Transcription
Eric.
Yes.
Welcome to Wenocidis.
It's amazing to be here. Finally.
You're having fun here.
Uh, officially, no.
Officially, no, but unofficially, I'm having a blast.
So, when we met at Cafe Tabak the other day?
Yeah.
Um, you spoke to me about confidence. Um, what do you have to say to Argentines under confidence?
First of all, you're very underconfident. If you ask someone who's been here only a week, what do you think of Argentina? Because, uh, there's so much to observe, and there's so many layers to Argentine society, and really, um, the only thing I'm being exposed to is the core of Buenosiders.
So you have this first impression. So it's a, we make that disclaimer. But in my defense, um, there are certain countries in which much of the life of the country takes place in a very small area.
And so, Bangkok for Thailand, and, you know, famously, the sort of errand of Paris focusing in on the, you know, Notam on the Eel def France is the center of. They have this gravitational pool, right?
And so, you know, a country like Germany has many important cities, the United States has many important cities, and I think, uh, you know, that's part of the characteristics of some countries is that there is one, uh, one city that grabs the oxygen in the room. Whether that's deserved or not is a different question.
Yeah, we like to claim that we are a federal country because it's big, it's large, has several cities, but it's true that a lot of the economic activities centered around Wenocidis. Um, what have you been wandering around the city? What have you been experiencing? What, what's your feeling about Argentines?
Well, one of the things that's interesting is that if you go to Trip Advisor and you ask, "Okay, what are the top things to do?" It, this is not a city that really lives in terms of, "Okay, these are the 11 top sites you have to see." And so, somehow, it's, it's a challenge because the foreigner is trying to say, "Okay, well, you live in your streets, in your conversations, in the energy," and it's hard to go sightseeing looking for energy.
Now, I happen to be in a, in a relatively, uh, nice position that I have one or two large social media accounts, and if I so much as whisper... So, you know, I put out one photo, um, that was in the Santelmo area. Yeah, that photo generated a lot of noise. The Instagram post.
I didn't know that, that it would or it wouldn't. But I, I didn't say where I was. I just, anybody who knew that area would know where I was. It was an attempt to sort of maybe make a low-key reach out to people who are interested in connecting to the outside world or welcoming visitors. And I was overwhelmed with the hospitality, the interest.
Have you, are you aware, just to clear out the elephant in the room, the kind of, uh, noise and impact that there's around the arrival of Peter Thiel to the city? Like, have you been able to grasp a little bit of the...?
You compare my friend to an elephant?
Um, no.
A Republican elephant.
I see. Where did you study diplomacy? Um, I'm not aware of how this sits in the Argentine mind. Uh, I know there's energy because the cab drivers will talk about it.
You, you heard cab drivers mention here?
Sure.
And, um, you know, the cab drivers are an indication of, of several things. And so, if you're open to it, you're already discovering one of Wenocid's best kept secrets, which is cab drivers are wizards, and they hold a lot of knowledge, and, uh, they usually give you interesting advice.
I just assume that they're Argentinian intelligence officers.
Well, you know, I cannot say yes, I cannot say no. Um, but, you know, one of the things that you learn is, is that a lot of them are not confident in any other language than Spanish. There's ancestral memory of Italian, but mostly people don't speak it. They just allow their, their Argentinian Spanish to be infused and suffused with borrowings from Italian.
Um, there's no trace of German that I can find. Uh, there's very little, not in this part of the country at least. Okay, we'll leave the penguins for another point. Um, I would say that, um, they are aware of the interest, and of course, you know, MLE is such a focal point, not for Argentina, but for the world.
What, what is it that, you know, we won't go too deep into a lot of the things we already know about MLE, but why do you think that the world is paying so much attention to him?
It's a, it's a good question. So, without getting too specific, I would say, first of all, is that, uh, for a long time, leadership itself was tinged with, uh, stigma. That the memories of Stalin, Hitler, and the ways in which leadership had gone wrong under Mao were so powerful that leadership itself was dangerous. Ideas are dangerous, and he's not afraid of danger in order to push forward his agenda.
I think also you have to understand that one of the great, if, if you think about how Argent, Argentina sits in the, in the minds of the outside world, we, we're not very plugged in. So, we know about the tango. Uh, we are somewhat aware, uh, that you have some football players, and we remember Peron, obviously, mostly through Vita now, because that musical resuscitated the interest in what was going on in Argentina, thanks to Andrew Lloyd Weber and the movie with Madona, for both worse and better.
And, um, my feeling about that is that when a, a charismatic leader appears in Argentina, there is memory of all the things represented, good and bad. And some of those ideas, of course, have been, uh, amplified. The way when you plug, if you play an electric guitar without amplification, you can barely hear it.
But when, when, um, the gift of a chainsaw to Mr. Musk, uh, for Mr. Malay caught the world's attention, and you also have this strange triumvirate, if you will, uh, instead of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, you have Zilinski, MLE, and, and, uh, Trump. You have these people who are telegenic reality or, uh, modern media stars, um, becoming world leaders, and that as our phones become more important in our lives and these alternate channels. People who've succeeded in these other areas lend themselves. Uh, so when you plugged the Malay guitar into the Trump amplifier, it was pretty loud.
It's a loud noise.
Yeah.
Do you think it's, um, a noise loud enough to fight the woke mind virus, as Elon puts it?
Um, I'm not as worried about your woke mind virus as I am about ours, America. Yeah. Because in, in many ways, Argentina's chosen to cut itself off. In, in, in some ways, it's not interoperable with the rest of the world in a very easy fashion. And as a result, you've missed out on many of the benefits of being part of the outside world, and you've missed out on a lot of the problems of the outside world.
So, in, in some sense, you can look at the United States and Europe as the ghost of Argentina's future. If it doesn't do something to avert some of these problems, maybe it will get there too. Do you see Argentina as an opportunity in that regard, looking into the future? Like, what, what are we, um, protecting ourselves from that has, uh, shaped or changed the US and Europe?
So, in many ways, Europe isn't Europe anymore. And I met with an Italian journalist yesterday, and I shocked her. Um, and I shocked her by saying that I had, I traveled through Italy not using Spanish or Italian. My, I don't have any Italian at all. Um, but using Hindi.
Wow.
And she said, "Well, how is that possible?" And I said, "Well, because you have all of these Bangladeshi merchants, you know, selling candy bars or soda pop, you know, on the street, and they watch Bollywood movies, and I have a little Hindi Udu, and so I would converse with them in a language that wasn't their first language, wasn't my first language, but it was dependable." That's a very strange thing.
You think Europe has, uh, gone beyond the point of no return in terms of its...?
Again, the question is, to what end? Europe is not what it was. It's transforming into something that it has never been. So, my comment is, is that there is a good argument to be made that Buenosiris is potentially the last natural European city.
That's a statement that, uh, you know, when we talk among Argentines, you know, we, we used to have this reputation of being like the Paris of South America. We make this joke that we are Spanish people that speak Italian, that believe they live in France, and, uh, um, but at the same time, we are part of Latin America, uh, and we have, uh, you know, an interesting neighborhood. Um, do you see Wenos like being very European? You see it like as a European city?
Yes.
I think, full stop, Argentina is Europe. It's what Europe, it's the closest we have to what Europe was. And I want to make a, a careful point.
Part of what Europe was was being effortlessly European. So, if you take Hungary, which has decided to enforce its border more strictly, well, maybe it's retaining something of Hungarian exceptionalism, but it's also, if you, if you think about it, it's having to do it at great cost of being very deliberate and saying, "This is what we are, this is what we will not do. We care more about our own people than the refugees you tell us need to be welcome, uh, to be welcomed within our borders." And so, that already transforms the, the equation. Whether you let in people or you choose to exclude people, you're having to make a lot of choices.
In Argentina, I actually, this is something that perhaps I got wrong because I've been looking at this place for a long time. I didn't realize when I got here the number of people who would talk about being at the end of the world, right? It's a very interesting play on words in English.
The end of the world meaning its edge, and the end of the world being its edge in time, not in space. And so, there's the space-time distinction of being at the end of the world.
Pope Francis, when he was named pope by the, by the church, he said his very first words, "I come from the end of the world."
Wow.
It has a also an apocalyptic connotation, right? Uh, are we living in the end of times? Do you think, uh, like your friend Peter does, that, uh, we might be facing, you know, the apocalypse anytime?
I worry that I have contributed to this situation because...
You take responsibility for it.
I, I'll, I'll give you the facts and then allow you to, to aside the blame. I've been worried about that, that the end of the world was signaled in November of 1952. It was a very clear moment.
Interesting day. Like the birth of Christ, you have the birth of the hydrogen bomb.
All right? And my belief is, is that that 1952-53 is the beginning of the end of the world. But Peter, being Peter, said to me, "Eric, you are insufficiently apocalyptic." I said, "Well, what do you, what do you mean, Peter?" And he said, "Well, I'm looking not for your words, but your actions. How do you act? Are you acting as if you believe the world is coming to an end?" And I said, "Well, to in my defense, I don't dare live what I, my beliefs, because that will be so distorted as to miscommunicate much to everyone around me. It'll, it's like a choice to communicate that you're losing your mind," even if you're the only person getting it correct.
And so, he didn't buy that. And so, I started living it, and it made him crazy. He was not happy with all of the talk of the apocalypse. And then he became focused on the Antichrist, which is not understood by people. I think that when Peter talks about the Antichrist, and particularly the catacon, they're really missing what he's saying. They're just having fun making fun of him.
The whole, you know, Greta Tumbberg example, you know, Peter isn't, Peter's really smart.
Yeah.
I mean, there's smart, there's really smart, and, and then there's like the top five people you've ever met.
Yeah.
And so, unfortunately, Peter is a conservative gay billionaire, and that takes all the energy away from like, "Well, who is this guy? What does he think?" So, my feeling is that he and I have been discussing how to make sure that there is a future, and I don't want to look at it from the point, you know, I was in the cave of the apocalypse. Um, I was on the island of Samos with, uh, Pythagoras and in his cave, and then we went over to what is it, Patmos, where you actually can go to the place where John, you know, where he wrote, yeah, the apocalypse, right? And the whole iconography of the book of the seven seals and the revelation and all this. This is the year 100 after, you know, AD.
Yeah, it's very powerful, even as a Jew. You know, Judaism lives in large part on a Christian substrate. We, we view you as our most powerful spin-off. You know, it's like Breaking Bad is good, but Better Call Saul is also extremely important to us. And, um, yeah, I think people need to pay attention. This is, this has been what we've called, what I've called, the long nap from 1945 to 2025 is this anomalous 80 years.
And it's, of course, very strange because Argentinians see it through this Argentinian lens, you know, and people, they, they call it, what do you guys call it? The, the degradation. No, no, no. The, um... yeah, the decadence. We, we have that kind of tango feeling after, you know, some people pinpointed to a specific period. Some people believe it was certain politicians, some people believe it was certain military men, but it feels like we've been through a 100 years of decadence. That's what the Argentine, the average Argentine mostly thinks.
Yeah, I think that's probably wrong, but it's very interesting to hear it because it's accepted. You don't, you don't even have the ability to question that, that's what happened. Why are we wrong about that?
Well, I don't know. Of course, please, Argentina, forgive me, but, um, because there are certain things that are zeitgeists that are misinterpreted as folksist. Maybe I would say it that way. There, there are currents blowing through all of humanity that each country is only seeing through its own national lens.
So, I, I'll give you the one that nobody really seems to be talking about, that I, I can't imagine we aren't discussing. I have various countries that really matter to me more than others, and I'm sorry that this is my first trip to Argentina is not on my list yet, but I'm, I, I hope that will change. So, if I take the United States, Israel, Turkey, and India, those are absolutely four countries that really matter to me.
In all of them, there's 20th century idealism that was very grand and sweeping, and it's being repudiated in the 21st century as antiquated, that it's, it has a vintage, and that, you know, you keep a, a good wine in a bottle for too long, and it goes bad.
So, in the United States, that would be Lynden Johnson and the Great Society programs as the high watermark of federal idealism, and maybe begun by, uh, FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt, uh, and the New Deal, and that's been repudiated by Trump, as well as the World War II order enshrined in NATO.
Uh, in Israel, you have the Bengorian vision, uh, of the founding, uh, of the modern nation, and in large measure, I would say Benjamin Netanyahu is rewriting Israel.
In Turkey, it couldn't be starker that in around 1923, you had this anomalous set of circumstances that allowed, uh, Adaturk to rewrite the Turkish language from Osmana into modern Turkish, put it on a, a Roman derived, uh, alphabet, and outlaw polygamy, and as well as the national dress. Uh, and then did something very unusual, which he took modernity and he trusted it not to democracy, but to the army. And it took a long time to pry modernity away from the army.
And that's what Erdogan is doing is he's looking at the Islamization of this really anomalous part of the Islamic world, which is the western crust of Turkey that was felt itself to be more secular and more part of Europe, and they had made the mistake in some sense of treating the Anatolians as, you know, "those primitive people, there be dragons," the east, and those dragons are very powerful, very wealthy, and are transforming the society.
Um, and in India, you see Modi saying, "Look, why are we pretending that we aren't a Hindu country? We are a Hindu nation, and that Hindutva and the concept of Hinduism as an organizing principle allows for us to have minorities. We, we are no stranger to pluralism, but let us do it honestly, not on a secular basis, but on an officially Hindu basis."
Now, I'm not here to pass judgment, right, right, left, what's good, what's bad. But how can you not notice that all of these things are taking place, and in each system, we're, we're, we're talking about them in isolation?
And so, that's what bothers me about the Argentine perspective, which is, "You're so sure you're cut off, are you? Are you sure you're not going through the same things that we all are?"
But your, your flavor. So, I'm not here to say that you are or you're not. But, um, another thing is, is that maybe the growth was the strange part. Maybe it's not the decadence. Maybe it was the fact that somehow you had a one-time opportunity for fantastic growth. The same way the US had that growth from 1945 to around 1971-73. If you think that that growth is normal, then everything after looks like corruption, right?
So, my feeling about it is I want to hear more people who don't accept the terms of the debate. Not because the terms are wrong, but we're not going to know that they're right or they're wrong if nobody's saying, "Are, are we sure this is about decay?"
And projecting forward into the future, uh, for the countries that you mentioned, or even for Argentina, there's this large phenomenon around the world, which is, you know, the, the falling birth rates. Uh, the Financial Times recently spoke about the impact of the smartphone, uh, in how people, you know, you see falling birth rates in Europe, you see falling birth rates in Argentina, you see in Korea, in Japan, and around the world, uh, which seems, uh, which, you know, in Europe, it, it's, it's a, a growing old population, it's a population is growing older and older, that's why they opened their borders for to migration and led to the current situation. Um, how do you see the world moving forward, uh, as, as countries seem to become more like civil civilization states, right? Like, uh, you know, going back to their roots, like you mentioned in India or in Turkey, or, um, how do you see the world moving forward? You know, what's, what's the hopeful message as we, you know, face the end of times?
Well, I visit your dead first. That was my first act.
You went to the cemetery?
Of course.
In Reala.
Yeah.
Have you seen the Eva Peron grave?
Yes, I did. But, but that was hardly the most important part of it.
The most important part of it is this concept of a city of the dead, because when you build mausoleiums, you're not building for 12 years, but where people might still remember the dead enough to bring a flower or two on occasion. You're thinking about families and continuity and dynasty and, and eternity.
Then when you start to see broken glass in a, in a mausoleum, and you see a failure to repair something which cost a fortune to build to begin with, and then you see an anomalous maz mausoleum that's built that's been very well tended to in real time. Somebody still believes, and then suddenly there's a star of David in the middle of all of this Christianity. Uh, so that my, my first act wasn't to go to, uh, the, uh, Eva Peron site. It was to take this in. What does this tell us about visiting a cemetery?
And it tells me that you gave up on the future, you facing the dead aristocracy of Argentina.
Yeah.
But that you, you're not thinking in immortal terms. Look, your men are very handsome. Your women are very attractive. I see no reason, uh, why, uh, love isn't in the air. Why aren't babies coming out of it? Why? What's wrong with falling in love and families? And everybody's struggling everywhere on Earth. So again, what are the odds that this is an Argentinian issue? It's an issue everywhere.
Yeah, it is. And the, the answer is that the, our indefinite human future collapsed because of the apocalypse. That's an interesting connection right there.
Yeah. We, the, the problem isn't that Peter Teal arrived in Buenosiris and that he's, uh, preparing for the end of the world. The problem is that you believe it. You're worried that this is a, a harbinger. This is a, an indication. These are the daffodils of spring, and the spring is the spring of the apocalypse. And so, now that you see the first daffodils, well, now you've got a problem.
Now, I'm not, I know Peter and I talk to him, and what he thinks and what he says is his business, and I'm not going to convey it. But if you think of it as a rorshock test, you can see that it animated the, the ideas that were already resident in the minds of the Argentinians.
Do you think that the way to fight this, you know, this, the, this feeling or this, uh, fate, uh, is, uh, through the means of technological progress, uh, and eventually, like Peter says, to go into a transhumanist?
It depends what is exciting to you.
Isn't it scary to live forever?
I don't know. No, I've only done it for a brief period of time. Let's see. Go slow. Um...
Bores wrote about the subject.
Yeah. Uh, that's, that's an entirely different thing because he wrote, he wrote with such, such imagination.
Yeah.
That I wonder how well... Very often, uh, in the United States, we look to Latin Americans to infuse us with, with magic, and whether it's the power of the jungle or the drugs that are so far beyond alcohol, caffeine, and, uh, and nicotine. There's something magical about South America, and it's in all the cultures. There's no way to stop it.
That's the, the element that Europe lacks. The access to sacred plants.
Sure. But you're a pet exorcism through the Catholic Church. You're, you're running a very safe version. It's, it's the nerfed Catholic Church, right? Once, once you take off the parental controls, what is the Catholic Church? It's absolutely mystical and magical and dangerous. And, you know, in the way in which we were talking before about sto and the way in which the Catholic Church has been infused, it has to take on the characteristics that are local.
The, the Santo church that brings together the Aawaska tradition with the Catholic Church.
Exactly.
In Brazil and expanded through, through the world.
Right. So to me, in part, the Catholic Church without the Americas is a much smaller proposition.
So, in part, this is this issue of confidence that's so hard to communicate. I love it when a country tells me about itself rather than asks, "Here, drink this. You will hate it, but you will come to understand." Okay, fine. You know that's a thing.
Let me pour you some.
Well, far be it for me to take away the master of the mat.
Now, you have to drink it on camera. Um, that's an interesting observation that you did about the, the confidence of Argentines and how we perceive ourselves and our culture and how we position ourselves in the larger, uh, context of the world. Um, you had, uh, your beef with a very famous, at least for some, uh, Argentinian Maldasa.
Well, I thought you were going to talk about the beef we actually had last night with the businesses.
I don't know if we can talk about that.
It's a question of what's dangerous in Argentine.
You, you enjoy the city, right? The, the night vibe in the city. It was a, how, how you perceive it as a, you know, visitor coming to Wenocitis.
Well, it's, it's, you, you know about dadaism as a movement.
It is dadaism. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, well, so we could frame this, uh, to, I find it very strange that the man who potentially, in some ways, took the crown from the world's anointed smartest human being is Argentinian. And none of my cab drivers know who this man is.
It's a tragedy. So, for the last, I don't know, almost 30 years now, the world of theoretical physics has been dominated by Argentinas Malasena Maldena, and this is, this is the paradox for me of meadona versus Maldena. We talk about feronism versus malay, and left versus right, and rich versus poor. Why don't we talk about meadona versus maldena? You had maldena on...
Well, quite different personalities. But they changed everything.
Different kinds of geniuses, for sure.
Okay. So, I want to know. So, I, I went to the, the Arcos park with the science museum, and the, you guys are behind like monoconal antibodies, you're caffarelis, and you, you've had a huge impact in the sciences. Act it. Why? What, what's wrong with you?
You know, so, I, okay, yes, I understand it. Soccer, football is a religion. I get it. We've all seen the visuals. It's amazing. And it's not no, it's yes. And...
Right.
So, my claim is you guys should be running with the ball that, uh, that Maldainis stole from Edward Whitten. What was it that allowed him to do that?
He's such a, also, he's such a softspoken guy.
He's very humble. We, we interviewed him here at Von News, and, um, it's not easy. Uh, he does, he's mostly focused on his theories, which I, you know, I know that you have some criticism about the way he views the anti-def. Let, let me put it in violent intellectual terms.
I like that. Everything was going along okay in 1983 until we got to 1984. And in 1984, there was a new idea, and the new idea was that there was only one way forward. You could prove that it was the only way forward, and it could do what no previous theory could do. So, the previous theory that held sway, and what our current model is based on, something called differential geometry, and specifically gauge theory in the case of the standard model.
And then there was a claim, and the claim was that string theory could do what gauge theory could not. And that the reason we had failed to make progress is that we had stayed with gauge theory, and the track on that train would only take you so far. You had to change to, I don't know, off-road vehicles.
And Malda, many years later, almost at the turn of the century, said, "No, there's an equivalence between gauge theory and string theory, and that the quantum gravity on the inside, so supposedly strings, was equivalent to gauge theory on the outside. So, what's going on in the inside of an orange could be detected by just looking at the skin, and the skin and the inside were somehow dual to each other. The information can be stored at the surface, right, in a lower dimension."
In one lower dimension.
Right.
And this has this assumption of anti-deer space, which is not true according to our friends the astronomers. We are closer to being in desitter than anti-deitter.
I didn't know that.
Well, this is part of the problem. So, in terms of the decadence, if you want to bring the, the Argentinian decadence to the physics, we're ruining the world of physics as or not. You see what, what one did, nobody's going to object to it as a huge summit of, of human thought.
So, maybe it's just mathematics. Maybe it's not relevant to the physical world. And to be honest, when you asked him about that, I believe that he's very humble, uh, about the likelihood that this is actually the world. Or maybe he's just building a model.
And so, from the world of psychedelics, there's a famous phrase, "the map is not the territory."
Mhm.
So, maybe this is a piece of map that doesn't correspond to any territory. That's the question. Is this just mathematics that doesn't correspond to physics?
But the place that I had my beef, if you will, with Juan was that they gave him $3 million, which I thought was great. I'm very happy that, that he got that. And for some reason, when he wanted to explain what he'd done, he chose the example of using economics and exchange rates and gauge theories of economics. And that was something that I had initiated with my wife.
And so, at some point, we were at a, a meeting in San Francisco where they were trying to raise money for the institute. And I was very critical of the way, not, I think, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the most important institution in some sense for math and physics in Princeton, home of Einstein and Vanoyman and Harris Chandra and all sorts of wonderful people, and one. And there was no reference whatsoever, um, to this work that we'd done, and in particular, to my wife's PhD thesis.
And so, when I brought it up, I said, "You know, what about, what about Milani?" You, he said, "Do you know who that is?" I said, "Do I know who that is? I, I married her. We're collaborators." And then one changed the paper, and he put in a reference to it. So, I'm not going to complain, uh, about that. He, he addressed that, but that was for him, it was just an analogy. For us, it was also a piece of economics, and we pushed it farther than he did as an analogy.
Um, it would have been nice if he had pushed and said, "You know, there's some great work here, and none of you are taking it seriously, and I, the great one, Maldena, uh, tell you economists, you should really look at this." So, it's a missed opportunity, but it's not a, I hate artificial conflict.
And my feeling is, uh, Juan is a gentleman. He's a genius, and you guys should be very proud of him. You're, you're very lucky to, you should, you should form an institute around him. I don't know what you're doing by not doing that.
When he comes here, he fills up the theaters, but, uh, yeah, he's not super popular, but we're trying.
With the, the, the river stadium.
Not yet, but eventually one day, maybe Juan will be able to...
Inshallah.
Um, there's a, one of the subjects that we Argentines, uh, like, it actually became like a mainstream subject for the entire country, which is inflation. Like, you, you jump into a cab, and you will be able to talk about, uh, inflation, uh, the whole ride with the driver, everyone.
Yeah. Vandito.
And, um, that's another subject that you are an expert on.
Well, that was the work that Juan was referring to.
All right.
So, my claim is, is that no one really understands what are called price indices inside of economics without gauge theory. And that's the work one was borrowing.
And so, the whole problem and question and issue is that there is something that people feel that they're entitled to in a price index, which is called path independence. The claim is, "Tell me how much more or less my dollar is worth," and that's not what inflation is. So, there's a worldwide intellectual confusion about what we would call, let's say, CPI, the consumer price index. And it's this idea that there is a price level, and that the level changed. And you want to know how much, what, what are my $1 1974 compared to my 1987 compared to 2026. And this is nonsense. It doesn't exist. It will never exist. And that's not what inflation is.
Because if I have two different prices, it's, it's true for one good, by the way. So, we have this called the Big Mac index.
Yeah.
And as long as you only price one good, that makes sense. As soon as there are two goods, so, for example, we have coffee and we have mate. If coffee goes up and mate goes down, and you have a different preference for mate over coffee, like you like it better than I do. I'm trying, but I'm not so good at it yet. Right? And then the idea is that our personal subjective, uh, situation is not the same. You can experience a different level of inflation than I can.
And also, it matters which path we took because if you take financial assets, and you and I have the same portfolios on day zero as on day 365, and we're experiencing the same prices, but we keep trading in and out of different stocks, bonds, precious metals, commodities. Even if we come to the same percentage allocations at the end, if you've bought things when they were tra, traded out of things when they were high, bought things when they were low, you're going to show that you experienced a great deal, uh, different than I'm going to experience because prices kept rising on you, and you got richer and richer. So, in that case, inflation is a wonderful thing because it's the inflation of assets.
Furthermore, we have this thing where we, we talk about, "The market crashed today. Stocks fell." Stocks don't fall all at once. What happens is, is that you've got this idea of long and short. So, if I have the S&P 500, I've got 500 different equities, and I say, "I, I'm diversified." No, you're not. Because you only have one thing in the denominator, which is the dollar. And the US dollar, if it moves, it has the illusion that something happened to all stocks.
So, the right way to report a crash is, "Today, the dollar surged against equities."
Right?
Relative. But the point is, everybody's language, the price level, inflation, the market crash, stocks fell, all that language disguises what can actually be said technically and rigorously because all of the people trying to manipulate the markets do not benefit from people understanding what's actually happened.
Have you met any Argentine economists in your time here, or have they not identified themselves as such?
Everyone is an economist in some way.
There was that gentleman last night who identified himself as having been in the Harvard economics department.
Demian, um, he's the nuclear guy, or used to be. Well, physics and, you know, physics and economics are very important in, uh, Paul Durac, of all people, perhaps the second greatest physicist, uh, according to insiders of the 20th century. He, he was given two opportunities in Stockholm when he won his Nobel Prize with Schroinger early in the 30s to, to give speeches, and he chose to address markets in his lunchtime speech, and he said very, nobody reads this speech, but he chose to say that anywhere that numerical methods are used that work in physics, we should be able to import them and say something profound about markets. And that's what my work is intended to do.
It's to say that if you and I wish to trade, let's say, and your imports are my exports, and my, uh, imports are your exports, and we have two different currencies. How do you say whether or not our trade has increased or decreased when we don't even agree as to how much the trade is worth in two different currencies? So, it's called the failure of the law of one price. And my claim is, is that this is something called the gauge theory of GL2R, where because 2x2 matrices do not commute, a * b is not equal to b * a, is very different than if you have one currency, because then you're dealing with one by one matrices, and a * b always equals b * a. You don't see the, the nonlinearity.
And what's more, um, this is a perfect analogy between light and the other non-gravitational forces. If you see this bulb here...
Yeah.
If we had two of, let's say, two flashlights, they don't appear to interact much. You can shine one beam through another beam. That's because A* B equals B time A. There's a very subtle way in which the beams interfere, but at the, the primary mechanism, it doesn't. Now, if you do that with the strong force that keeps all these protons that want to run away from each other, and it causes an explosion, uh, like an atomic bomb, when that thing weakens, the electromagnetic force takes over, and everything runs away. That strong force is highly nonlinear. It's based on 3x3 matrices, not one by one.
Interesting.
And so, in part, economics is stuck at the level of electromagnetism, and the, a theory worked out by an Algerian French economist named Francois Devisia, and it hasn't made the jump from electromagnetism to the strong force, and that's what we did. And my, so, my claim is, is that, yes, we're talking and intuiting about the thief of inflation, the scourge, the thing that causes us not to trust ourselves, each other, the government, without being able to study it. Now, this gets back to how could Argentina claim back its crown and its throne? You laugh. I don't.
No, it's music to my ears.
Well, but, but, but you'd have to stop being [ __ ] and you'd have to say, "Okay, are there new ideas about how to measure inflation? Are there ideas about how to kick the politicians out who will always wish to lie about inflation? Because if it's happening on your watch, you want to say that it's down."
Exactly.
And so, my claim is, um, if you have Maldena and you have inflation, and Juan will tell you about it, you're crazy for not exploring this.
Wow.
Because he should be the world expert.
Wow. Speaking about matrix, uh, transformations, uh, what do you think, uh, the role of AI will have in the development of modern physics in the years to come? How do you view the looming threat of AI that is permeating every aspect of our lives right now?
With some interest, um. This is the most profound thing that's happened in our lives. Our lives have been so quiet. You know, this gets back to this Europe thing. Europe is soaked in blood. It's a bloody dangerous place. Yeah. And so, when we say, "Oh, you know, I miss Europe and what happened to Europe?" Keep in mind that Europe was quiet, and like the dirty war in Argentina, it's world famous, but it's the kind of thing that, I hate to say this, is normal. Humans being savage and horrible to each other, and, you know, and the left-wing violence that begat the right-wing violence, and the whole thing.
So, AI is like being back on the clock. We're, we're just at the beginning of an incredible disruption headed for all of us. There's almost no reason for me to be giving this podcast because I've put so much of myself into the corpus that right now these people are stealing the abil. I am like a puppet, and Sam Alman and Elon and Mark Zuckerberg and Daario can manipulate. Well, if you just ask what would Eric Weinstein likely say about this, it'll make a pretty good guess.
Yeah, probably can do a whole hologram of you and indistinguishable.
No, it's not indistinguishable. There's...
Not yet. There's some uncanny valley still.
Well, but that's the thing. I have never been more threatened in my entire life.
Are we far away from AGI, or is it right?
It's the wrong question. The, the problem is HGI.
HGI?
Human general intelligence. We don't exhibited.
I love that. First time I hear it.
So, the problem is what we are doing is, thank you. Mostly, most of our conversations are LLM conversations. Some giant percentage of our conversation today was presscripted before either you or I ever sat down, even probably.
NLMs probably take 50% of our daily conversations in one life for today, something like that.
50, 80, 90, 97.
Something like that. That's why it passed the Turing test.
So, it's, uh, yeah, it passed the, the Turing test. Is the human exceptionalism, does it something like that? Does it, is it possible?
Well, my question is, what is the 3% or 1% or 0.001% that isn't that? That's what you're no longer, you should be focused on that right now because everything else it's going to do better. You have to understand like how weird this is. The, the paper that created this in 2017, "Attention is all you need." Yeah. So, it's based on this Beatles song. Yes. But what is attention?
They changed love from to attention, which is interesting.
Well, they could have called it love. You see, it's only a technical term. It's not attention in the standard sense.
May I be so bold as to borrow your spoon?
Of course.
Because you don't seem to be using...
Matrix moment right here.
Right now, these two spoons are mostly perpendicular to each other. And the question is, how does a computer understand meaning when it doesn't understand what it's talking about? So, the computer says, "Look, I have no idea what you're talking about, but if you'll show me 10 million conversations, I will figure out what is meaningful to you." So, for example, if two people meet and one says, uh, "it's very nice to meet you." "Meet you" is the completion of that. So, it knows that "meet you" is very meaningful to "it's very nice to," you know. Now, that would be represented by those two tokens having an angle.
Right.
That's quite small.
Right.
So, the idea is that if two things are meaningless to each other, then the idea is that they're roughly perpendicular in every possible measure, and if they're meaningful to each other, it means that the angle is smaller. Right?
Now, there's more to it, but we don't really understand how this thing works. We just know that if you teach the machine, your notion of meaning is small angle. Our notion of meaning is that my heart is full, or that my skin is, uh, on fire, or that I'm bored out of my mind. And it encodes all those as what we call attention heads. And those are different inner products. So, in other words, um, if I look at this and I say, uh, "let me see what orange." Does "orange" mean the ver, the adjective "orange," or does it mean the fruit "orange"? And of course, they're related to each other. So, is it "orange man bad," uh, for, for Donald Trump? Is, is there an orange? Is there an orange man? Should I think of a, of a cir, a spherical man? You know, in one notion, those things are very, have a very small angle; in another, they have a very large angle, and that's how we figure out the context. We have many different notions of meaning. We teach the computer each one as some kind of an inner product or dotproduct, not exactly, but close. And that's what's producing 99% of our touring test beating new friend. What's left to us?
Well, first of all, we are the ones who created that meaning. So, I'm very, I've decided now, maybe I'll, I'll announce this on this "end of the world" podcast. I'm sick of hearing from these AI billionaires. I say so much original stuff that I can tell you that when you ask the LLM something, it spits me back to the world. It doesn't compensate me. It doesn't ask me my feelings. It doesn't, it's, it's rigging me.
Yeah.
And now Sam Alman owns me. Daario and Elon own a version of me. And they're all treating me as a puppet. You, did you see Men in Black?
Yes.
So, there's this moment where Edgar goes out to face the insects with his shotgun and his overalls, and he said, "You put down your weapon. You can, you can have it. You can have it when you pry it for my cold dead fingers." And the bug says, "Your offer is acceptable." And then suddenly he's taken in, and his skin is maintained, but inside is the bug.
Well, that's what Sam Alman is doing to me.
What?
And I, and by the way, I know Sam and I like Sam, but f that guy. It's not, it's not personal. It's just, you cannot sit here.
I sure feeling I like Sam. You cannot sit here...
And take all of humanity and say, "Well, I'm running a company now. It belongs to me." The, it does.
It doesn't.
Open AI had like a good purpose in the beginning.
I don't want to hear that. It's not. This is so. So, it's a nonprofit.
Yeah. Used to be, is it still?
Why does everybody allow these guys to tell us what the frame? Take the Overton window, kick a football through it. Let's have a different conversation. I don't care whether it's a nonprofit or a for-profit. That's me in the machine. I'm the ghost in the machine involuntarily. Now, if this is going to be developed and we can't stop it, so be it. But this idea that we are going to hang on to capitalism in its most naive form and we're going to have five people take all of human history and decide that it's theirs. This is like, it's it's a scary.
It's like humanity bending over to pick up the soap in the prison of AI and just waiting for whatever to happen to happen. Cut it out, man. Fight back. Sam doesn't own this. Elon doesn't own this. Daario doesn't own this. If this breaks capitalism, then let it break capitalism. This is the theft of everything. Notice that I'm not laughing.
I'm laughing out of nervousness.
That's right. Because it's...
It's a bold statement.
Okay. Well, but my my point is, my trip to Argentina wouldn't be worth anything if we weren't doing something new here. And this is what I keep trying to say. So, we can have that conversation here now, which is that maybe five to 15 people are stealing all of human history as we speak, saying, "No, no, can't touch them. Capitalism, rule of law."
Yeah.
And my claim is, "No, no, this is so much more profound than the rule of law. It's more profound than democracy. Something amazing has been created by eight people who wrote a paper, none of which can you name."
Yeah, they belong to Google Brain, most of them.
That's true. One of them, the University of Toronto.
Exactly.
Right. But my claim is, I I cannot understand the passivity of so many humans saying, "Oh, well, Daario said this and Elon said that," and, "Say enough. Who cares what Mark Andre said?" Mark Andre, brilliant guy. Love him. I can't keep listening to only rich people discussing what was produced by only technical people from things that were produced by every other human being on Earth. This does not belong to those companies.
What kind of revolution this kind of situation with this amount of power being concentrated in such few tanks requires?
We should have this conversation in Santelmo because it's much more bohemian and ready for a revolution.
There's a lot of revolutionary spirit in Santelmo, for sure.
I know. I know. So, look, you have to be careful because this isn't metaphoric revolution. You want to talk about inequality? AI is an amazing engine of inequality. And so this is why I keep talking about Ronald Coast, the greatest, the most surprising result in all of economic theory. The heart of the Chicago School of Economics claim to genius is this idea of salailable property rights. That we have rights that haven't been made salailable, so we can't profit from them. And then somebody's going to say, "Look, those rights are red tape, and what's yours, I'm going to take from you. I'm not going to purchase from you. I'm not going to allow you to negotiate." Right? Did Did you remember getting a contract from any of these companies saying, "Please uh accept this generous offer for the limited rights to use whatever you've produced."
No.
Yeah.
They just took.
Apple even uses my last name for their AI product, and I never heard of them.
Exactly. And you had it before they did.
I had it before I... Yeah. I mean...
Right.
Maybe I was meant to have that last name.
Well, everybody's asking you all the time for everything now. Um, yeah, this is going to lead potentially to blood. How likely you see a scenario like that happening in this century?
Pretty likely. Look, am I right that neither you nor I are particularly interested in being permanently left or permanently right?
I agree with that.
Like I should...
That's flat land. I want out of flat land.
Okay. Now, why is it that Argentina has these two states? Its left-wing state, its right-wing state, more or less a schizophrenic state. Well, that's the point is is that it's trying to go in this direction and it only knows to tack left or tack right, you know, sort of. So, it's just doing this. It can't do that. If we're not careful with AI, we're going to have a worldwide revolution. And if these people want to enjoy their their wealth, they're going to have to figure out a distribution mechanism because they're going to break capitalism. You know, markets are the most precious, beautiful thing we have. And I say that not as a capitalist. I say that as a progressive.
There's nothing more progressive than a market that can lift the poor to dignity, right? And you're going to destroy markets by making a technical argument that you own everything.
What's the way out? We, we, you know, the obelisk. Yes. We put four fingers on either side of it, including as an art, like Christo would do.
That's a good reinterpretation of what the obelisk means. Speaks of the Argentine spirit, for sure.
That's what I'm trying to say. So, if you wanted to do something special, you'd say, "Look, we know about genie coefficients, right? We're not as bad as Brazil."
We feel it. We're definitely Latin America. We feel the genie coefficient. The genie out of the bottle, man. And you got to what you have to do is you have to say, "Look, distribution matters." And I know markets as well as you do. I'll take you on. You know, there's there's nobody at the Harvard Department of Economics, my old department, that's so intellectually intimidating that I won't take them in a fair fight. You you consult the economist. What should we do? And they say, "Well, we've been looking at the numbers. We've run these regressions, and we can tell you that what you need is free trade." And what they're not saying is, okay, first of all, we've taken society and we've come up with our own moronic welfare notion called paro optimality, which is if you can get one peso and I can get a trillion pesos, we're both better off. So you should be happy that I'm this much. So now what do I do?
Yeah.
I make your life miserable with my trillion and your extra peso. So, first of all, nobody cares about paro optimal. Second of all, there's another scam called Caldor Hicks. Calor Hicks says, "If we had a redistributive tax, could we make everyone better off?" Somebody says, "Yes, theoretically." So, with those two moves, I now as an economist tell you, "Here is what you must do." And I've outsmarted Aristotle and Plato and every philosopher that I've somehow come up with what you ought to do from what is true. Who died and left these morons king? I don't understand any of this. You're all under some crazy spell. And I I can give you the exact locations of where the magic trick is done and why libertarianism doesn't actually work. And I'm very sympathetic to markets, but there are entire categories of things that markets can't price.
Music used to be priceable by the market because if if I had a record album and you wanted to borrow it during the period of time you were using it, I didn't have it. That's called uh excludability.
And then if we play that record a lot, the grooves used to wear down and suddenly there would be scratches. That's called it's exhaustable. If something is neither uh exhaustable or excludable, then it's called a public good. And that means that even in the perfectly free market, price and value can't be held together. So when the MP3 file and and Napster and Lime Wire and all these things came out, huge disruption.
Well, the point is is that something that the market could see became something the market could not, right? And now you have to earn your living from what? You earn your earn your living from concerts. Why? Because you can have a perimeter and you need a ticket to get in. So it is excludable.
Right.
Right. And then the idea is that it's exhaustable. I'm not going to go on forever. Even Bruce Springsteen would only go for 4 hours back in the day.
My brother loves him.
What?
My brother is a big fan of Bruce Springsteen.
Well, I I have to catch up on my Charlie, I'm being told. Anyway...
Yeah.
But I will show you some Charlie on on the way back to the hotel.
But, um, what I'm trying to get at is...
We're used to having these people do our thinking for us and they lie to us. And I don't understand this. I mean, I I'm I want inequality, but I want that inequality to reflect something meaningful. You know whe when I visit my friend in his 11 million home and I know he's been doing nothing other than working himself from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. every day with no breaks for 15 years. I don't feel any jealousy, you know. So the if the inequality reflects, you know, uh something meaningful...
Something worthwhile.
Something worthwhile. I'm not going to say I could do MC Jagger's job the way he could do it. I don't know how to do that, right? We we don't get so resentful, right?
It's particularly when you have a bunch of people telling you, "Well, I'm very rich because I did something extremely worthwhile." "Well, what did you do?" "Well, I I I destroyed these companies by uh you know doing these crazy games with uh with leverage and stocks and bonds and shareholder activism." And it's like, well, it's not even clear that you created value. Maybe you destroyed value because you found a loophole. It's very important that we save markets. Some of them like Elon are talking about UBI or universal high income even maybe going to the point of fully automated luxurious communism in a world of abundance. Do you think any scenario like that is like a desirable scenario for the...?
It's a beautiful idea and I I don't hate the idea that we've always wanted to liberate ourselves from the worst aspects of work, right?
But if you think about work as a bundle...
Okay, so there's the question about the marginal propensity to consume marginal products of labor, etc., etc. There's sort of a coincidence that the amount of work I can contribute and the amount that I need to consume to have dignity are sort of roughly held together.
Yes.
What if that's sort of an accident? And what if those things become out of whack? So my feeling about it is one of the things that a bundle of work that work bundles together is dignity. I don't want to be paid in a high income to do nothing, right? What about my dignity, man? You ever looked at what's happened to chess? It's fascinating.
I'm a big fan of Fino, the 11year-old that played in the club where Peter went to get his third place medal.
Well, first of all, uh, masletoough to Argentina. Um, yeah, it's one one wonderful thing about chess is that an 11year-old can be a full adult, can be an elder of the community.
Yeah.
Uh, it's true. It's true in mathematics as well. It's very rare, but it happens. The interesting thing is that we still care about chess when none of these people can play at top level. If we include computers, not one of them. And so we we've started playing chess as narcissists. Human chess is now a narcissistic endeavor like a competition, like a spelling bee. You could just ask the spell checker. But you know, there's some people who just say, "Well, look, I I just want to see how hum how much humans screw up."
Interesting. That's why we then in in the old days we used to talk about a brilliency in chess which is those crazy moves like in the evergreen game or the immortal game or whatever that change everything. The queen sacrifices...
Now we talk much more about blunders, right? Because we can see what works, what doesn't.
It's more high signal the blunder now.
Yeah. And so the key question is, who blunders less? Can you imagine two guitar solos and you say, "Wow, you know, it really seems like Roy Buchanan blundered less than Eddie Van Halen," rather than what they had to say artistically? So, we're already chess is the future. We may still care about us just because it's us.
Yeah. You know, one wants to see a game between two machines, right?
Well, I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. In some sense, when you watch a dog fight in two planes, it's thrilling because there's there's life on the line. But maybe maybe it's thrilling if it's just two automated planes, both made by uh drone manufacturers. I don't know. I we don't know what this future is. I think one of the really important things is to listen more to people who say, "I don't know." It's in a world where everyone has access to LLMs not knowing it's also high signal like the blunder. Well, but but the question is of course who are the original thinkers?
There are many billionaires in the world. There are tiny number of them who are blindingly original.
Peter is one of them probably.
I would agree with that. I agree with...
I hope he doesn't hear this, but he's uh he's blindingly original. So, of of the humans that we know now, who who will be the last to be fully automated, Peter will be among the last. But I also don't believe that attention is all you need. You see, this is a scaling bubble. It's not an AI bubble. This is the bubble that says, "Okay, we're going to take the second part of that title, the is all you need seriously, and we're going to say how much energy, how many chips, how fast. We're just going to scale everything and say we don't need any further innovation." And this is why Deis Habus is sort of the the odd man out. He's like, "Boy, I wish we'd thought more." So my guess is that this bubble is going to collapse. But the bubble is directionally correct. In other words, the people lying to us through hype have the direction right. And that's one of the reasons why it's so it's so confusing. You know, there's this strange interaction between Josh Wolf and Elon Musk where I think Josh Wolf is very critical of Elon. And when I when I got a Tesla with full self-driving mode, full self-driving is the headline and the secondary line is beta supervised. So he gives with one hand and he took away with the other cuz it wasn't classic Elen.
But without it, he couldn't have gotten the data, right?
So the idea is that we have two classic examples that everyone's focused on which is people who overpromise and underdel and people who underpromise and overd deliver. And Elon thinks both of those are for [__]. He's like, "I'm going to overpromise and then I'm going to overd deliver on that." That's what Bill Gates did also with he didn't have an operating system. So in part the person willing to lie and then cover their lie and make it true in retrospect in a rears is the winner.
Should we pursue going to expanding the consciousness and life to the stars and going to Mars and like the ultimate exit?
We have no other choice.
Well, everyone who doesn't want to is almost certainly going to have their lineage die on this planet. Now why is nobody interested? So this is this is this paradox that I talk about which is that humanity's most important philanthropic endeavor has a zero allocation which is going beyond the solar system.
Which is physically possible, right?
Simon...
We can, uh, we can travel close to the speed of light in...
We can or can't?
Can, in some theoretical configuration.
Sure, but not in an interesting way.
Everything is so far away that...
Information travels at the speed of light.
Okay. So you want to make a call to a distant galaxy? How's that going for you?
Maybe they already did to us that that's why we built computers in the first place.
Okay. Does this excite you?
Waiting.
I I sometimes...
Waiting billions of years for an answer. "How's it going, Joe?" I wonder, maybe Satoshi is the one who called. This is a very interesting point right here. But it's hard to have this conversation. So if you don't mind, may I I take a for may I take an advance on our friendship?
Yes, please.
Why aren't we having the more interesting conversation, which is: Einstein's only been around for a little over a hundred years, and we know he's wrong. We know he's wrong. He's a he's his reductionist theory, right? His uh no, we know that there are two singularities in his theory that you can't get rid of. The initial singularity which we associate with the big bang and the area around that and the black hole singularity which we associate with short. So you know that it's a model. You know that it's the map.
Yeah.
Why are you taking it so seriously? Why? Why did we stop looking for the theory beyond Einstein and what it can do? You know, this looks to be a wood table.
Yeah. So, when I do this, it doesn't nothing happens. Why isn't this a smart table? Let me complain to the production team. Why isn't this a smart table? Um when in 2000 around 2003 at a TED talk the first guy did this. Listen, the audience gasps. That's built into what we think is spacetime. Spacetime is like a wood table. You can't do much with it. Right. What if there's an extra gesture that makes it very easy to go places? Do you guys have a UFO problem here in Argentina?
Yeah, we have some places where, you know, we believe they land.
Where?
In Cordova.
Okay.
There's... Yeah, we have there's a whole culture around it and...
And maybe also through psychedelic means, you know, you get to talk to some strange voices.
Well, um, speaking of drugs, is it possible to get more coffee? Um...
You have some mate. Let's have the mate.
The uh no I everybody's gotten enervated their vital it's like you you you fix your dog you spay and neuter your animals who who did this to the human spirit?
It's like Elon is the only intact male running around. You guys have an institute? You want to do something? You want to get out of your decadence? Make an institute for getting out of the solar system. Or is it just because you don't see anybody doing that in the United States or or Great Britain or France that...
We should unplug ourselves from the influence?
If you're really... Yeah. If you're really out here isolated, if you're going to be non-interoperable, if you're going to make life so difficult...
Make it.
Use your isolation.
Don't tell me about... I'm so bored of your decadence.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Who wants to talk about this? Try something. Fail. What's What's the worst that's going to happen?
It requires like a big cultural disruption also because...
No, it requires 10 people with some money. Like you ask about... people assume that billionaires start coming here.
There's a domino effect.
Don't ask, "Am I pretty? Do you love me?" Ask, "Okay, what what can we do now that we couldn't do last Wednesday?" It's funny. Every time I get to this point, people just get nervous like I'm making a joke. But it's good. You're instilling something to the Argentine spirit that definitely feels different to the way we traditionally perceive ourselves. Every European and every indigenous person who got here took some giant risk to get here.
There must be something in the gym pool.
Yeah. And now it's dormant. You know, I went to the... It's very funny. I went to these waterfalls. I was so inspired. I I I've been on this planet for decades. I did not know that moons exist. And I saw things I've never seen. I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and the splendor of the whole thing.
It was so false.
Yeah.
At night.
At night, under a full moon. Perfect. It's very hard when you get old to have anything new happen.
Yes.
And you know, we we got this lecture from the person like, "Oh, you know, you could try Iawaska, but they say that the ions in the air." I was just like, "Oh my god, I really..." And I go down and I see this thing and I thought I can do anything.
High on life.
High on life. And how many of how many worlds are there with more spectacular things and nobody and and nobody's serious? Everybody feels that Einstein is holding us back. They don't know to blame him. But it's like I love I love him. He's like a friend. I've read everything he's written. You know, he was a socialist.
He was a he was a mench. He was a human being. He was and he's also my jailer. He made it so expensive to move around the universe. Even in my mind, every time I watch Star Trek, I like, "Yeah, it's impossible. It'll never work." I don't know why we've stopped dreaming collectively. And my claim is is that anytime you guys want, you can you can use your isolation from the madness you see in every other. And by the way, you're not the first country I've given this lecture to. I've said this in Australia. It's like you can see that the UK and the US have gone mad. If the US goes mad, Canada goes mad. That leaves you in New Zealand. And New Zealand's like 3 million people. It's not It's barely a country. I don't mean...
Yeah.
It it punches above its weight.
Okay, Australia, what are you going to do? And they're like, "Yeah, but we're not like that." That's what they say. That's good in theory. So anyway, if we put out a message, my question is, don't you realize that the reason that you're in this decayed state is that you want this? That you're not willing to dream. You're not willing to use the fact this is I can't pronounce it exactly. This is Zarabard.
Zarivard.
Yeah. There's this island.
Yeah.
Near the Arctic, not the Antarctic.
Excellent. Around there.
Around there where they keep the seeds from all of the crops if the rest of the world gets wiped out.
Wow. Okay. This is where we keep Europe.
Wow.
If we screw it up. So, this is Vlabard for Europe. Act it. Do something.
Can we fabricate the Argentine dream?
I don't know. Nothing stopping you. You look at all these Bella buildings. Are are you them? Are you the people who built them? I don't know.
Eric, thank you so much for making this interview.
I I hope you'll come visit up up top and I hope this is not my only trip down. This has been my first time in South America and you guys could not have been a better introduction. So, thanks for being wonderful hosts.
It's a pleasure to have you here. Um, I think you certainly have given us more than enough to think about and um, you know, we say in Argentina that uh, you don't need to be born in Argentina to become an Argentine. So, the country opens its doors and you can any day if you want to become an Argentine as well.
I appreciate that. And to the person who says, "Who the hell is this guy to get off a plane and tell us what to do?" you're my brother because that's exactly the attitude I would be having. So, thank you very much.