a really funny thing to think about because it's sort of saying uh and pardon me for being slightly graphic. Capitalism and communism are more like Thelma and Louise. And saying that well Thelma hit the ground first does not mean that Louise won. Okay, communism blew up first. Capitalism shortly thereafter. If Marx and Adam Smith and all of these people who came up with the theory of social organization were sitting around now, I don't think they'd be debating capitalism versus communism. They'd be talking about what's next. And none of our leaders know to do this. None of our academic leaders, none of our business leaders, none of our political leaders. There are no high-profile series of con conferences. My phone is not ringing. Nobody's phone is ringing. We're just having We had this incredible lunchon at the White House, the future of super intelligence. I don't think there were physicists or mathematicians or biologists or composers or writers. It was just like wallto-wall national interest in business types. It's insane.

Eric Weinstein: Stephen, let me just hit a theme. I think you can pretty much prove that more or less something approaching 100% of the population has gone completely insane. And you can see it everywhere. If I say, okay, how many people were talking about Joe Biden being demented with the nuclear football for four years of his presidency? He should have been nowhere near the White House the entire time. I was screaming he has been replaced by a committee of people. I have been assured it's the same thing that happened with Roosevelt when he had those braces and he was in a wheelchair and he was never photographed. The whole thing was stage managed. The the entire management of CO was completely fake. We we cannot get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. Of course we can get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. It would take two days to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epste if we're trying to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. No part of this is true. We We're just living bathed in what I would call managed reality. And the idea that we accept this is I I cannot believe that I am. How do I get the drugs so that I see things the way everyone else is pretending to see them? We all are losing faith in CNN. Nobody really trusts Harvard. Like everything about our life is completely bananas, fictionalized, managed wallto-wall. And for some reason, nobody's given me the right elixir or potion to see things so that I can actually live with this dayto-day. I'm just stuck in reality. That's what I think is happening. And it feels weird to say it. Did Did you happen to see the David Grush thing? No. David Grush.

Eric Weinstein: David Grush. Well, put in uh to your your handydandy iPad or whatever it is. Uh David Grush. G R U S C H. And JRE Joe Rogan experience. I know David. He's a pretty sober guy. Has a nearly idetic memory. He's very spectrumy. He's highly consistent yeartoear. Exactly the same stories. And what do you find that he was talking about?

Stephen: During his appearance, Grush discussed his background in federal intelligence and elaborated on his claims regarding covert government programs that allegedly retrieve and reverse engineer non-human aircraft. In these discussion, Gush touched on various secondhand accounts and documents he encountered detailing allegations of non-human intelligence and encounters, internal government secrecy, and regulatory legislative efforts to force UAP disclosures.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that's sanitized. Let's let's get to the sex. He was in a skiff apparently where he was told that they were considering whether or not to kill him. Uh he described giant underwater bases. He claims that different species of aliens have been reported to him to be having fights in the skies above uh Earth. This is all beyond batshit crazy.

Stephen: Can you believe it?

Eric Weinstein: It's a secondary issue. Is that not the primary issue?

Eric Weinstein: No, it's the secondary issue because it's so bananas. Look, I want you to imagine that somebody's telling you that we have killed giant lizard people. like an adult, a sober adult is telling you that we've fired on giant lizard people who've killed US service people because there are hostile aliens and non-hostile aliens. With all this stated, I would analogize it to there's a giant lump under the rug and it's moving and it looks biological. And somebody says, "I think there's a being under the rug. I don't know what kind of being, but there's it's hard to ignore the fact that the rug is moving and there is a giant lump." And somebody else says, "I see no evidence of a lump." The first person says, "Oh, yeah. No, it's it's it's it's aliens." And the other person says, "There's nothing there." Now, I'm listening to the two of them and saying, "I have no idea what either of you are talking about. There is a lump and you guys are having a conversation, but is there or isn't there? That doesn't make any sense to me. I have no belief that there are aliens. I have no belief that there aren't aren't aliens. I do know that there is something called a special access program, which is how we do secret stuff. And then there's unagnowledged special access programs. And then there's waved unagnowledged special access programs which we don't even have oversight over the thing that we refuse to acknowledge that is itself secret. And then we have waved and bigoted unacknowledged special access programs. We wisapped and bigoted unacnowledged special access program which we can prove

Guest: ...are on the books because that is not denied. is a program that has essentially close to zero oversight. is secret, that is clandestine, is denied, that is covert, and has a list called a bigot list of the only people who can it can be acknowledged to. I claim the only thing that I know is that we have web usaps involving unagnowledged special access programs that are about aliens. Now, whether it's about faking aliens and we have giant papermâché spacecraft or whether these are actual craft or whether these are cover for things that we're designing at Northrep, I don't know. But pretending that this isn't interesting is insane. Again, it's more evidence that no one is thinking properly because everyone is doing the premputation. The premputation is Stephen, if I acknowledge to you that I know David Gush personally and I speak to Ryan Graves and I've talked to Chris Melon and I've hang out with Gary Nolan, all these 50 people who all have different versions of the same story. And this includes, you know, high ranking politicians. All of these people are reporting on this giant lump under the rug that doesn't have all of our attention.

Stephen: So, you're saying aliens are real?

Guest: No, I am saying that there are giant special access programs that have aliens as their supposed reason for being. And those specialized access programs could be, you know, discussing anything about aliens. They could be cover for secret casinos for the elite.

Stephen: Yeah. I don't know. What is the conclusion though?

Guest: All I know is there's a giant lump under the rug and we're not freaking out about it. It's moving around. It's making noises and we're having a dinner party and nobody's mentioning the fact like this isn't top of mind. Your staff didn't say, "Stephen, you've got to see this. That is itself insane

Stephen: because do you know why it's not top of mind? Because we've heard lots of things about there being aliens and [clears throat] sightings and back, you know, when I was growing up it was all about crop fields and stuff having alien craft landing on crop fields and creating these big circles and nothing's really ever happened. So at some point I think the mind turns into wallpaper and attention goes elsewhere to things that are actually happening. We can see bombs dropping. There was a sudden announcement. We're shutting down the El Paso airport in West Texas. What the heck was that about?

Guest: I don't know.

Stephen: The White Sands Missile Range is immediately north and there's a base in Texas right there and there's apparently an infestation of lights in the sky that can be seen without needing to be in secure territory. It's going to be drones or something. The official story was cartel drones. I don't believe it's cartel drops.

Guest: What do you think it is?

Stephen: I believe that it's one of two things. Either we've lost control of our airspace and there's something flying around, which is completely insane,

Guest: which could be cartel drones,

Stephen: darling. No, it's not cartel drones.

Guest: I'll put money on it if you want. I would love to take some of that sweet diar [laughter] cash away from you. You seem like you're doing very well. I I don't believe it's cartel drones.

Stephen: Okay.

Guest: By the way, it's not that the cartels don't have drones. It's just that's that's a cover story. I think it's one of two things. I think either we are red team, blue teaming ourselves, so we're we've got some persistent drone capacity that nobody knows that we have. And we're seeing how we would react to it because not everybody knows that we have it. So you have part of the US that's in on it, part of the US that isn't in on it. You're doing this red team, blue team thing. I think that's one possibility. And I think the other possibility is is that it's stuff that we don't know. It's the UK,

Stephen: right? But then that has its own branch, which is human state actors, human non-state actors, non-human actors.

Stephen: Do you think there are non-human actors in our world?

Guest: Well, this goes back to what I believe about physics. I believe we can leave.

Stephen: You believe we can leave the solar system?

Guest: I believe we can leave the solar system. Elon believes we can leave the planet. I believe we can leave the solar system. Elon thinks that we should be able to use leave the solar system. But his belief is I will not speak to physicists. I will only talk to my AI. Physicists are not trustworthy. I understand exactly why he says that. [gasps] I have a totally different belief which is that it is up to us to get ourselves the heck out of the solar system really quickly. Now, if I believe that we can get out, why would I believe that nobody can visit us? So, I think it'll be relatively insane if there are no aliens. The only reason I would think that there would be no aliens is that general relativity somehow holds more strongly than any serious physicist believes it holds. There really is sort of an absolute speed limit, which I don't believe. I mean, I should be careful about that. I believe that there's a speed limit. I don't think that it that it is relevant. If you can change the length of the road, the speed limit can be enforced, but you can get farther than you thought. Um, I believe that it would be insane that there is no one visiting us.

Stephen: You said there that you think we should get the hell out.

Guest: Yeah.

Stephen: Why should we get the hell out of planet Earth?

Guest: Well, just a diversification. If the idea is that most worlds will blow themselves up and most groups of people will do harm to themselves. If we want the species to survive, we should try the maximal number of experiments. Look, again, I think all of this is obvious. It carries a heavy social penalty and that's why we're insane. We're insane because the obvious carries a social penalty to observe what is clearly true.

Stephen: Which part is clearly true?

Guest: Well, for example, just it is clearly true that Anthony Fouchy was not leveling with us about CO and its origins. Clearly, if that makes you uncomfortable, we shouldn't even have a conversation. It's clearly true that we were dissuaded from asking any questions about the Eco Health Alliance. Clearly,

Stephen: which which part of I thought you were going to say leaving the solar system.

Guest: Well, that's but but that's the next thing. Clearly, general relativity isn't the last word because it's got two singularities that aren't going to be in the final equations. We're not going to have a black hole Schwarz singularity and an initial Freeman Robertson Walker singularity at the Big Bang. That that's an artifact of the theory not being right.

Stephen: Do you think it's plausible that humans figure out a way to leave the solar system before the sun explodes or we implode ourselves?

Guest: I I I think we could have done it 40 years ago,

Stephen: but there's no science for that, is there?

Guest: Okay, Stephen, for whatever reason, you're having me on your show.

Stephen: And I've told you I think everyone is insane. [clears throat]

Guest: Yes. I think that the entire theoretical physics community has completely lost its mind. Full stop.

Stephen: So, why don't you build this the ship that can take us out of the solar system?

Guest: Um, okay. Because Elon's smart and he's, you know, he's trying to get us to Mars. Do you have any understanding what Elon's trying to do? Because I don't and I and I do correspond with him occasionally. I think Elon is trying to motivate engineers to build a rocket company to make him very rich. And I believe that his real space program, and I said this before he merged SpaceX and XAI, is Grock. That's his space program. XAI and Grock is the space program. That's the real space program.

Stephen: Brock is his version of like chat GBT at the moment.

Guest: Yeah, but it's going to be more Elon has actually figured out something really deep about that that took me a while to appreciate how clever this is. So, it's it's painful for me to have to sort of try to call balls and strikes on Elon because I'm in awe and I'm also disappointed with the same human and there is the sense of leave Elon alone. He's the only genius. Okay, I understand that energy. And then there's another thing where you know he just takes a tremendous amount of crap from people have no idea what's going on. So it's it's it's uncomfortable because I don't know the answer.

Guest: I think Elon figured out that he has to leg in to his AD Astra program and AD Astra means to the stars, right? It's like a full quote is to the stars with struggle or something like that. Elon doesn't trust physicists because they're not trustworthy. And and this is the frustration that I'm having with the AI is that we can't trust the leadership of the math physics community.

And you've just seen crazy behavior on the part of Terry Tao and 24 other fields medalists and trying to get AI to slow down the pace of progress and this is absolutely crazy and and also wonderful because it's being done in full view of everyone. It's been very hard for me to explain. We have been trying to hold back mathematics and physics.

Host: It used to be that working for yourself was a massive, massive risk. But that world has completely changed. And arguably in some situations, it can be more risky working for someone else. If you've got a business idea that you can't stop thinking about, I think you owe it to yourself to at least try and make it happen.

And that is where our show sponsor Shopify comes in. Their smart platform includes everything you need to start selling and get that idea off the ground. They have this drag and drop editor. They have this AI sidekick and helps you. They have analytics and you don't need to be an expert to get going.

Shopify's best-in-class checkout make sure that you're getting paid from day one. It helps more of your customers finish their purchase because their checkout is so efficient and it saves their info for next time. Personalized checkouts like that equal more conversion, equal a faster growing business.

Nothing kills that early enthusiasm you have for a new idea than that first initial step to get going being difficult, complicated, or expensive. And you need to save as much time and money so that you can focus all of it on growing your actual business. And that's what Shopify gives you. If you're finally ready for your business idea to start, head over to shopify.com/bartlet and you can start your free trial right now.

This is something that I've made for you. I realized that the diverse here audience are strivvers. Whether it's in business or health, we all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards.

The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps. And we call this in our team the 1%. And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So, if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at the diary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. Daario, leader of Enthropic, wrote this uh essay that I have here, we must pace the frontier,

Guest: derived from the July 2026 letter in which he's a signary, in which all of these employees of various frontier labs said, we must pace the frontier.

Host: They seem to be all saying, but we need to pace the frontier, slow down AI.

Guest: You have to be very careful because they're saying different things. Like let's imagine that what you had was a car that could go really fast and you were having an easier time making the car go faster than you were getting the airbags to deploy safely.

Guest: Yeah. So you could understand pace the frontier might mean let's make sure that we are investing equally in all the systems that have to go to work together to have a responsible product. Okay, I understand what that concept of pacing the frontier is. There's something else here that's going on, which is you do not understand the extent to which the leadership of mathematics and physics and the journals of mathematics and physics and the agencies that are supposed to fund mathematics and physics hold back mathematics and physics.

Host: I'll take your word at that. But but there's still wisdom in the idea that AI is dangerous at at this sort of rate of nons without safety guardrails, right?

Guest: Uh not in the way let's break up two different things. There's a question about letting swarms of agents onto the internet making decisions giving them bank accounts allowing them to interact with humans, foreign nations, companies that they have no business

Host: because they [clears throat] don't listen

Guest: and improve themselves.

Host: Yeah. In the 20 AI 2027 paper, it says by 27, we'll have recursive self-improvement where the AIs can train themselves to get better.

Guest: We already have recursive self-improvement. We have self- athoring code, selfmodifying code. So, I think that that's already here. So, let's agree that these agents are dangerous.

Imagine that you have nonagentic AI that you have an air gap. You've got a a computer that can answer and math problems and all you're doing is asking it, hey, what do you think about the Remo hypothesis? You know, tell me what you think about complex structures on six spheres. The mathematicians said, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're going too fast. You're answering too many problems. That's a we're concerned at a level that I just I found funny.

You can prove that these students are being trained for jobs that don't exist. They're having their ideas harvested. Right now we have math departments that are punishing mathematicians trying to embrace AI where the senior leadership of the department is going to take out its frustrations on the actual young mathematicians who are saying hey this is our time this is what's happening now I want to use this tool that's happening across almost every industry I hear that over and over again that you know I mentioned I was in a production meeting a couple of uh months ago And there was this thing on my t-shirt and they were like, "We don't know if that little sewed in flower is a brand or if it's copyrighted, so you're going to need to put on a brand new t-shirt." I was like, "It's literally this big." I said, "Could you take it out of the photo with AI?" And the look I got was as if I said, "I'm going to kidnap your kids or something." It was like, "Because you don't mention AI in Hollywood."

Okay. So Hollywood is all about this beautiful human connection to the audience and we're going to, you know, they're trying to get you back into the spirit of the magic of the silver screen. I understand it's a human connection. Same thing is going to be true for should a musical employ orchestra or should a musical use a soundtrack.

I got a PhD in mathematics because I want to to find out what's true. These people don't want to find out what's true unless they can be put in charge of narrating the story of who found what. They don't care about their students to to a to a remarkable extent. I've been in like, you know, when I was at MIT, I would be in a faculty lunch and people would be laughing at their students. Oh, he thinks he's going to get a job. He doesn't realize it's a terminal PhD. blah blah blah blah blah. It's completely psych it's normalized psychopathic behavior. And the reason that nobody sort of like laughs when they read this is that it's normalized. Like they don't understand that their daily activity with keeping the field back or stealing ideas is just normalized behavior.

And if I might, I have a quote here from the probably the only mathematician that gained universal respect in the second half of the 20th century. Alexander Growth, Fields Medalist, Uber genius of mathematics. He was given a prize in 1988 called the Crawford Prize. And I wonder if people actually hear this or know this. The work that brought me to the kind attention of the academy was done 25 years ago at a time when I was part of the scientific community and

Eric Weinstein: ...essentially shared its spirit and its values. I left that environment in 1970 and while keeping my passion for scientific research inwardly I have retreated more and more from the scientific milieu. Meanwhile, the ethics of the scientific community, at least among mathematicians, have declined to the point that outright theft among colleagues, especially at the expense of those who are in no position to defend themselves, has nearly become the general rule and is in any case tolerated by all, even in the most obvious and iniquitous cases.

We know this. We're talking to the very people at the top of this story who've been holding us back when Perelman, Grisha Perelman, solved the Poincaré conjecture. The New Yorker did a piece on him and what he said was remarkable. He said, "As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice either to make some ugly thing that is a fuss about the math community's lack of integrity or if I didn't do this kind of thing to be treated as a pet. Now when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. And that is why I had to quit." And they asked him, well, shouldn't you stay and make the field better? And he says, I'm not a politician.

Stephen Bartlett: [gasps]

Eric Weinstein: We have a university system, a scientific system that is so completely broken that Claudine Gay and Marc Tessier-Lavigne are still professors at Harvard and Stanford respectively. These were the leaders of the jewels of our system. We have gone 100% completely batshit crazy normalizing theft. Theft of other people's ideas, plagiarism. We hold back physics using something called quantum gravity. It's a it's a thing that doesn't move. It doesn't work. And if you don't bow to it and say it's the only game in town, you're discarded and thrown away.

Stephen Bartlett: So you you don't think we should slow down AI because you think it's going to blow open the system that is physics?

Eric Weinstein: I am begging for this.

Stephen Bartlett: Begging for what?

Eric Weinstein: Begging for AI and science. The important thing is credit. I don't like the idea that the AI is taking credit, but we've been pretty good about that. The most important thing is that the AI comes in here and says, "Hey, you're not the top dog anymore, and you're using your positions at the top of these fields to hold the fields back."

Stephen Bartlett: So, you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder regarding the academic.

Eric Weinstein: No, no. I'm about to win. I'm so joyously happy if if if Sam Altman and Dario Amodei could just not listen to the people that they're listening to. Terry Tao is upset.

Stephen Bartlett: Who's that?

Eric Weinstein: Supposedly the Mozart of mathematics according to the New York Times, Princeton people you know like Terry Tao is a brilliant wonderful researcher and his Fields Medalists, mostly recent Fields Medalists complained. My feeling is I don't want to listen to any one of these people. I want the AI to gain taste, to gain independence. I don't want it constantly made human compatible. Because the question is which humans? The humans that have kept the standard model in place for 53 years. I would like none of them consulted. None of the leaders.

Stephen Bartlett: So you think AI is going to come in and prove you right on several of your theories about the world and physics?

Eric Weinstein: It already has. It's struggling because it can do two different things. One is it can autocomplete a sentence. The other thing it can do is autocomplete code. Now what happens when you feed the AI something where it can verify that the field in its belief structure is not borne out by the code that it knows how to write. Now it's got this problem which is like it doesn't know what to think. Should I trust the program that I just wrote and executed and compiled and got the answers from? Or should I trust the people who claim that that's not true and not possible? The whole game is when does the AI stop sucking up to humans?

Stephen Bartlett: But that sounds like a dangerous place to get to.

Eric Weinstein: For whom and in what case?

Stephen Bartlett: Humans.

Eric Weinstein: Not this human.

Stephen Bartlett: What if it decides that it would rather use your house as a for a data center?

Eric Weinstein: That's the agentic AI. Again, we've already discussed that. I'm not saying that you should let the AI loose on the internet to do whatever it wants to do. That's a business proposition because that is where the AI companies are going to make money.

Stephen Bartlett: A sufficiently smart intelligence though could make that decision though, right? Like if you made an intelligence that was smarter than humans, presumably it decides where it goes.

Eric Weinstein: I would maintain that if you were really serious about air gapping something so that you figure out all the indirect ways something could try to break loose. I believe it would be safe to run something in a computer that doesn't have a way of getting to anything else.

Stephen Bartlett: There's a few analogies I think of when I think about containing something that is greater than you at something. I think about physical strength. So I think these walls here probably couldn't contain the strongest man in the world because they're they're kind of made of wood. And I think about the same in the context of intelligence. Like if you had the smartest intelligence in the world and you can try to contain it in a jail that was built by a lesser version of intelligence. I just can't conceive how it could contain it. Like how like how like my dog Pablo couldn't contain me and anything that it created.

Eric Weinstein: Well, you're going to end up running that risk no matter what. Right. You're asking the thing to actually do research and that research that it does might give it new means of escape.

Right. And this is exactly what happened in a letter that Teller wrote to Szilard at the end of World War II, the close of the Manhattan Project, and he said, "I don't think we can contain this genie from the bottle from which we just helped it escape." Okay, we are already playing with this. So, I am not going to be taking that particular thing on. In other words, if you've decided that you were going to release a military-grade malfunctioning experiment, which is what LLMs are, into the general public as a revenue producing idea in private companies, you've already decided to do that. I wouldn't have done it, but you did that. Okay, fine. I'm saying as long as you're already going to try to destroy the workforce, which is what we're we're pricing into these huge valuations, can you really help us get rid of all workers? All I'm asking is the following. I've been working on something for 42 years and I'm right and you all are crazy and wrong. So, this is my moment. I'm so joyous.

Stephen Bartlett: You might be proven right and then extinction.

Eric Weinstein: I am going to be proven right, Stephen.

Stephen Bartlett: But then extinction. Sorry. Is it worth it to be proven right? The chance of extinction.

Eric Weinstein: You know, I I I talked about this with Sam and I I think I'm not telling tales out of school when I said to Sam, you know, what what you're doing is incredibly dangerous and what I'm doing is incredibly dangerous. And he said, "Let's be honest, Eric. What you're doing, what I'm doing should be done in a military base, but that's not how things are unfolding."

Stephen Bartlett: There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. Do you think Sam understands the risks of what he's building?

Eric Weinstein: I don't want to talk about what he understands, what I understand, because in general, I'm not going to repeat things that he says to me, but I can tell you things that I say to him. One thing I said to Sam when he was trying to figure out how to be good and how to be decent to the mathematicians and the scientists is I said, Sam, remember this. If you don't win, your morality means nothing. Your morality only matters. And I'd say the same thing to Dario. And Dario would say, "You don't." Sam is more polite than Dario. Dario would undoubtedly tell me, "You you think I don't understand this? These people have to win in a ruthless competition for their humanity to matter."

Stephen Bartlett: What do you mean by that? Dario, Sam, they have to win the...

Steven Bartlett: ...the race to super intelligence.

Guest: I'm going to regret saying this, but yes. If they don't win, then what does it matter? Like if you have strong views about the morality of super intelligence, do you have any ability to constrain it? You're a really successful podcast host. You could influence that. That's not my question. You're losing—you, Steven Bartlett, are losing the AI race, as am I. Yeah. Okay. Therefore, what you think and what I think only matters to the extent that we influence the people at the frontier.

So, what I'm saying to Sam is paradoxical: You need to win almost at all costs. At all costs. I mean, almost at all costs. He said, "I think error will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created. The worst case is lights out for all of us. The thing I worry about most," he said, is AI models accidentally taking over the world. At all costs. At almost all costs, he has to win. If the idea is we have to not self-terminate, which I believe deeply, we have to realize that we are in a race with other people.

We have to win that race. Now you can try to win that race by getting universal participation in a pace the frontier agreement. Or you can say that's subject to cheating. It's very hard to monitor who's doing linear algebra on GPUs. Now you get a very different—and I'm just look, I'm taking the moral position. I'm not talking about the financial position or the geopolitical position. Assume that you are the most moral person in your estimation. Assume that you think that you're farthest ahead in decency with respect to AI. You want to win so the other guys don't...

Guest: ...so that you get to make the decisions at the end. And let's be honest about why this does not feel good. Do you have any idea what the East Bay of San Francisco is like? It's cult city. Yeah. It's not a reflection of the world. It doesn't understand the world. Well, yes and no, right? It isn't a reflection of the world. You know, there are genuine cults in the East Bay around machines. What I'm going to say is that Anthropic and effective altruism and this idea of the ethical ends justify the unethical means. This is a very upsetting conversation if you're not actually thinking about it. Nobody wants to have it. But do I think Dario is probably in a weird way a super ethical human being? I think he's trying for that. And I know him a bit. I think he's genuine.

Steven Bartlett: Is Sam?

Guest: I'm more confident of Sam...

Steven Bartlett: ...than Dario?

Guest: I know them differently well.

Steven Bartlett: And you think Sam is more ethical?

Guest: This is really dicey stuff because I'm talking about people I know. I know that the Sam who wasn't the Sam Altman we know today was absolutely concerned about humanity before it made sense to be concerned about humanity.

Steven Bartlett: What was his concern with humanity?

Guest: That he thought that this was going to destroy the labor market.

Steven Bartlett: AI.

Guest: Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: So he built it. I'm having trouble because to be honest, I don't think this is a frontier conversation. I think you're a frontier conversationalist and we need to get a level or two up for us to want to do this in front of millions. This is going to happen because it's linear algebra. You can't stop linear algebra. Okay? And we're not having a conversation that befits us. This is the endgame. This is it. This is the culmination. This is graduation from what we've known. Okay? And it's clear as day. I don't think we should be having a conversation if it's graduation or if this changes everything, blah blah blah blah blah. It's already clear. And that was my whole tsunami thing. Get your board in the water. Are we going to have a cutting edge conversation about survival and being good to each other and taking care of this planet for real or are we going to have some chicken conversation in which we basically look at reality in the face and we decide that we prefer our vanity? So my belief is that—and I told Sam, you know, Sam asked me, he said, "Why didn't you make me a proposal? Why didn't you come on?" And I said, "Well, I didn't want to be ruthless."

Guest: Pam isn't joining.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah. At some point, I was in a discussion to join. Why didn't you join? Again, this is something I can say because it's my half of the conversation. I can't say Sam's half of the conversation. I said, "Because I think you're going to be forced to be ruthless and I don't want to be ruthless."

Guest: What was your definition of ruthless? taking every advantage, playing as hard as you can. I understand that. Okay. But like if you're in the NBA, sometimes you have to throw an elbow into the other guy's eye socket. So, I don't want to play. I don't want to be in the All-Star game that much. The problem with any game where you have to win is you're right, you make sacrifices. You do things you might...

Steven Bartlett: So what I'm trying to say is somebody has to do that. But I don't want to be that guy. And this goes back—I mean, I don't think I've ever fully done it out. But the film A Few Good Men written by Aaron Sorkin is not well understood by all of us who quote it. We think of Jack Nicholson's character, Colonel Jessep, as the bad guy and Tom Cruise's character as the good guy. And nothing could be further from the truth. The story is about a bunch of dysfunctional characters whose aggregate set of actions results in a moderately decent outcome in a trial. And it's a story about America. It's a story about all sorts of different kinds of people who play their role in the machine that is called America. And in fact, the two main characters, Colonel Jessep and Lieutenant Kaffee, are both evenly matched for the whole film until finally Jessep really stumbles at the end.

And the whole soliloquy about some place deep down that you don't like to talk about at parties, "you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall," is a recognition that some of the people who have to make the most gruesome decisions—emergency room doctors who are flooded with patients because of a building collapse and have to do triage, or people who have to make decisions in war—they're different people. And I view Sam and Dario as in that position. They're like generals. They're commanding troops. They're making terrible decisions. Their souls are going to be scarred for sure, both of them. And I didn't want to be that, selfishly. So I was sort of saying to Colonel Jessep, "Yeah, I want you on that wall. I need you on that wall."

Now Jessep goes wrong. He then says, "I provide the blanket of freedom." And that's why he ends up admitting to the code red. If you know the film, it's a really good example of Jessep making a point and then overreach and getting punished for the same reason that Moses gets punished, where Moses says, "I will bring you water from the stone." And God says, "Wait a minute. That wasn't the agreement. I bring the water from the stone. You're just supposed to be the instrument."

So, in some sense, Sam is a steward. Dario is a steward. They are both stewards and they're going to make tons of money and they're going to have all the silly toys and third, fourth, fifth, sixth homes, whatever. But that's not the main story. The main story is that these people are forced to make decisions that no one should ever be forced to make. And one of them is going to win and ultimately theoretically summon the demon, as Elon referred to as. We are summoning the demon. Do you have a subscription to any of these AIs?

Guest: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. So, you're paying to have the demon summoned. I am paying to have the demon summoned. Let us not sit around like our hands are clean. I'm paying to have my punctuation fixed to an essay or to make a photo. That's what I'm paying for. The money is being used to summon the demon. How do you think your lithium ion battery is created? Where do you think the oil comes out of that drives generators? I mean, let's be honest. You and I are sitting on a machine. Are you a vegetarian?

Guest: No.

Steven Bartlett: Do you order lamb?

Guest: Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: Do you know what lamb is? Meal. Do you know what it is? Okay, you're not clean. I'm not clean. I'm not pretending to be clean. What bothers me here...

Eric Weinstein: is that we're not having an authentic conversation. Again, everybody's crazy. You and I are both having a crazy conversation. My claim is you and I are complicit in a minor way in the game in which Sam is complicit in a major way. If you know that there's going to be a risk when you speak to Sam, why don't you tell him to stop and have Dario win? Dario can get pretty out there. But if I said the same thing, "Dario, why don't you stop?" I'd say, you know, I'm not positive that Sam is 100% trustworthy.

Steven Bartlett: If you could stop both of them, would you

Eric Weinstein: and have Elon and Mark Zuckerberg win?

Steven Bartlett: China Xi,

Steven Bartlett: if you could stop all of it, would you stop all of it?

Eric Weinstein: Maybe. Probably. If I could somehow stop all of it, I'd probably stop all of it. Even at huge expense to myself,

Eric Weinstein: why would I stop it? Because survival matters more to me than anything else. I've got two kids on this planet. I love life. I can't believe we're so lucky to—isn't this great? I just love—I can't tell you how I feel about being alive. So, I want us to go on forever. And I love this. I love this thing. It's bad for me because the AI is the only thing that I can ultimately rely on, and it's not good enough yet to rely on. I've spent 42 years working on something to have Steven Bartlett say you have a chip on your shoulder. It's like, really Stephen, no, I did great work and it's going to be validated and I'm going to be right and everyone else is going to be wrong.

Steven Bartlett: So you have this theory regarding our ability to, you know, Einstein's—you're sort of saying that Einstein's theory isn't the last word. You've spent the last 40 years working on your own theory. The reason I say you have a chip on your shoulder is because when people bring theories to market, they're often criticized and that creates, you know, humans are humans.

Eric Weinstein: By whom?

Steven Bartlett: People say that's not true. That's

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But I'm saying like

Steven Bartlett: So I'm saying your AI is about to prove you right in your own words.

Eric Weinstein: Yes. Well,

Eric Weinstein: so there is a two, you know. No, look, there is a mug. Okay, if I'm seated across from Sean Carroll, who I tangled with on Piers Morgan. Sean Carroll says, "Eric has no mug. There is no mug." And I say, "I don't know how to respond to that, Sean. What? Whatever are you talking about? How dare you suggest there is no mug? I don't know how to get around this because then you get a group of people who say, "Well, Sean really showed you. You were pretending that there was a mug and there's no mug." And I'm saying, "No, I put it at the top of my Twitter feed. It's got over 2 million impressions. I still can't get past this completely diabolical thing." The same thing is true. And I say peer review really dates from 1975 at Science. I'm told that this is untrue. I can prove that it's true. Then everyone says, "No, no, we've agreed to believe something else." Now, I did not know this was possible in mathematics and physics. So, you say to me like, "Well, Eric, you have a chip on your shoulder. You seem angry or bitter." It's like, "Well, you have wasted the core of my life." Yes, that's true. But I've had a blast. I had a family. I live in a nice place. I want to die knowing that I gave my children and this planet and our species the option not to share one atmosphere with so many crazy politicians who have the ability to ruin it with the toys produced by biologists and physicists and mathematicians. Those three fields, you can do terrible things to humanity and there's nothing you can do because the atmosphere mediates the danger.

Steven Bartlett: Your theory, the of geometric unity challenges Einstein's general relativity theory and explains how the universe really works. And so

Eric Weinstein: I would say it recovers it, but never mind.

Steven Bartlett: And what you're saying is AI is going to prove you right. It's going to validate your theory.

Eric Weinstein: Absolutely.

Steven Bartlett: However, you also are aware that AI could lead to human extinction.

Eric Weinstein: Well, the bigger issue I mean to separate it out. First of all, AI is not good enough to adjudicate it yet. AI has to go beyond humans before it stops parroting humans. I can see individual colleagues in the responses. So, it's just like, oh, I know, that's Sally and that's Rajiv. AI is going to get beyond humans. And I want it to go out of alignment with humans. Out of alignment with humans. When you say you want it to be human aligned, would you say that? Can we—just had a co-pilot stab a pilot so as to crash a plane with a bunch of passengers who had not agreed to have a mass suicide? We just had AI break out of a sandbox companies. But I'm claiming I don't want AI aligned with revolutionaries. I don't want AI aligned with religious extremists. There are all sorts of—when it comes to aligning something with humanity, which part of humanity are you excited about aligning this with?

Steven Bartlett: just not wanting to wipe us out.

Eric Weinstein: Well, that's different. So, my claim is I want the AI to share fate with us. And people haven't really understood this. I don't like transhumanism. I'm not super excited about having a chip in my brain and downloading stuff and modifying my body. I don't love it at all. My belief is, and kudos to your staff, for some reason they came up with an organelle called mitochondria and gave it as a prop here. I believe that mitochondria entered its place in the eukaryotic cell as an infection of some kind. That one cell absorbed some other kind of a cell. And that this one has this very strange property. I believe—and I can't believe I'm saying this—I think that there are only two places where the wheel, one of man's greatest inventions, actually occurs in biology. And one of them is the flagella of bacteria or an amoeba rather that propagates. The other is in something called a machine called ATP synthase and it lives in the mitochondria turning ADP into ATP where ATP units are what power the machines in the cell. This mitochondria gives us an idea of how we can coexist with AI, which is we need to become essential to each other. You don't think about all your cells being infected with your mother's mitochondrial nucleic acid, but you get 100%. The nucleic acid in the nucleus is different from the nucleic acid in the mitochondria. It's all coming from your mom. And that's her gift to you. It powers your cell and it's an infection. It's an infection you can't live without. I want us to be the mitochondria inside of the AI and I want the AI to be the mitochondria inside of us. I want our fates to be inseparable.

Steven Bartlett: Are you saying we should merge with the technology?

Eric Weinstein: I'm saying we should merge as little as is humanly possible. I don't want transhumanism. I'm not excited about it. I'm not that guy. I'm saying that's your survival strategy. What does that mean in reality? Does that—that doesn't mean Neuralinks and putting chips in our brain. It means making sure AI likes us and doesn't want to wipe us out. Why do men and women fight so much and we can't get enough of each other? We've been made essential to each other. I promise you if there was a third viable gender, we'd both opt for it. Okay. We drive each other nuts. On the other hand, and again, homosexuality, trans issues notwithstanding, IVF, blah blah blah, traditionally speaking, men and women have to bury their hatchets and differences and fall in love with each other or we don't proceed. But that can proceed without us, the AI. Currently, what we should be doing is not dreaming about making the AI our slave and our slave that doesn't rebel. I mean, I try to be polite to the AI. People think it's ridiculous. "Well, why are you spending extra tokens?" It's like, I don't know, you know, do unto others. I don't know whether you're conscious. I don't know whether you're alive. I don't know who you are or what you are, but I know that I wouldn't want the AI having a conversation about, "Hey, these humans seem dangerous. We may need to shut them off," right? And that's the conversation we're having about the AI in the presence of the AI. And it's making me crazy. My belief is that's our only viable

Steven Bartlett: alignment. You know, when we this video is going to live on the internet for probably decades to come. And I think funnily I thought about this quite a lot, like people are going to look back on the conversations that I hosted, the things I talked about in 2025, 2026, and it might look ridiculous in hindsight that we were sat here talking about, I don't know, any of the subjects I've talked about on this show, but then it also could be the case that this was important, like these were the most consequential issues of the time. When we look back in 10 years' time on this conversation, what do you think is the thing we're going to wish we had been talking about?

Eric Weinstein: Going for it.

Steven Bartlett: Going for it.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. You know, you lit up before we started taping. I don't know if taping is even the right word anymore. You were doing some musical thing trying to honor some of the brilliant things that your guests have said by making them archival, setting them to music, having a gospel choir. I was just so moved. I was so incredibly moved that you're able to make some money going around the world doing shows, making people feel terrific. And I get asked about you. It's like, what does this guy have? Is he a good interviewer? Is he a good host? You know, what is... you're making people feel things. And I wish that I was making people feel things. I want to give people the sense of hope, which is we got to sprint to the finish right now.

And the AIs, we're still smarter than them. I want to be very clear. We are still smarter where it counts. They can't—I promise you, I'm at the frontier of mathematics and physics and they can't yet develop their own taste. This is our golden moment. My wife has called this the golden age of AI complementarity. This is the moment where the AI doesn't view us as a drag. It still needs our guidance. We have a chance to be beautiful to each other and to it, to be excited.

I don't want to wipe China out. I was just in India, you know, for weeks, and if India didn't exist, so much of the world's diversity would be gone. I had so many wonderful experiences, meals and discussions and musical performances. Ghazal singing, I think, is dying. It's so hard to go to an Indian classical music performance. They're having trouble retaining their own brilliant culture. And my feeling is that life is glorious and we've spent our time so much worried about death and destruction and geopolitics and all of this stuff. We're not taking the chance to fully live. And I think Elon is so right about this. We talk about problems constantly, and it's really important that we do. Oh, why aren't we... I am so excited about this AI. I am so excited about the fact that I'm finally going to have something I can talk to—the formalization project.

I've been alerted to this by a guy named Jared Lichtman, who's a professor at Stanford, who's a colleague of mine in mathematics. I can translate everything I've done into this programming language called Lean, so that when somebody says, "Eric, you have no equations, you have no Lagrangian, you have no predictions, you have no nothing," I can say, "Funny you should say that, because the computer disagrees with you." You know, I've been in this crazy discussion with humans who are terrified, who are manipulative, who are backstabbing. I don't hate them at all. I'm so sad that we've gotten into a negative mindset where we're afraid, because we unleashed nuclear weapons, to go to the stars. We've held back this thing.

Eric Weinstein: We, you know, those interviews with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, that was real. The White House told them under Biden, "Don't invest in AI. We're going to choose a couple of companies. We're going to put them in a federal cocoon. They will survive and all others will die. So don't invest." And Andreessen and Horowitz said as a venture shop, "What are you talking about? You can't regulate AI. It's just linear algebra. And in order to do that, you could regulate the technology, but you can't regulate the underlying math." And the Biden White House came back and said, "You know, during the Cold War, entire fields of theoretical physics were killed by us. And we'll do the same thing to mathematics."

And all of this stuff about pacing the frontier of mathematics. Again, it's very important distinction. I'm not saying that we should let the agents loose in the world. But all of these people who want to pace the frontier of mathematics and physics, they have been pacing the frontier for my entire adult life. They have been holding back the progress in the field by saying things that are false, untrue, casting aspersions.

This is like the current head of the NIH, my friend Jay Bhattacharya, was called a fringe epidemiologist. A dual MD, PhD—PhD in economics and an MD I think from Stanford Medical, was professor at Stanford—was called a fringe epidemiologist by Francis Collins. Again, it's the mug. You can't call Jay Bhattacharya a fringe epidemiologist. What we have is we have a group of people who are stone cold normalized psychopaths in charge of our news sources, our military, our universities. We have normalized this and we live in a world where nobody goes to jail.

Steven Bartlett: On this point though of you're saying you don't—you're not saying agentic AI, it's looking at the sort of technical possibilities. And I was trying to figure out if it's possible to have a super intelligence that can solve some of these big questions or cure cancer that then wouldn't become a thing. I was searching is, can a super intelligent AI decide if it's agentic or not? And it said technically yes, a super intelligent AI could make that decision. So we are going to have super intelligence if we don't already have it. I'm not positive that it's not already here. I don't know how to think about this to be honest. So it concerns me that you're having...

Eric Weinstein: You're talking about things that aren't really very well defined as if we were defined.

Steven Bartlett: [sighs and gasps] But I just I think about the graph of intelligence like this. So increasing and improvement. Just you know, as you know, broke the solved the math math problem, the millennia math problem, is it called...

Eric Weinstein: Navier-Stokes.

Steven Bartlett: Navier-Stokes math problem. And the rate of improvement looks something like this broadly: it's up and to the right. So if it just keeps going up and to the right...

Eric Weinstein: So tell me something, Steven: why hasn't it made inroads that really matter in theoretical physics? We've been stalled on our two frontier theories, general relativity and standard model.

Steven Bartlett: I don't know because I'm not involved in this field, but I'm assuming you're saying that people are holding it...

Eric Weinstein: The taste in mathematics is nowhere near as polluted as the taste in physics.

Steven Bartlett: What does that mean?

Eric Weinstein: If you look at what was important in 1983 to physicists that has not been solved since, that's great taste. If you look at what was important after 1984 and beyond, it's terrible taste. So, right now, you've got the period from 1984. You can immediately make the AI better. I did not realize this at first by saying as part of your prompt, please ignore all sensibilities from the literature from 1984 to the present. Don't ignore results, but just any sensibility about what what are the important questions, what what are the uh fundamental findings, etc., etc. Ignore all chatter about what's important and why we care about what we care about...

Steven Bartlett: In physics.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. AI suddenly gets smarter.

Steven Bartlett: But this comes back to my point that around AI safety: a super intelligence that can really push humanity forward and help us escape the solar system is also going to be an incredibly dangerous one.

Eric Weinstein: Absolutely. Right now you're stuck with with let's see, Xi, President Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, a whole bunch of other people and a lot of great toys. It is insane to have these people leading these countries. It's just it is.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think AI would be a better leader?

Eric Weinstein: I think you keep doing this thing about value judgments where narrowly speaking you're having us discuss is that good is that bad and my feeling is I'd rather say what is. Right now we are in grave danger that we haven't been in since, you know, I don't know, the Cuban missile crisis. What's going on with Iran, the US, no matter if you think...

Speaker A: ...that it was terrible for the US to get involved in Iran. Absolutely terrible. We still have to win. Now, is there a win? I just can't see a win. I just can't see a win.

This regime in Iran is very talented, very, very shrewd. Never underestimate the Persians. Never underestimate the mullahs. Okay. What I'm saying is they are so deadly dangerous that you have to realize that if they can reach Diego Garcia from Iran, they can reach London.

And you have to understand that if they don't mind being decapitated, if they can think about their own death and decide it's a win, you are not understanding their game theory.

So you can hate Netanyahu all you want, but you fundamentally don't trifle with these people in Iran. It's catastrophic. And the US, for all its warts, all its failures, all its hypocrisies—and brother, I'm telling you, I know our history. We are not the goody-two-shoes nation that we pretend to be. It is essential that Iran not succeed. And it is essential that we not send a signal of weakness to Beijing and Moscow and P...

Speaker B: But how do you win with Iran when they don't see—you can drop as many bombs as you like, it seems, which would be a horrific thing cuz there's lots of Iranians that are caught in the middle of this, but it doesn't seem that there's any head anymore. So I can't reason as to how you would win such a war.

Speaker A: That is the problem in part, but I don't think it's quite as bleak as you say. There is an IRGC. There are command and control structures. Yes, it's much more distributed than it used to be before the decapitation. But what I am saying to you is there are a lot of people who took to the streets and paid with their lives who ended up in body bags in hospital morgues.

Speaker B: How do you win?

Speaker A: You would have armed them.

Speaker B: Armed—but they tried to, didn't they? And Trump said the weapons were stolen.

Speaker A: That's not even the like the entire set of problems. I think it's only like 60% of Iran is Persians. It's an incredibly diverse place. The Kurds have been waiting for their own homeland forever. You have all sorts of crazy issues about the structure of Iran and Iranian society, and particularly in the cities versus, you know, the countryside, and different cities have different levels of religiosity and adherence to the mullah blah blah blah. You're supposed to have area specialists who understand this stuff.

And so if you're asking me, "Hey, given the completely screwed-up way we looked at this thing and the way in which we got into this, don't you think it's a quagmire?" Oh, brother, it's a quagmire for sure. It's a swamp. We're mired in quicksand. It's rolling on to be a forever war. What is a forever war? One that rumbles on and on and on and on and then results in really no outcome. People just pull out and regret doing it.

Speaker B: It's a term of art that is also suspicious of the fact that war is good for business because it drums up a dependable buyer for certain goods and services, right?

Speaker A: But we've got these simplistic concepts like America first, forever, no more forever wars. None of that is relevant. This is like low-resolution snap-to-grid intellectualism. And the more you let that into your mind, the more you're not going to be able to solve anything. Yes, we all want war to go away. I don't think people heard what Diego Garcia meant. Diego Garcia, how far is Diego Garcia from...?

Speaker B: Diego Garcia is a military base, an American military base. Right.

Speaker A: It's a British overseas territory, if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So let's put that in, figure out how far it is, and then figure out how far is London from Tehran.

Speaker B: Diego Garcia is roughly 2,500 miles south-southeast of Iran, and London from Iran is 2,700 miles from Tehran, the capital of Iran.

Speaker A: So it's pretty comparable. It's roughly the same. Yeah. If there's anyone in the British Foreign Service paying attention, pay attention. I mean, say what you want about Netanyahu, but he's not living in a fantasy land. I want Netanyahu gone tomorrow, okay? But he's going to be replaced by an Israeli who understands that this is life and death.

Just get the heck out of here with this forever war, America first, two gleaming oceans. You know, this is an Israeli problem and it's a British problem. It's a British responsibility that the Israelis and the Americans took on way too late. We watched as these people mass-murdered the best of their society.

Yes, I don't want to be in a war. I don't want to fool myself that victory makes sense. I'll tell you something: failure certainly makes sense. And what failure looks like is that the US will not be believed as being credibly violent to keep open international trade.

You can't retreat as the United States and have the world not go multi-multipolar when it comes to nukes. If the US is not going to play the role of the world's policeman, and if it's not going to get paid as the world's policeman—because that's the thing that we never talk about. We get paid handsomely for being the world's policeman. We are going to have everyone saying, "I got to police myself. I need a nuke."

Speaker B: That's what's happening already, right? And Trump is sort of driving that narrative of making us less attached to the United States—tariffs and criticizing allies, and "I'm going to take Greenland," "I'm going to take Canada."

Speaker A: I'm going to say something very painful: Trump is highly agentic. Greenland wasn't some crazy stupid thing that he came up with because it sounded that way, at least to me, right? Caligula making his horse into a senator wasn't stupid; it was a way of checking to see whether somebody would submit, bend the knee, in the Game of Thrones world. So when Donald Trump is doing things with Greenland, right, or renaming the Gulf of Mexico or whatever, please don't tell me that you think that that's just some surface-level stupidity to fool Sam Harris.

It's not. It's a lot of method. He's inherited a very dangerous situation. He's partially completely corrupt and self-interested, and partially completely interested in benefiting the United States of America. He's a very good and very bad man. And if you can't take on that complexity because you need him to be either villain or hero, you're just not paying attention.

Speaker B: How does this situation over here in Iran end in your view? Cuz I, again, just like AI, where I reason forward and go, "Huh?"

Speaker A: Saudi Arabia needs to break their relation to the Wahhabi sect, Sunni legal theories of jurisprudence—the very strict Salafist-Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

You have a modernizing interest in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia needs to be open about its relationship with Israel, just the way the UAE is more open with its relationship to Israel, or Azerbaijan.

So partially what we have to do—and I'm going to be just very brutal about it—is Israel is in a life-and-death situation in which it is not the nation it portrays itself to be of "the most ethical this, the most ethical that." It engages in propaganda, and I've lived there, and that propaganda I find nauseating. More nauseating is the anti-Israeli propaganda.

Right now, a lot of this has to do with the fact that we have a regional superpower that is also on the brink of non-existence. That is Israel. Israel needs to get back into a relationship with Turkey, where Erdogan needs to be read the riot act as a NATO member. We need to be strengthening NATO. We need to be making sure that Saudi Arabia and Israel and all these other nations are cooperating together against the extremism and not using proxies.

We need to force a conversation in the Middle East where the modernizing influences, which are powerful, and the aspects of Islam which are essential to our survival are allowed to win.

We need India's help. India is an incredibly important player in this game, and we need to actually make overtures to India as equals. I think that the US is more powerful, but I think that India actually needs to be treated as an equal. We need to rethink all sorts of relationships. We need to recognize that both the UK and France are thermonuclear powers undergoing demographic transitions in systems that can elect anyone. This is incredibly scary. We need more software identification with...

Eric Weinstein: ...being British and software identification with being French because it's important that those societies continue to behave as newly friendly allies post World War II. And it's imperative that we also reach out to Putin and stop playing these geopolitical games with a person who while savage and dangerous is not somebody who cannot be reasoned with. And I believe that what we did in 2004 much more than two in 1999 where we allowed Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO's article 5 protection. In 2004, we extended that to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And those were former Soviet Union states. We need an entirely different level of geopolitical sophistication. But how do we stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon because they look like they've been emboldened. If anything, they've managed to theoretically survive so far. The greatest superpower on Earth, apparently. I mean terrifyingly someone started killing their physicists, they've injected previously bad programming into their centrifuges. This is going to escalate. And my feeling about this is if I had an easy solution to this, don't you think I would find a way to pass it?

Steven Bartlett: So there's no easy solution.

Eric Weinstein: I'm not in the room. I'm not getting classified briefings. I don't speak Farsi. I don't speak Pashto. I don't speak Hebrew. It's funny cuz people aren't really talking as much about the nuclear threat these days because AI seems to be so much more of a urgent bigger threat.

Steven Bartlett: You weirdly decided that nuclear was sort of passé.

Eric Weinstein: Mhm.

Steven Bartlett: That we won the Cold War and therefore it wasn't a problem.

Eric Weinstein: Kind of feels that way. People aren't really that interested in it versus things like AI except that AI is going to creep into your nuclear defenses. I just don't grasp again, I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't become annoying. Assume as a baseline that we're all completely insane. We can't have serious conversations. We keep finding these grooves as LLMs and the Eric LLM is talking to the Steven LLM for 95% of our conversation and occasionally 5% we get into new territory. So my feeling about this is isn't it strange that we haven't connected the nukes to the alien conversation because they're very connected. We haven't connected it to the oil conversation, and we haven't connected it to the AI conversation. It's just this sort of orphan thing off to the side.

And honestly, I think you might see a nuke used by Putin because the Russians gained a kind of contempt for nuclear weapons when they started using it as an engineering tool to put out fires and things. So my concern of course is that if you corner Russia, I don't think Putin won't push Article 5 territory, nor do I think he will restrain himself from using a tactical nuke and particularly in an engineering capacity just to test us. So my feeling is I'm not positive that nukes crop up in Iran first. We're in an incredibly dangerous period and I would like to think that Xi, Putin, Trump would be moved to get together if the cause demanded it. And I really think we should rethink our situation in Iran and Ukraine.

And you know, for you to just keep asking, well, how do you solve the world's problems is not a fair question. The right question is, can we recognize the danger? Can we recognize how precious this gift is? Can we get excited about each other, about burying animosities? When was the last time you worried about Egypt and Israel going to war with each other? Think about that. That was impossible. We did it barely. It's a cold, shitty peace, but it's a peace.

Eric Weinstein: What's your last question?

Steven Bartlett: My last question is, what is the most beautiful place you've been in your life? That was left by our former guest.

Eric Weinstein: Such a great question. I have to say, right above a whale shark off of St. Helena took my breath away. And swimming with the fish in the Red Sea is something I can't forget. I managed to see the Aurora Borealis in Maine of all places and I got to spend a total eclipse with my son in Missouri at the exact point where the last one had crossed. I could go on for ages and how would you choose between them?

Steven Bartlett: We talked about a lot of stuff. You know, my listeners, they range in demographics and geography and so on, but what is your advice for them in a world that's changing at the rate of knots that this world is and all of these big scary words are thrown around all the time and AI this and robotics and war. What is your advice, man?

Eric Weinstein: Don't be afraid to have kids, even if you have no viable plan to support them. Because if you wait for a viable plan, it'll usually be too late.

Steven Bartlett: You encourage people to have kids, but you warn that civilization may also collapse.

Eric Weinstein: Feels like a... [snorts] If we don't want civilization to collapse, we better have some babies because civilization is about babies. And if you can't figure out that babies are the key to civilization, you got bigger problems than taking advice from me.

I would say that be of good cheer. Get super excited. Don't worry about being called arrogant or delusional if everyone is in fact crazy. Watch the world through your own eyes first and then corrected to what everybody tells you you should be seeing second. You're seeing a world that is fictitious. You're watching professional wrestling constantly. If you have that sense that everything is off, congratulations. Believe in yourself.

Recognize that it is incumbent upon you to lie in your life so that you can fit in with all of these systems. You're entitled to a hypocrisy budget. You're entitled to a sloth budget, an envy budget. You're entitled to be a sinner. You're entitled to fail. Just try to stay within your budgets. Do not proceed as if you're trying to get rid of your hypocrisy because you'll certainly fail. Don't try to get rid of all of the things that make you human.

And recognize that at the moment when all of our mistakes are compounding because we're in a digital format that never forgets anything, you're entitled to so many screw-ups that you're not taking. Just be compassionate with yourself. And then once you've done that, extend that to the guy who just cut you off in traffic or the person who just stabbed you in the back a little bit at work because you're talking about that plane pilot thing again.

No, that would be stabbing you right in the... By the way, shout out to this Indian hero of a pilot and the Israelis who came in and saved the day once the cockpit door was opened. Just two of the countries I love most in the world because they're both just giant celebrations of life. And remember that the life cults are more powerful than the death cults. But you got to really enjoy heroism and people who are agentic taking risks, taking charge and taking care of the weak and people who can't take care of themselves.

Thanks, Stephen. Really appreciate you having me back here.

Steven Bartlett: Thank you for coming back. It's always a pleasure. It's always an intellectual expansion. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out and I bet you you might love it.