Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein On the Possibility of Nuclear War and the Twin Nuclei Problem (#351)

Starting point is 00:00:00 While Zelensky is talking about a no-fly zone, our own media is enforcing a no think zone. There will be no thinking. There will be no thinking in public. There will be no communication of thoughts. Every conversation will be turned towards white supremacy and bigotry. And it's time to clear these idiots off the stage because right now we've got a nuclear situation. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors.

Starting point is 00:00:33 Welcome, everybody. to a quarterly update with Times Man of the Microsecond. No, no, this is perhaps one of the greatest of all friends and neighbors. It is Eric Weinstein joining me today to speak about the state of the multiverse. Eric, how are you doing, good sir? Great. Ryan, how are you? It's great to see you.

Starting point is 00:00:54 I wish we were in person. We're going to have to make that happen. It's been a month or two. It's a little too long. Start going through Einstein withdrawal symptoms. I get the shakes. And I might be mistaken, but there might be some news afoot in your particular area of the multiverse. Why don't you share any news that you'd like to share right up front?

Starting point is 00:01:14 I think what's going on with me is that I'm trying to understand why I'm perceiving a different situation and a different planet than the rest of my brethren. I feel like we're being called to do very specific things. We're clearly not doing them. And a lot of this is being driven by the accident, if you will, of Vladimir Putin taking some initiative in Eastern Europe. My father, you know, of blessed memory, used to go to bed every night listening to Art Bell, who is a Titanic individual in the world of broadcasting. You may know of them.

Starting point is 00:01:55 You may not. He used to do like a 12-hour radio show. And then he'd sign off at three in the months. morning, and then he'd go on ham radio for like another eight. This guy was a titan in the field. Anyway, the point that he would often bring up is that the pace of humanity is accelerating, not the Kurtzweil-esque singularity, but this sort of quickening, that news cycles, that events, that titanic shifts are occurring faster and faster and ever more so after September 11th, of course. But I feel like it's unsustainable. I feel like we cannot get off of this cycle of just

Starting point is 00:02:29 constant adrenaline hits. So I was in need of talking to you many times in the last couple of months, and I know the audience was too. But we're going to make, I mean, is it, where do you see us going? Let's just not bury the lead. Are we headed towards a incredibly serious nuclear confrontation with an armed nearly 70-year-old individual with a nearly 80-year-old individual at the helm of the free world? Probably not, but probably not means less than 50%. If I actually do the math on this, and no one can because it's not a math problem, but metaphorically, if I start to compile the facts, I would guess that we are running between 1% and 5% chance of a nuclear exchange

Starting point is 00:03:18 over no known ideology before this Ukrainian adventure. has concluded. One thing that I've learned is that if the odds aren't over 50%, a giant percentage of the population says, well, it's unlikely. They don't weight it against what we're talking about. So, you know, for me, I would like to be able to whisper, I don't know, maybe it's 3%, maybe it's 5%, maybe it's 1%. We're running some catastrophic risk of having the Mahabarta box B minor mass, all of the sporting events that have ever been held with fantastic outcome, Bob Beeman's long jump, all of that being obliterated by the choices of what I take to be five relatively undistinguished human beings, and that would be Putin, Biden, Zelensky,

Starting point is 00:04:16 G, and Kim in North Korea. And I'm looking at these people. I mean, this is to say nothing of Iran or Modi and Indian, but just the five people I named are re-evaluating the chessboard. The World War II order has now broken. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is unprecedented in the 21st century, and it is very well precedented in the 20th. The thing that was holding everything together is now broken, and we're living through something that is akin to the Cuban missile crisis, in my estimation. but until all of the news outlets say the odds are, you know, considerably north of the odds

Starting point is 00:04:59 during the Cuban Missile crisis, no one's going to wake up. Now, why are the odds so high? It's not capitalism versus communism. It's not Protestants versus, you know, Catholics. It's not Hindus versus Muslims. It's, we got into a habit during peacetime of just deciding that every time we could expand NATO, that was a great thing. And depending upon how you think about that, either it's a wonderful strategy for, you know, really controlling Russia by encircling it with allies of the West, or it's a provocation, just the way we would see it if it was happening in our hemisphere and somehow China was setting up a base in turn. Toronto or something. Right. Although, you know, to push back with respect on that, when you look at, you know, our territorial aspirations, it wasn't like, you know, we were threatening Russia. We weren't, we meaning Ukraine, rather, wasn't necessarily actively threatening to invade Russia per se, whereas, you know, provocation on the Mexican, you know, border with the United States or Canadian border, you know, that is, there's what reason would it have other than territorial expansion as proven in 20. 2014, 2013, and now in 2022. It's not like Putin hasn't, he hasn't demonstrated that he's willing to take, have territorial aspirations for what he perceives as a benefit to him. So I think it would be somewhat different, right, than just to say NATO now, you know, or Mexico now joins the Warsaw Pact, which doesn't exist. But I really don't know what to say, Brian. A lot of us were very concerned about what the reasoning was. in extending, you know, NATO status to Latvia. You know, it's super close to Moscow.

Starting point is 00:06:51 I know, it's like, is it a thousand miles, maybe even inside? There's a lens where you get to say, wow, these are sovereign states. They get to do whatever they choose to do. Who's to tell them? That sounds like paternalism, you know. Okay. You're talking about the world. I mean, I just, I can't shake this.

Starting point is 00:07:09 That wasn't pushback that you just did. We know Putin is a bad guy. I want us to win. I don't want to be unclear about that. We're talking about the world. We're talking about a habitable world, a world in which we recognize buildings from antiquity where it's relatively safe to breathe the air. I don't know what conversation we're having.

Starting point is 00:07:34 I'm just very confused by it. When you have Article 5 status in NATO and you decide that you've got peacetime careerists who want to burnish their resumes by saying, I'm the president who extended NATO to more countries. That happened under my watch. And you're not really thinking about the idea. This goes back to Stephen Pinker's idea that we're living in the most blessed era of all time.

Starting point is 00:08:02 And I'm having the same issue over and over again with the economists with price indices. All of these people, they look at certain terms in the equation without looking at the whole equation, and then they decide I'm seeing enough of the equation that I can draw strong conclusions. And what we have is a world saturated in potential violence in the form of nuclear weapons,

Starting point is 00:08:24 biological weapons, fuel air weapons are incredibly terrifying. The weapons of demoralization that make, you know, why does Japan capitulate at the end of World War II the way it does is because somebody's brought the fire of the sun to Japanese soil, you know. Yeah, and you actually made a very, provocative statement, but I think it on further reflection has some merit to it, which will probably shock most of my listeners, and that you were advocating for the detonation of a fusion device, not a fission device, at some point in the past, maybe it was 2019, to kind of reiterate and shake

Starting point is 00:09:03 the dust off of the complacency that were you, you know, looking into your, you know, patented crystal ball back then? And, and, I mean, what was that based on? at that point. Because Eric, we both know, you know, this guy, Lawrence Krauss, has been a guest on my show, and people like Shelley Glashow, a friend of the show as well. And they're on this thing called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And every day, you know, Trump woke up and tweeted they were moving the secondhand club. Do you feel like your client, or your, you know, kind of proposal, shall I say, to do this was really encounter to that kind of cry wolf effect that they kept increasing it over pet like the woman's march okay now we need to move it up

Starting point is 00:09:47 i mean was that in response to that because it was way before george floyd it was way before covid it was way before putin why why why was that front of mind for you why why was i on the twin nuclei problem we just spent you know how many years living indoors not attending our our loved ones funerals with masks over our faces having no idea whether they work not really understanding what we're injecting into our bodies. I was warning you about the twin nuclei problem. Explain that for people that might be new to your thoughts. Sure. In less than six months between 1952 and 53, we unlocked the secrets of the nucleus of the cell in the form of three-dimensional structure of DNA, followed by the genetic code 10 years later. And we unlocked the ability to fuse

Starting point is 00:10:31 nuclei with the teller Ulam device. And those, I guess Ivy Mike was our first nuclear test in 52. First fusion device. First fusion device, right? And those innovations made humans capable of their own extinction by just fiddling around with power that we don't know how to control. We know how to unlock it, you know, but we don't know how to control it. So if you give somebody a bottle of Jack Daniels, a Ferrari, and a machine gun, they can have a pretty interesting time just getting to know their new friends.

Starting point is 00:11:10 I don't know what we're doing. I'm so flipped out, and I was calling for a return to rare above-ground atmospheric nuclear tests because I don't believe in their absence, human beings will actually do the computation of what we're talking about. We're having the most irrelevant discussions. As long as Ukraine looks like house-to-house fighting, and as long as Zelensky is telegenic, and by the way, you know, Bruce Willis is stepping away from acting. It's funny because I was saying that Zelensky, you know, is the ultimate sort of Bruce Willis character.

Starting point is 00:11:48 When he's offered, you know, the ability to evacuate, he says, I need ammunition, not a ride. You know, it's like, wow, that plays well because. Adios, mother, comrades. Dasvidania. Dasidania, comrades. We're crazy. I can't go to parties.

Starting point is 00:12:09 I was just at a party. I was a complete pill. I've been telling people, if you don't watch the cell in the atom, you can have all the Bitcoin conversations. You want all the conversations about liquid democracy and institutional reform and Web 3. It's just like nobody's paying attention. We are sleepwalking to Armageddon. And what I learned from the invasion of Ukraine is that what I was trying to do with my show,

Starting point is 00:12:36 was to wake people up. And Vladimir Putin just said, hold my beer. And everybody hit the snooze button. I mean, we're talking about Ukraine. It's not like we're not talking about it, but we're talking about it. You know, do we think Putin will capitulate? Is he out of options? We turn everything into a soap opera.

Starting point is 00:12:56 Right. Just like, do you want this guy cornered and weak? I certainly don't. And do you want to talk about, you know, he cannot be allowed to remain in power? and then, you know, Biden has to walk by. Well, I didn't mean regime change. We've got children. I've got a 79-year-old child as the president of the United States.

Starting point is 00:13:17 And then I did the computation. It was 116 days where Harry Truman went from the ceremonial role of vice president of the United States, largely ceremonial position, to being the one to drop two atomic devices on civilians and military in Hiroshima Nagasaki. The person who currently holds Harry Truman's old job is Kamala Harris. I'm not supposed to be able to say anything

Starting point is 00:13:44 about Kamala Harris that's negative. You mustn't say, I have to stop you. Because she's both female and a person dark of hue. And the answer is, no, Kamala Harris isn't really fit for that job and it's evident. I don't need to go into detail.

Starting point is 00:13:59 The idea that you can't even speak in our society to say obvious things like There's something weird going on with women swimming. Or even answer what is a woman, right? That became controversial last week. Right. So in essence, the media in my estimation and our tech giants are, while Zelensky is talking

Starting point is 00:14:20 about a no-fly zone, our own media is enforcing a no-think zone. There will be no thinking. There will be no thinking in public. There will be no communication of thoughts. Every conversation will be turned towards white supremacy and bigotry. and it's time to clear these idiots off the stage because right now we've got a nuclear situation. No, I think I think you're being abundantly clear. And speaking of stages, you ever see like one of these performers, you know, like Duolipa or Ariana Grande,

Starting point is 00:14:48 who are, you know, undoubtedly talented individuals. But I saw a video and they're singing on stage and they're having fun. And then accidentally the mic slips out of Duolipa's hand and it rolls into the crowd. But somehow she keeps singing with the same amplitude and same, You know, delightful modulation. In other words, it's all a sham. It's all, she's just lip syncing to something that she recorded. She had genuine talent, but maybe there's, and I feel like we're doing that as a society. Like the speakers have dropped their microphones and we're pretending like they're singing it.

Starting point is 00:15:19 They just raise their voices. And they won't get off the stage. They can't get off the stage. It's inherent in who they are. Okay. So let's assume that that's true. The problem is not them. The problem is us.

Starting point is 00:15:33 Let's start with me. The problem is me. I had this show. I've got a giant audience. People say, where's the portal? Why aren't you doing any new shows? And I'm thinking, do you know how a nerd you are to everything? You've decided that Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Joe Rogan, maybe Brian Keating, everybody, Sam Harris, I can tell you the things that go around about every single person as to why we can't listen to anyone who's not on script. I have failed. Vladimir Putin has failed. I'm spending my days split between two separate activities for the most part. One is trying to get us options, trying to figure out what it is we can do so that if we don't agree with Zelensky, Putin, Xi, Biden, and Kim, we don't feel that they've got this. What do we do? I mean, it's sort of funny.

Starting point is 00:16:30 Like, Elon is talking about all this stuff. He's on the same planet the rest of us are. The other thing that I'm doing when I'm not trying to do physics and trying to think about how we get out of here is to try to figure, is there any way to wake us up? And it just doesn't seem to be possible. It seems to be that there's some interface between media, tech, and the human mind that until the human mind gets the message

Starting point is 00:16:53 from CNN and in the New York Times, hey, we've been lying about everything. We're in great danger. We have the wrong leadership. We need resources completely. I mean, let me just be very pointed about it. Are you familiar with the Anton Chagore character in No Country for Old Men? Very, very, very vaguely, yes.

Starting point is 00:17:11 Okay. At some point, he's about to kill Woody Harrelson in a hotel room with a silenced shotgun or a suppressed shotgun. And he asks, he says, may I ask you a question? Always polite. If the path that you followed led you to this of what use was the path. So if you want to think about markets and you want to think about democracy, and you want to think about the American experiment,

Starting point is 00:17:35 if the path we've led has got us with a 79-year-old commander-in-chief about 10 years, almost 10 years older than the oldest president ever in history, if that person has a 5% plus chance of dying in any 12-month period, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration. Men's health statistics. 79-year-old U.S. male. if his running mate was Kamala Harris, who was almost certainly chosen for diversification reasons, in part just the way he announced that he was going to make sure that his next Supreme Court

Starting point is 00:18:09 appointment was an African-American female. NASA, by the way, has made an announcement that it wants a woman and a person of color on the moon, both of which are awesome things to have, but why make a point of it? I have no concept. That's their mission statement. So you're talking about the Artemis program, which has in their Twitter profile. Again, the way conservatives would do this is they'd say, you know, Condoleezza Rice, you know, is the first person to hold this. And then they'd be done with it.

Starting point is 00:18:36 They wouldn't hold a week-long celebration and talk about, you know, powerful black females. There's just a difference in sort of seriousness of purpose and temperament. We can't talk about any of this. So if we, if the path of democracy and markets have led us to Kamala Harris being a heartbeat away from a guy who has a 5% chance of dying in any one year period, at age 79 and declining cognition, with Vladimir Putin landing shells, if I understand, between 10 and 15 miles from the Polish border, which has enjoyed full Article 5, mutual protection status since I think 1999, have we built a doomsday machine? In other words, if you view all of our interlocking agreements, our markets, our laws,

Starting point is 00:19:24 our cultures, our understandings, as a machine, and we, are simply the subroutines. Does this machine effectively bring humanity to a close, not because any particular person willed it, but because we kept piling up new instructions and we didn't check the code that it was actually going to run and run indefinitely. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:19:46 You know, just to finish this up, we've all failed. And I feel like I failed more than any of you because if I go back to my old stuff, you know, people say, are you going to sit around and say, I told you so? Well, for sure, I'm going to say, I told you so, I've been on this for years.

Starting point is 00:20:00 Because I told you so, I also know that I failed because I got the audience. Right. And a huge audience. I said exactly this. Beware the twin nuclei. We spend two years plus under COVID, which is probably something involving Peter Dajek and the Wuhan lab, but we haven't even bothered to investigate it. And now we've got Vladimir Putin miscalculating in Ukraine and we're sort of chirpy about

Starting point is 00:20:24 the idea that this is going to be an exercise in masculinity. and we like Zelensky's brand better than Puffy Putin emerging from COVID. These are the twin nuclei people. This is exactly what I warned you about. And because I told you, so, I failed more than any of the rest of you. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Starting point is 00:20:48 Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises.

Starting point is 00:21:07 It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Well, you know, I want to, you know, I appreciate the humility and I believe it's sincere, and I want to just countenance the following subject. So I just started teaching in person for the first time in three years, and it was a little bit, you know, not just. trepidacious, anything to do with COVID or anything, but just like, wow, do I still have it? You know, I've done, I started, you know, communicating via YouTube and everything, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:36 into the pandemic two years ago. Actually, I think this is our two-year anniversary of doing podcasts together, by the way, my friend. I did that. Yeah. So, so there been, you know, that was at least one good thing that came out of COVID besides staying home a lot with my, with my family. But I'm back in person. I'm teaching students. I'm enjoying the, the feels of it all. And some of them are undoubtedly watching this episode. But I'm also, enjoying being with my graduate students. And it reminded me we're recruiting graduate students. We have a bumper crop of some of the most amazing students coming to UC San Diego to work with me and my colleagues here. And the fact is, when I start off with a new ground student, I tell him

Starting point is 00:22:12 or her, and I say, look, what you're about to do is complicated, but it's not complex. In other words, think about a 787. It's very complicated. You know, no one person can build a pencil, let alone a 787 dream wonder. But if you follow the steps, the blueprints, you have the materials, you put them in together in the right order, a 787 is sure to emerge. On the other hand, if you tell me to make a sand pile with exactly so many grains of sand, with exactly these dimensions, that's impossible to do because of sensitivity and true underlying complexity or predicting the planetary phenomenon like the weather.

Starting point is 00:22:48 You need something of the size of the Earth to predict accurately model the climate. And so I think there's merit to this testing idea that you're talking about because the only way to really model the effects maybe on society and our collective conscious would be the detonation of this device. And I do, I'm not advocating it for a person. I'm just saying there's merit to this idea because you cannot simulate the effect of a complex process without the complexity of the process itself. But I want to turn from that to say, really, what do you think would happen the next day? And I oppose this to Lex Friedman when I was on his show late last year, early this year, actually. And I said, what do you think Lex would happen the day after we discover aliens? And since you joined the Project Galileo with Avi Loeb, I want to get your feedback on this, too.

Starting point is 00:23:31 What do you think would happen the day after we discover aliens, Aaron? I mean, it's an interesting question. I can tell you what happened on September 12th of 2001, because everyone remembers September 11th who went through it. What I was fascinated by, in addition to that, was September 12th. because in a world where we're mostly narcissistically eager to share who we are, what we think, we didn't want to say anything. Most of the very loud voices recognized that something had happened. And that thing that had happened had grave impact on the culture ourselves,

Starting point is 00:24:12 the family is affected directly. I think that when Israel went through 1973's Yom Kippur War, after the brilliant victory in 1967, it was a humbling experience because they'd gotten high on their own supply. We had gotten high on our own supply that there was a magical force field protecting the United States. Saw almost no action during World War II. There was a little bit of stuff from Japanese subs, and I think around Santa Barbara, I'm not quite sure. But the mainland of the U.S. was basically untouched. So I think what would happen after aliens is that even, We would actually be transformed and silenced and quiet and humbled.

Starting point is 00:24:58 Or the change that has been brought about by the smartphone and all of the innovations since September 11th would cause us to continue to dream walk that we would want to know if we could get selfies. We want to know whether we could turn the aliens into an NFT. I think we've gone mad. And I'm not positive how to answer how a mad civilization would respond. I can tell you that I'm pretty sure that if this had happened in the 70s, it would have been very, very different. We were smarter then. You know, we were being lied to, but we were being lied to lessened by fewer people and it wasn't quite so chaotic.

Starting point is 00:25:42 Right. It was centralized. Right. You know, so there were lots, there are lots of things that are much, much better. It's not, it's not that the 70s were some golden era. It's just we've become almost unforgivably psychotic, collectively. I don't know how to, I don't know how to sugarcoat this. I feel like I am so far away from planet Earth at the moment in my understanding of what I'm watching, what's on the line, what the odds are. You know, and again, as you can see, I've clearly gone through. a bunch of attempts to estimate what are our risks. Until the looking glass of tech and the media reflect our reality, I now believe that we are in, I don't know if you've ever seen an ant mill,

Starting point is 00:26:30 where ants leave these like pheromone trails. Yeah. And the danger is that they'll make a circle. And so the ants will go into a death spiral by just following a trail that goes infinitely. and they'll die circling, you know, effectively an object. I feel like we're in an ant mill, and this particular ant, I want out. Let me ask you, again, with all due tenderness and respect, by what, you know, by what virtue does one look into the equations of quantum field theory, say, and from it divine a nuclear device? In other words, where does the engineering begin and the physics take over?

Starting point is 00:27:11 The transistor is another example. We didn't really look at the laws of quantum mechanics. They said this filament-like act, or this whisker of a semiconductor with certain impurities when engineered and put in contact and sufficiently close proximity behaves this way. Oh, and then we can explain it using Schrodinger's equation. We didn't look into Schrodinger's equation to find the transistor. So to what extent could one be serious about looking at string theory, loop quantum gravity, whatever you want, GU, and look into those equations and get off of this marble, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:47 and what kind of walk me through that process? Sure. So first of all, let's talk about the old discovery. There are, there were civil war veterans who saw action at places like Antietam, who witnessed the hydrogen bomb in 1952. The big discovery, I think it was 1932, was the neutron. and the you know the I have a living ant in Philadelphia who is older than the neutron so when you make a discovery it's not necessarily the quantum mechanics but the structure of the nucleons and nuclei gave lease mightner a woman who did not get enough credit for getting us into this mess and may get us out who knows right or blame yeah you know Her discovery was, I don't know, six years later, five years later, not very long after that.

Starting point is 00:28:44 And then Teller and Ulam figured out how to take a fission device and turn it into a fusion precursor by focusing the geometry of the blast from the fission device and reflecting it back into a second stage, which actually produces the fusion. It was sort of a combination of engineering and geometry much more than it was innovations in quantum field theory. And then what it did is it sort of, it taught the physics community that they weren't impotent, that they could do things. And almost immediately after they remembered that they were actually capable of doing things, they went back to quantum field theory and basic understanding of the universe. And so you have Shelter Island and Pocono and Oldstores. own conferences, which changed everything in physics in the late 1940s, 1947, 48. Right now, what we have is we have a theoretical physics community that is in the same

Starting point is 00:29:45 situation before the Manhattan Project, where we'd done great work. The standard model of the time was called QED, but we couldn't compute with it. And then once people like Feynman, you know, had a chance to shine at Los Alamos, we started holding conferences where we were really looking for solutions, and almost immediately we were back on track. So I have to imagine that as horrible as the products of the Manhattan Project were, their effect on the theoretical physics community was to take them out of being a cargo cult that only got infinities and turn them into extremely capable engineers

Starting point is 00:30:22 so that they could go back to being extremely capable physicists. So right now, the way in which this would work is, we don't know whether we can get off this planet. And by that, I really mean get out of the solar system. If we're going to be here with general relativity, and that's the last word, you understand why Elon and Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are focused on rocketry. What we don't understand is why rich people aren't focused on getting rid of general relativity as a fundamental theory and making it an effective theory so that we can find out whether

Starting point is 00:30:58 the true fundamental theory below it has new possibilities and new degrees of freedom and new opportunities for engineering and escape. And again, the point isn't that if we go to another planet, we're not going to bring our madness with it. It's that some of us may not be crazy enough to blow ourselves up. And at the moment, we're talking about the lowest common denominator, and the lowest common denominator may very well be Vladimir Putin or Kim. And that might be the sand grain that is unpredictable, that topples the pile. But do you think, I mean, if we were talking on a Zoom call or back in, you know, 380 AD in the, you know, waning era of the Roman Empire, I mean, are some of these things just translation invariant? They also built a sophisticated civilization with a lot of old, you know, people in charge at the top and plenty of young people at the base of the societal pyramid and hungry for bread and circus.

Starting point is 00:31:58 And for, you know, all the accoutrements that we have, we just call them TikTok and Instagram. Do you think this is a time translation invariant process, but made worse by the ratchet effect of the power, awesomeness, power? I don't understand what conversation we're having again. And again, forgive me because clearly I don't, I'm not a good conversationalist anymore. Well, presumably there was still, you know, Aryan and Dravidian civilization in the subcontinent, or there were Iroquois and, and, and, and, um, sue precursors during the Roman Empire. And, you know, my claim is that not all our eggs were in one basket. Right.

Starting point is 00:32:37 But right now, all of our eggs are in one basket called Earth. And, you know, maybe the idea is that I should first just limit myself to the subset of people who find it really important that humans have an indefinite future. I meet a lot of young people. I don't understand. Why do humans have to have an indefinite future? It's like perfectly reasonable question. get it away from it.

Starting point is 00:33:00 All right. Well, they did a study, a famous study, they asked Olympic hopefuls if they trade, you know, 30 years of life expectancy for a gold medal and 50% of them said yes. There is this, but I guess what I'm saying is you're right. Of course, now we're playing with fire

Starting point is 00:33:14 for the first time, a nuclear fire, right? So that's of course true. On the other hand, it's not whole society. If Putin were removed from the equation, if he was, for God's sakes, not allowed to remain in power, you know, just like Lee Harvey Oswald, a single individual change the world for the worse.

Starting point is 00:33:31 And it's much easier for single individuals to worsen the world than for individuals to make it better. Right. So what I'm trying to say is that's going to keep happening. Yeah. The key question is whether the single individual in question has leverage. If you've got nuclear leverage or biological leverage, we get trouble. Because those levers are so levered, right?

Starting point is 00:33:55 The amount of power. I mean, literally, I view this as sneaking into God's toolbox and just rummaging around. It's self-evident to me that this is where we are. And it's self-evident to me that there is only one plan. Yeah. Every plan for survival involves tasking the people who got us into this mess because Francis Crick was a physicist, Teller was a physicist, Ulam was a physicist, that was a geometer.

Starting point is 00:34:22 You have to task the exact same people who got you in to get you out. And that may be unfortunate. You may say, well, you built the Titanic and here it's sinking, go make sure that you build us some lifeboats. Yeah. You're like, no, I'm not going to trust that guy. He built the Titanic. Look, these are the only boat builders you've got. Which part of this?

Starting point is 00:34:42 Here's my question, Brian. This is like a four-line proof. The only way out of this conundrum, assume that it's 3% odds. Assume that you're playing roulette in either a European wheel or an American wheel. I guess the American wheel has two green. Yeah, zero, zero and zero. And the Europeans have one and otherwise there's something like 36 red and black things. Okay, assume that that's the case.

Starting point is 00:35:07 How many times do you get to spin this thing before it comes up green? No one knows and not that many. Yes, it's unlikely, but you can't keep playing this game. All right, that's the first thing. Next question is, if that's true, give me the total list of escape scenario. Like one thing that you may not know that I only know because I've recently found myself in circles of people who have 10 figures and up is that a lot of very rich people are thinking about personal escapes from Armageddon.

Starting point is 00:35:40 They're not thinking about the bankers or? Yeah, bunkers, different countries. Zealand. Yots. Whatever. This is ridiculous. I mean, for only in limited situations, is that a great plan? There's only one thing to do, which is to ask how.

Starting point is 00:35:55 do we get ourselves diversification so that, as you point out, these conserved features of collapsing civilizations don't take down the permanent human enterprise. And that's why, you know, I'm going to a Bitcoin conference in Miami. And I think that the talk is supposed to be, they usually say fix the money, fix the world. And I think I have a change to fix the money, leave the world, the importance of decentralization in spacefaring. If Bitcoin is a protocol, how does it work if you're multi-planetary, if you're in different star system. Or you're Cardasheff 3, you have infinite free energy. Right. Yeah. Or do you have a different situation whereby the point of Bitcoin is to start working on a decentralized option, like from decentralization to decentralization. The key point of failure

Starting point is 00:36:44 is that we're all sharing one terrestrial surface. Now, Bezos or Bezos, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, talks about like Gerald K. O'Neill cylinders and maybe Stanford, Tori, where you get artificial gravity through centripetal acceleration. Elon is focused on the moon. I'm not quite sure what Branson is doing. But the point is all of these people at least have the nub of the idea. We've got to diversify. And with all that money, I don't ever want to hear about a theoretical physicist

Starting point is 00:37:16 who isn't putting three kids through private schools with a second home, a pension secured, and the ability to check in into any four seasons anywhere. on the planet Earth. I mean, this is obscene. The only people who can save us are mathematicians and physicists. And we don't know that it's possible.

Starting point is 00:37:35 It's quite possible that they could return a final theory and we could look at it and say, yep, Einstein was right. The final theory doesn't contain any new options that the one did. Faster than light travel. We don't know. We don't know.

Starting point is 00:37:49 And until we know, and until we hold the conferences, we're instead held hostage to an economic system. system that is mostly there to protect people born in like the 1940s and 50s so that they can live out their days pretending that they're doing physics while they do geometric analysis inspired by physics, which they might call string theory or topological quantum field theory or toy models or conformal field theory. It's like, no, it's now time to get back to physics.

Starting point is 00:38:19 It's now time to do what Oldstone, Pocono and Shelter Island did, is like, conferences, which is to reignite the physics community, get the smart people in here. And here's the dumbest thing. And I'm just embarrassed to say it. But here goes. Physics built your entire economy, more or less, suitably understood, from biotech to communications, to the worldwide web, to the semiconductor. The dumbest thing in the world is money or tokens.

Starting point is 00:38:50 Go get us a huge pile. Drop it off and go away. This is the dumbest thing in the world. It's just resource. You're going to put it down on a Gulfstream, or you're going to put it down on a private island. Whatever you're going to do, it doesn't have anything like the leverage of making sure that the people who built your economy are cut in as wealthy people who are independent enough to say, no, Ed Witten, no David Gross, no university. I'm not going to do your stupid bidding. I'm not going to bow down to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Starting point is 00:39:25 We're not going to adulterate what we know how to do if it has the opportunity to save us all. And the idea that we can't even get resource into theoretical physics, differential geometry is an obscenity. We built this goddamn thing. And then you were in an agreement. You society were in agreement, which is we're not going to let you commercialize this. You're frozen out of intellectual property. Oh, what do we get out of the equation? Oh, you get institutional protection.

Starting point is 00:39:56 You get academic freedom. Well, you got rid of that. You turn the universities into a monstrosity so that we can flatter our undergraduates because what you did is you used it to extract wealth from the young and give it to the old. Now the universities are broken. They don't work. The stupid thing is go get us a pile of money and leave us alone and tell us to work on getting you the hell out of here because we got you in here. That message is so simple and it doesn't resonate.

Starting point is 00:40:24 It's got no resonance. And I've given up. I mean, all I sit around doing for the most part is doing quantum field theory. I'm giving up tons of money, not doing much of anything else. Because I'm trying to make sure my kids, at least my clan has a future. And I believe this. There was no possibility of building an atomic weapon in 1930 because we didn't know about the neutron. almost immediately after you had the neutron,

Starting point is 00:40:53 you had atomic power and atomic weapons, right? We don't know what physics is about to unlock. And when you look at that James Webb telescope, and you look at it peering out into the cosmos, imagine that it is possible that if we can get beyond Einstein's theory, that you won't be talking about faster than light, because spacetime is an Einsteinian concept. You'll be talking about something that you have no idea what the words are,

Starting point is 00:41:17 and it may be possible to visit the universe, so that you're not deciding between Kosamui and Talum. You know? I mean, it's just, it's really important to recognize that more or less we're here on one spec, time to go. And let me just say the last thing.

Starting point is 00:41:33 I hate how heavy and overbearing this is, but wake the hell up. Like you've seen this in Ukraine. You're not putting it together because the person on television is not telling you. You're running a 3%, 5%, 1% risk, something like that of total annihilation. right now. Thanks. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Starting point is 00:42:04 Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. I have to inject some levity at this point. So Einstein dies, Eric, and goes to Shemime. He goes up to heaven. And there he encounters several individuals. First one comes up to him. He says, hello, young lady. What's your IQ?

Starting point is 00:42:20 She says, it's 156. It's great. We can talk about math, physics, geometry, space travel wormholes, et cetera. Then I meet somebody else. What's your IQ? 130. Oh, great. We can talk about politics and life and law and something.

Starting point is 00:42:39 Meet someone. What's your IQ? It's 96. Oh, great. We can talk about the stock market. Because, yeah, you're saying that this is, and no offense to all my day trading, Bitcoin friends out there. shoot my laser beam eyes at you someday. But the point being, yes, this should be a problem that

Starting point is 00:42:54 physics can solve. And actually, you and Pia and others have made contributions to a physicalization of an economic system, which is, which is rather brilliant. And I'll be a topic for another show. And you have given lectures in recent places like the University of Chicago and elsewhere. You pen. You've been all around the world on a college tour. But I want to say you are, you're sounding dark. You're darker now than I've heard. But let me finish. Let me finish, but I want to give you hope. I come to bring you hope. Hope and light, as President Biden just said.

Starting point is 00:43:26 So you don't look at a honeybee and say, that's great. You know, the honey is sweet. Could you make me a web? Like, I really need a web. No, you say, I want some more of that honey. And likewise with a spider, you don't say, oh, make me some honey. You have a unique gift. You could do science.

Starting point is 00:43:39 You can do physics, but you can also reach out to literally millions around the world. You have a huge platform. And you use it very with great gravitas. And I think it's more than most people do. And of course, the haters. Oh, he's a guru. He's a Sven Ghali. Let's ignore them.

Starting point is 00:43:56 It's not worth discussing. However, you do have an ability to inspire and build a lifeboat and provide preservers. I'm not optimistic about getting off the planet with GU or string theory or loop quantum gravity in my lifetime. But what about my grandkids? You're hopefully going to be a grandfather. That was my point about the neutron. If you had a correct theory that was a major upgrade, why wouldn't you be optimistic within a very short window?

Starting point is 00:44:23 You don't know, is my point. You don't know, but just not knowing is not proof that it will happen for, you know, that there's a question. Why the Galileo project is so important. You see, if we can escape to the cosmos, then the cosmos can visit here. Right. Very simple. If we found out that we are being visited and that we are being visited by something that wants to be cryptic, because it doesn't want to be fully known, there's precedent for that.

Starting point is 00:44:47 North Sentinel Island does not probably understand that India exists, but India claims North Sentinel Island, even though the North Sentinelese don't speak any Hindi or Tamil or whatever. We don't know what language they speak. If we can leave, they can visit, and if they can visit, it means that the next iteration contains power, just the way the physics before the neutron had a lot less power than physics with the neutron, right? So if the Galileo project is successful in convincing us that there is something to visitation, then suddenly everything changes.

Starting point is 00:45:29 And this is something people are embarrassed. Again, they will immediately compute the social consequence of saying aliens, right? And then there'll be a Roswell thing and everything degenerates into giggles just the way every conversation about, every conversation about sex, you know, super important force that determines the world, but we can't talk. about it without giggling. So we have the same thing with aliens. And in that world, you start to understand that the odds that we're alone in the cosmos are negligible. And if people can leave, intelligence can visit. And we need to know that that's possible. If somebody told you it is

Starting point is 00:46:07 possible to visit the cosmos, because Einstein isn't the last word, you double your efforts. And if they told you, you know, it's much easier than you're making it out to be, and it isn't an infinite journey. Because people will say all of these idiotic things. They'll say, oh, I think that they're an infinite number of problems. And people have always thought they were getting to the end. Well, people thought they were getting to the end of intercontinental exploration. And then we found the last landmass off the north of Siberia, and we were done. Right?

Starting point is 00:46:37 So these things do come to an end. No, they do. They do. but but I guess to get back to the, you know, inspirational, motivational report of the speech, you have this ability and not knowing in the future. I feel like that comes with it a responsibility,

Starting point is 00:46:54 not to say I failed and now I'm going to take my lashes and do Cheshuvra, but instead to say, look, I have a unique platform. I have a, and focus entirely on inspiring. If that's what you want, make me,

Starting point is 00:47:09 make me happy. bring me people. I need people. I need resources and I need them now. Lawyers, guns, and money. Well, I offered you people here in San Diego. And money. I just think that Warren Zvon belong.

Starting point is 00:47:23 This is the first smart thing we've said today. Send lawyers guns and money. But really, instead of lawyers, I need differential geometers, particle theorists, and I need money that is not encumbered, and I need people not to bitch and moan about the fact that scientists, are comfortable and fearless and not writing grants. Let's stop this grant cycle.

Starting point is 00:47:46 Let's get them away from undergraduates. Wait, no, Brian, give me these people. And I will go back to telling jokes, playing the guitar, playing the piano. I will be the sunny host of the portal. But right now, I haven't been on the air for years or, you know, for over a year. I'm telling you, this is the emergency. You know, it's not that I'm sitting here every second and saying we're all going to die of COVID. I didn't know that.

Starting point is 00:48:10 I can tell you this. If you keep running this Putin experiment and you do several versions of it, we will all die. Or whatever world is left will not be the one that you want your children to be living in. And right now, if this doesn't get your attention, I need to separate from my audience. I don't want to entertain you where you don't understand what's on the line. This is not life is beautiful while I'm pretending that, you know, a concentration camp isn't a death camp. isn't the death can. I don't think I'm asking to pretend that.

Starting point is 00:48:41 I'm asking one of two things, which I don't think can simultaneously be true. One is that you're saying, scientists need to focus 100% on what scientists do without the diversity, BS, and this thing and that thing, and bureaucratic BS and grant writing and peer review. What was that?

Starting point is 00:48:56 Get out. But then you're also, my friend, you're also saying that, like, scientists do a crappy job of selling the best script that's ever been written, which is the scientific enterprise, in that we don't do it. And you have people like Ed Witten and others.

Starting point is 00:49:09 If HBO wants me to do a show to get people excited, I will. You have a show that's bigger than most CNN broadcast. I don't have a budget for the huge graphics with the 3D and the projection mapping, all the stupid shit. If that's the stuff that excites you, somebody else handle it. Right now what I want to be looking at is bundles, partial differential equations, fields, operators, Hilbert spaces. And I'm happy to share what's going on with it. I'm happy to talk about what we...

Starting point is 00:49:41 I'm actually not talking about you. I'm not criticizing you. I'm saying that you want to insulate scientists and give us the academic freedom that we were promised. I love talking to people, Brian. But it's... Hold on. Let me finish, please.

Starting point is 00:49:54 I want to say, I don't feel like my other colleagues are engaging with the public in a way that is going to further this project that you're describing. In other words, we sit in our offices or our laboratories and we just do what we're supposed to. We never talk to the public. We never communicate what we're doing with their money. And so, of course, why should I give you more money? You just told me, like, I can't understand.

Starting point is 00:50:15 If I could understand what you're doing, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize, right, Feynman? So to what extent do we, a scientist, have an obligation to have portals of our own, present company excluded? Well, you know, you're doing it, I'm doing it. I'd rather be doing that stuff. When I like to take a break from actually doing research on something or thinking about something or building something or whatever it is. I love talking to people. I'm a social person.

Starting point is 00:50:36 I like explaining what I know. Turning everything into interpersonal drama or turning everything into a market or turning everything into a game theoretic exercise is killing what we knew how to do even a short time ago. So I would love to do half a day's worth of actual research equations, whatever. And then I'd like to record something. But if I'm going to record something, I just want to spill into a studio and I want to tell somebody, you know, in a week's time, get these things worked up as graphics. I don't want to think about payroll.

Starting point is 00:51:11 I don't want to think about human resources. I don't want to think about whether or not the... Sponsors and... Well, it's like I record in this room with a lot of glass. All the audio engineers complain. Dude, you should really, you know, cover your dining room in tarps. That's going to be great for my family where I've taken over the dining room. and covered it in tarps. I care about two things here. One, I care about inspiring people,

Starting point is 00:51:37 and two, I care about getting people a future. I'm looking at the people I'm trying to inspire, and I'm trying to get a future for. And they don't even know what risk they're in. And they don't appreciate it. And they turn things into drama because they're not strong enough to withstand like all the voices of, you know, like if the Lancet says, well, this definitely didn't come from a lab in Wuhan, well, who am I? I guess the Lancet said it. It's important. It's important. It's to recognize that we can inspire people. If I can't even get you to wake up and I can't even get somebody in the government to understand ideas have consequences. Ulam and Teller's ideas have great consequences. I've more or less told people why I believe there are three generations

Starting point is 00:52:18 of fermions a year ago. I've not had a single physicist on planet Earth say, I want to talk to you about why you say there are three generations of fermions. I gave a reason why the world world appears to be chiral but actually is not chiral. It appears that the weak force, beta decay, knows it's left from its right. It's maximally violating of CBO. And I have not had one person come to me and say, I want to talk to you about that. You think it's credentialism? You're not in academia. You're seen as an outsider. I get literally a book of week. No, no. It's not me, Brian. It's not me. It's the field. When Peter Waite came out with his. idea, which was to build it around the group SU3, which has the strong, communicates the strong

Starting point is 00:53:07 force, which is what holds nuclei together when the protons want to run away from each other, pecked in so tightly. I made sure to read what he wrote, and I called him up, and he said, yeah, nobody's calling. Now, I don't have to agree with him, but I at least understand what he did do, and I wanted to make absolutely sure that I grasped the general idea. What I'm trying to tell you is, I knew that no one was going to much call Peter. No one is listening to each other. There's almost no one working on physics. I think that that's the real statement. This is that the question is going to be, what does the community say? The community basically isn't doing physics. Go to your local university's physics, you know, high energy theory seminar. And I challenge you to listen to a talk

Starting point is 00:53:54 and find anything that sounds like physics in it. In general, it sounds like, Oh, we're in six dimensions. We've got a compact, simple group, and we look at the following fields that nobody's ever seen in human history. We treat it super symmetrically, even though we've never seen supersymmetry. We're not working. And the economists aren't doing it. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th.

Starting point is 00:54:30 powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. U.N. must be 21 to enter. Being economics, I think the extent to which people imagine that this system is continuing to do what it once did, until you actually release new ideas, you don't get to see, it's not an airport, it's a cargo I want you to react to this statement by a past guest on the show, Albert Einstein. Einstein said the following about two different dynamics of human capability. He called the, and this is from a book called the Metaphoric Mind by Bob Samples.

Starting point is 00:55:20 He said, Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is a paradoxical, it is paradoxical, that in the context of modern life, we have begun to worship the servant and to defile the divine. Oh, I love it. So do you see it possible to have both signs, the intuitive metaphoric, the sacred gift, the divine, and rational? Sorry, go ahead. He had both. I mean, this is the interesting thing, right, which is, what was it?

Starting point is 00:55:59 Inspiration is more important than knowledge. imagination, like the center for human imagination. Right. The rational people are, oh, you know, great spirits have always encountered violent opposition for mediocre minds. In order to make huge advances, you have to be wrong in the process. And what you find is you try to imagine E. Cummings turning in a poem and a copy editor saying, the capitalization is off,

Starting point is 00:56:26 the punctuation is wrong, the grammar is non-existent. Yeah, no kidding. E. Cummings. Great minds have to be able to do things that are wrong. When Derok, you know, came up with his equation, he had numbers where A times B wasn't B times A. And it wasn't until you realized that they were matrices that he could make sense of what he'd written. If you can't go through wrong, you can't advance. I didn't thought the positron was the proton, right? That's true. And Galileo thought the tides were caused by the orbit of the Earth, not the moon. So in all of these situations, you've got this sort of copy editing group that's always angry

Starting point is 00:57:06 because it never wins. The answer is stop being a copy editor. Is that why you think GU is experiencing, has experienced, you know, kind of passions in opposition? Or do you think it's people realize that? What are you saying about that? I haven't had almost any GU conversations. Well, you know, I was thinking about that as you were saying, we talked yesterday the day before.

Starting point is 00:57:28 You know, our mutual friend, Stefan Alexander, whose birthday it was yesterday, old man. I missed it. Yeah, that's okay. He didn't reply to my video text, but maybe he was having fun instead. But, you know, he's got a theory of everything. He works on as his latest book has come out, you know, kind of, you know, is the dark game. Yeah, what's that? He doesn't have a theory of everything.

Starting point is 00:57:53 Yeah, he's working on one. You mentioned Peter White. you mentioned we've talked about Garrett Lisi in other words I don't know that we have a dirt you know what if we have a glut of theories of everything

Starting point is 00:58:04 or are unification geometric unification ideas or what have you even you know Shelley Glashow has one right well I mean SO5 or whatever he had right that's U5

Starting point is 00:58:14 USU5 yeah that's grand unification yeah grand unit well I always say we're putting the toe before the gut you know because we don't have a great grand unit but anyway some geometric you know that will unlock powers as you say beyond the ad of the mirror on them, which is already causing so much devastation. But my question is, you know, maybe it's a supply problem.

Starting point is 00:58:32 Maybe there are so many of these things that how can anybody... You are unique, but hold on a second, hold on a second, because I have to compliment you. You're a handsome individual. Thank you. That will always stop Eric. That will always stop you from talking, my beautiful brother. But the point is, not everyone's you, right? So not everyone's able to keep up with it.

Starting point is 00:58:50 And not everyone, as I said to Lex, is as comitus, is as... you know, kind of collegial as you that will take the time, you know, our mutual friend Sabino, so I don't have time for these theories of everything. You know, he'll, she, will from Weinstein, Lee, but maybe not everyone can do what you do. Let's just be on it. I mean, you do, you have a special, you know, kind of arrangement where your work gives you flexibility. Um, perhaps, I, you know, actually, we've never really discussed your work and I don't want to hear, but, but the point being, how, you know, how can we expect the young assistant professor, you know, down the hall for me to get, to get involved in curating and, and doing a

Starting point is 00:59:30 rubric on these theories of unification. Let me just point out something that I don't like in myself. I don't like talking over you. But what you just said is so wrong, right? I don't know how to be polite about it. You know it's not personally. Yeah, I know it's not perfect. It's like, you're devil's advocate. That's not what's going on. You're pulling the conversation gravitationally back to interpersonal issues. Sabina has enough time. Do I want to call Sabina a liar? No, she's being polite. She's meaning to say something else. It took me about 45 minutes to get the gist of Peter White's paper. The assistant professor you talk about has 45 minutes to waste on all sorts of things. Nobody works all the time on their own stuff.

Starting point is 01:00:18 My point is nobody's excited to look at anybody else's work because they know. nothing is going to work. Now, why they know nothing is going to work, I don't know. But what you're doing is you're using your show to spread the dumbest wrong thing about something like Geometric Unity or Peter White's theory or Garrett-Lisi's theory. Anybody in our community can read those things for ideas, right? You can find the triality, the three generations source in Garrett's E8 theory, even though it's S-O-8 that has the triality, it sort of inherits, E8 inherits this. You can read about how Peter White gets asymmetry

Starting point is 01:00:58 of the weak force through SU2, through a WIC rotation inside Complex 3 space. Stephen Wolfram has not actually produced what I consider to be a theory of everything, although he's doing his own thing, and I think he should continue to do it. I'm not aware of Shelley Glashow really having a bigger idea than Grand Unififference,

Starting point is 01:01:19 vacation. We all keep some track of these things. The question that you're trying to ask me is something like, what's been the reaction to GU? And what I'm telling you is it's not what you're saying. The reaction is I've lectured in two places because of COVID, one in Marseille and France and the other University of Chicago at the Kadenov Center. I've had perfectly polite conversations. people are interested in various aspects. But the academic incentive structure, the ability to be viable, means that you've got to allow yourself with people who can fund you and who can hire you and who can give you tenure.

Starting point is 01:02:02 And everyone's worried about their reputation and nobody's worried about physics. But when I say nobody, I don't mean absolutely nobody. I had a great conversation with, for example, Nima Arkani Ahmed recently. Yeah, I was just going to say. you're right what was his reaction then i mean was he willing to engage it or was it of course of course you know he's very constructive you know his point is i learned a great deal from nema nema in my estimation is the soul of theoretical physics right now because he has an ability to do something that i think almost no one else does which is dead reckoning he we've

Starting point is 01:02:41 lost sort of the compass heading from experiment because the energy levels have gotten prohibited for new phenomena. We failed for a great deal of time so most people are demoralized. Theoretical physics lives, even when Neiman I disagree or he says something that's critical of me, that's what real critique is. What he told me to do is, hey, here are the sorts of things that you can grab the attention of the quantum field theory community. Now, I look at the learned something very, very important, which I would love to discuss on the show. I think one of the big problems is that there are these three legs to the mathematical stool, which is geometry, algebra, and analysis, i.e. calculus. The problem with quantum field theory is that it grew up

Starting point is 01:03:29 unbalanced. It's really almost all analysis. And then we found out very late in the day that we'd been neglecting certain topological geometric and algebraic things and sort of starting in the 70s with Jim Simons for the last 50 years. People like Ed Witten, Graham Siegel, Dan Quillan, Luis Alvarez-Gameh have been making quantum field theory geometric. And that's been the basic vector of success in the field. But what you've come to understand is that analysis is too brutal and crude of a tool to have this responsibility for carrying physics forward. And I'll give a simple example. If you have a function, like a little lump of probability that represents where a particle can be, and then you try to propagate that function, how do you know that the propagation of that

Starting point is 01:04:21 function isn't going to turn the function negative in some places? Or how do you know that the function as a lump isn't going to start moving faster than light and screw up causality? Or how do you know that the integral of the probability under that function is going to remain 1.00. So, none of those things are really natural inside of analysis, but it seems like the geometry and the deeper algebraic principles ensure that all of those things are true. And this goes back to something that Esther Perel once said to me, the great relationship coach and therapist. And she said, the thing about masculine. is that it is incredibly powerful and just as fragile.

Starting point is 01:05:06 In other words, a masculine male is an incredibly powerful person who can be damaged by a single stray comment, you know, from a woman and cut low and cut to the quick. That situation is true in quantum field theory, which is it's incredibly powerful, but it is just as fragile. And so what Nima does, which is different, is he says, here are all of the restrictions that we've learned to place on things through analysis. And it's a very long list and it's very brittle. So anytime you want to add something, everybody has the idea of how do we know this is going to,

Starting point is 01:05:49 this isn't going to screw up what we've got stuck together with masking tape and paper clips and the like. In that sort of a setting, his point is here are some things that we don't. know how to do and if your thing can do that that's the way to speak to people who are dependent upon analysis that's an extremely constructive form of criticism and feedback and i've taken an audience capture though i mean you're like it's solving the sociological problem of the of getting something palatable to your analytic no no no his point is he's explaining why quantum field theorists have the prejudices that they do like if you look at the loop quantum gravity guys and people came out of general relativity, they're much more unbalanced in the direction of geometry. What we should have

Starting point is 01:06:34 is a more balanced community that learns how to redo quantum field theory so that it works automatically. To give a very simple example, electromagnetism is four equations if you do it the way Maxwell did through pure analysis. But if you do it through geometry, geometry enforces two out of the four so you don't even have to mention them. So it cuts down the number of equations to two and then those two become unified. So really there's only one Maxwell equation if you understand the geometry. What we're doing currently in quantum field theory is it's a giant grab bag of mostly analytic techniques. And that's why the quantum field theory community has this sort of extreme, I don't know what to

Starting point is 01:07:19 call it exactly. They're very guarded because it's sort of like they've built a hot rod that can fall apart in an instant and is very full. finicky. And if we built something more robust, I think the field would be much more intellectually healthy. So I've learned a lot by talking to, I don't know, just spoke to Alan Goof at MIT when I visited. So I'm talking to great people. People are being extremely positive, polite, constructive. What you see online is you've got a different class and caliber of people, mostly people who've left the field and sort of, you know, try to score points by bitching. And what I'm

Starting point is 01:07:58 trying to do is I'm trying to listen to the top people in the world about what what's the best way of communicating with the with the community because I think this is the world's most important community you think it's in the last say 15 minutes that we have I mean do you think it's not unexpected I mean the famous Thomas Cune structure of scientific revolution is sort of you know predicated on periods of normalcy you know supplanted by periods of crisis when facts don't agree with, you know, kind of the accepted paradigm. And that leads to a so-called paradigm shift. But these, he said, can last for decades, generations, you know, lifetimes. And, you know, I wonder if layering in, you know, it's like options pricing, right? I mean, options are, you know,

Starting point is 01:08:43 you have to get the price direction and the time scale, right? So I'm wondering if we're on balance, not really capable of doing such a thing in physics, where you know the direction the field should take and you're in the time scale that's commensurate with tenure with somebody's got to step in and rescue the community from itself and it has to be somebody with money and to be honest i think bezos was a physics major at princeton or at least he was starting out in that direction Elon musk was one at the university of pennsylvania jim simons the most successful hedge fund manager in the world and has given a lot like we're too tied to what doesn't work If you think about string theory, string theory mopped up most of the best minds during our time.

Starting point is 01:09:30 And it doesn't work. And when I say it doesn't work, I don't mean that we didn't learn anything from it. It wasn't inspiring. I don't mean that we should throw away the ideas. I don't mean that it won't eventually be part of something. But it doesn't work to find the theories we need. And if you can't say that, which is terrifying. I mean, who am I to say that Ed Witten doesn't know what he's doing?

Starting point is 01:09:52 But Ed Witten, as a leader of the field, as opposed to a researcher, took way too many resources in one particular direction, wasn't able to make his bid. And right now, those very wealthy people need to save this field. And they need to build FU money into the field so that individuals don't have to knuckle under. Brian, here's my problem. I don't want to keep saying this. And most of what I do, I don't like, which is correcting people. GU is doing fine. It is being listened to. I'm in constructive conversations. I want to, I want to speed it up. I want to have conversations that I need to be having, we need to be having

Starting point is 01:10:37 conferences. We need to be, you know, having multiple, I don't want to take all the resources that we're in strings and become the same thing for GU. I want us to spread out, get active, get excited, and it's time to save everybody else because they can't save themselves. Everyone else is frozen in place, turning on the news to find out whether or not they've got a new virus or a nuclear threat from Eastern Europe. It's crazy. So when we look at, you know, these challenges, I think, you know, as Nima said in an interview I read recently, that, you know, it's sort of hardwired into physicist DNA to be reductionist. I wonder if you could have, you know, one piece of data, one datum, shall we say, what would be most dispositive, you know, for any theory, not just to you, but what would be the key, you know, piece of data that could be crucial and discriminating between the possibilities between all these different models? Is there such a thing? I can tell you what particles, I think, are left to find in terms of their signatures.

Starting point is 01:11:43 And it's funny. People always say, well, what mass? What energy? Which is like the one bit that you need quantum field theory to do because you have to compute the radiative corrections. And there are a bunch of things I don't know how to do yet. And maybe I can get there at age 56. Maybe I can't.

Starting point is 01:11:57 But there are certainly particle predictions that come out of GU that would immediately say, okay, well, he told us all these. They're in that draft. But that's the dumb version of it. The smart version of it is totally different. It's not a question about, oh, theory and experiment in the scientific method. It's like look at, what is it, 26, 27, 28 parameters, free parameters in the standard model. That's the ugliness that no one wants to deal with who's gotten involved in geometric physics.

Starting point is 01:12:27 They don't want to take on three generations with a KM matrix with random entries and a PMNS matrix and Higgs couplings that determine the shape of the Mexican had potential. All that stuff is artificial. What I'm starting to do with G.U. Is to say, oh, I see, you didn't get why I'm claiming there are three generations that are observed inside of this geometry. You didn't understand why I'm claiming the Higgs field makes sense as opposed to as an artificial get out of jail free card for the mass generation.

Starting point is 01:12:59 The real question is, do you not understand that the key issue is naturality? What we have is a workable theory that is extremely unnatural. It's in a natural language. There are natural components. The Yang Mills component is very natural. The Dirac component is very natural. The internal quantum numbers incredibly unnatural. The Higgs potential, incredibly unnatural.

Starting point is 01:13:22 The number of generations incredibly unnatural. The chirality, knowing left from right, incredibly unnatural. What GEU offers is a huge number of explanations of why this unnatural structure, is not only natural but gorgeous. So in the last couple of minutes that we have left, well, you mentioned you're going to some Bitcoin conference. Has your thinking evolved on Bitcoin fixing this where this could be anything from any nuclei?

Starting point is 01:13:53 I love those guys. I know you go. One of the reasons is that we fought. We went through this whole sort of interpersonal drama stupidity. Then they got kicked in the teeth when they're, price of Bitcoin relative to Fiat went down. And they realized that I wasn't their enemy. I was their friend.

Starting point is 01:14:10 I mean, I'm not one of them. I'm not putting on the laser eyes, all that kind of stuff. But I want them to be the big dogs. At least they're excited about life. They're excited about something that's new. A lot of them have made money.

Starting point is 01:14:23 And sooner or later, one of the things I took this guy, Robert Breedlove, is one of the big Bitcoin guys to the University of Chicago. I wanted to show him what happens when you look at academic economics from the point of view of a different academic subject. Anytime these guys want to, they can start endowing chairs in universities to make sure that professors are present

Starting point is 01:14:46 who can say no. You know, it's interestingly. Why is nobody endowing an anti-wokeness chair? People are bitching about wokeness, but you could actually use money to stop the persecution of scientists inside of universities by their woke colleagues from the humanities. Well, you typically can't, you know, you as a donor, you know, determine who gets a particular job.

Starting point is 01:15:11 And I can imagine a lot of the university. You can do a tremendous amount with money at a university. In fact, some of the most disreputable people in the world have tried to launder their reputations by contributing to universities. I can think of a particular center at a particular university. I bet you could, yeah. I wasn't thinking about Jeff Epstein in the Media Lab, but thank you for asking. What I'm trying to say is we're acting powerless, and we're acting like we have an infinite

Starting point is 01:15:39 amount of time, and we don't. What we need is we need a tiny number of the world's smartest, richest people to wake up and recognize you're all going to die and you're not going to be able to take that with you. You could at least figure out how to maybe save all of humanity and your descendants, because there's a huge thank you for whoever it is that actually steps up to. the plate. I don't know what they're doing. We've produced the wrong elite for sure. Well, sir, in the remaining few minutes, I want to open the floor to questions from you. No, I want to ask you what you're excited about, not to be, you know, Pollyannish about it.

Starting point is 01:16:16 We talk a lot about, let's, let's phrase it like this. Is it okay for me to ask you coping strategies? What are you doing to take care of yourself? I'm really excited, strangely, about non-standard blues progression. So I've been working with Stormy Monday. Let's Go Get Stoned. The song, drown in my own tears. Train kept a roll in all night long and trying to understand why non-standard blues progressions

Starting point is 01:16:48 are so brilliant, why the brain doesn't really notice how ingenious they are. So that's been something I've been super excited about. I just got a new spark mini amplifier from positive grid. they sent me. So now I can walk around with my electric guitar carrying a tiny amp with huge sound, which is greatly fun. I'm spending a tremendous amount of time with your colleague and my son, Zev, who is on fire about history, philosophy, linguistics, physics, differential geometry, and just to see life through the 16-year-old eyes. He's kicking my ass on all sorts of things.

Starting point is 01:17:28 It's just one of the great feelings, watching my daughter grow and trying to think about my golden retriever and my wife after the kids have gone. You know, dreaming about travel and maybe getting back to Hindi and Russian and Turkish and languages that I love. So I'm still very much invested in, you know, food, song, friends, music. It's the desire to save all these things that leads to the heaviness. It's like I love what we have so much. And I want to share it. I don't know how to say I can't watch everything I care about being balanced on a pole with a cat in a hat, you know, keeping it on its nose. It's just like I end up as the fish because I care about all of the things that are at risk.

Starting point is 01:18:19 Yeah, it's true. As they say, you know, if I have committed one crime, it's that I love too much. And obviously this is all we have. I'm convinced forever. But maybe Avi and the Galileo project and other technologies will prove us wrong. But for now, I want to thank you. I want to wish you a happy spring. Happy April Fool's Day, solemn holiday observed with many, many different traditions around the world.

Starting point is 01:18:47 And Brian, let me just say something before you let me go. It's been great watching you grow your channel, grow your presence and take on all this stuff, you know, with the dad jokes as the adult in the room. And thank you for also bringing the perspective of the experimentalist. I think that, you know, you say this, and we don't hear you enough. And you say, isn't it interesting that we keep talking to the theorists in physics who sort of scratch that itch where we don't believe in God, what is this place? what are we and what is the cosmos in the universe.

Starting point is 01:19:27 And I do think that I'm going to be looking for what you're up to with the telescopes in Chile, anything you're telling me about what's going on at the South Pole, cosmic inflation, the new James Webb telescope. And I think focusing us more on experimental physics is something that is going to be part of what comes next. And I think it's an absolutely important thing that we start balancing some of the madness. of theoretical physics with some of the practicality of the people who actually prove that these things are true, real, and have consequence. So thanks. I appreciate that. And from what I'm looking forward to, it's really teaching. Teaching is a kind of a gift to the future, to your future self,

Starting point is 01:20:09 the future of humanity. I'm really enjoying it more than I ever did. And that's, you know, kind of all these weird things, like being on a commercial airliner, you know, like I enjoy it. It's weird to say, but especially being back with my students and teaching in person. There's no replacement. And I'm more bullish, you know, if you asked me during COVID when we were talking about the academic hunger games two years ago for the first time on this channel, we rolled out that little Lejeure domain or what is it called, Port Mandeau. I wouldn't have thought that academia could really survive. And yet, I think, I think it will because of there's some richness that's irreducible in the and the beautiful world of academia that involves people convening to discuss ideas. And it still

Starting point is 01:20:52 happens and I'm still delighted and honored to have people like you to share it with. We have the greatest diversity, equity and inclusion program on earth, and it's called Passion and Merit, and it's open to one and all. Absolutely. Well, thank you, my brother, and it's good to see you. Good to see you, too. Be well, Brian. We'll catch up again soon.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein On the Possibility of Nuclear War and the Twin Nuclei Problem (#351)

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