Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein: UFOs, Crypto, Fatherhood, & The Portal Podcast Reboot (#204)

Starting point is 00:00:05 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Hello, everybody listening out on YouTube, on Twitter spaces, in the multiverse, in the metaverse. I think this is quite fun to do. We should take advantage of all the good technology and bring together good friends and people of good will and good faith. And so with that in mind, I want to close out the month. of December, the year that was 2021, with one of my best friends. I won't say oldest friends.

Starting point is 00:00:46 I will say one of my best looking friends. And that is the way he needs to be addressed. And that is, of course, Dr. Eric Weinstein. Let me bring him in over here. How are you, sir? Brian, I'm going to be with you. It's great to be with you. And we have a lot of people watching all over the universe.

Starting point is 00:01:05 and I wanted to first kind of give you some hearty congratulations because you have had a really significant year of many accomplishments and we're going to get into those accomplishments. In particular, you have just recently, I noticed, joined the research wing of the so-called Galileo Project or Project Galileo, led by mutual friend, Professor Avi Loeb, a man who is not shy from conscientious. And I want to ask you, what was your decision-making process? Walk me through the process that led to you, really joining up, joining forces and partnering with an institution that you don't necessarily have a lot of love for. But it's not fair. Okay. So talk us to the process. Yeah. I believe that in essence, there's a story about the night I ate a plate full of sauteed mushrooms. at Isidore Singer's house because I couldn't figure out how to say that I wasn't an adult to his lovely wife, Rosemary. And I feel like with UFOs, I really came to hate the topic while growing up, never took an interest, wasn't a big science fiction person.

Starting point is 00:02:22 And then, you know, I gradually found that people around me, who I thought well of, were taking this more seriously than I was. and I found that the ridicule that I was reflexively doling out for the topic was being met with different sorts of answers by some people. I should say that there's a subset of UFO land that's just crazy. But there are, there's been a huge shift. And no matter what this is, anything from SIOP to our future selves are visiting us in the past in a crazy, universe that has physics we don't understand yet, whatever it is, it's being taken seriously enough by our Pentagon. It's being taken seriously enough by people in positions where they have

Starting point is 00:03:14 some sort of security clearance for me to say, I want to take this black box seriously because I don't know what's in it. And that includes the possibility of a psychological operation or, you know, we're trying to come up with a cover story because we've got advanced tech. We don't want our adversaries to know about. But it's completely irresponsible to take the position that I was taking at this point. This is no longer the Loch Ness monster. And then, you know, you have the problem of like, now do I have to take the lockness monster seriously? You know, the idea that this is coupled to people who do remote viewing, the whole thing seems very unsavory. And because of the luxurious position I'm in where I trust my relationship with,

Starting point is 00:03:59 my employer at a level that I've never trusted an employer before. That could end up being my undoing, but I think that it's important that people with certain kinds of credentials take this seriously to take a lead to destigmatize it. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Starting point is 00:04:35 Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. I'm also an advisor, an external advisor to Avi Loeb's so-called Project Galileo. And, you know, if I could have asked Avi to consider one thing before he went ahead with the naming of it, I always find it perilous when astronomers compare themselves to either, you know, Galileo or Gio Diano Bruno, all these great astronomers who met untimely fortunes in one sense or another. I find that is not entirely helpful. But on the other hand, what he's trying to do beyond just the, you know, hopeful avoid the awful end that Galileo had,

Starting point is 00:05:19 is to use data to investigate phenomena that if real would fall under the purview of, of some aspects of the standard model of physics. You know, if Galileo is to be taken seriously, hopefully it's not the way he was, you know, threatened with torture, but rather that he was using data for the very first time to assay or check and we'll get into assaying and stuff later, laws of nature, using instruments that he built to do what he said to do was to measure what's measurable and make measurable what is not so. I want to ask you, what do you think is possible to measure that we have not been able

Starting point is 00:06:06 to make measurable yet? Are there technologies, or is it just more of the same with optical telescopes, radio telescopes, etc? Or do you think it's going to require a technological advance that we're not currently capable of? Well, so I keep thinking about the three long-range fields that we've used for teloscopy, the photon, the neutrino, and the gravity wave. And I think that if you think about this in terms of known physics, it's really interesting to me to watch our colleagues talk about what is possible

Starting point is 00:06:37 and what is impossible, assuming that the theories we have now are not effective theories, but are fundamental theories. So a number of people will say things like, well, so-and-so is impossible by the laws of relativity. And you would say, well, it's impossible within relativity. But if you were to try to describe, let's say, Lorentz contraction or time dilation inside of Newtonian physics, you'd have all sorts of surprises in store for you. Same thing with trying to figure out the double-slid experiments from a Newtonian perspective. So in part, we don't know what theories are to come. And I think one of the things that I've come to understand about the whole UFO-UAP controversy is that it's really very different.

Starting point is 00:07:16 if you imagine that you are getting your physics from technology that was constructed by civilizations that you don't know anything about, which is, you know, what you're talking about in the most optimistic UAP scenario, UFO, what you're doing is you're looking at somebody's engineered craft. It's like you're trying to understand radio waves by looking at a radio rather than looking at radio waves by looking at the electromagnetic spectrum. And I think that that has given this field a very weird feel to it. It means that our aerospace corporations are much more deep in the weeds in what would normally be science than we expect. I think one of the things that I've learned is that our government doesn't trust open scientific culture, that for a brief period of time,

Starting point is 00:08:01 you could get a bunch of physicists to keep mum more or less out in the desert during World War II, but this is in general not a trusted paradigm. And so in part, what we're doing is we're working with a lot of people who are sort of physics adjacent, like electrical engineers, or material science people. So maybe some of that is physics, but it's not the right neighborhood of physics for the interstellar intergalactic travel part of this. And there is just a dearth of high-level physics talent and sort of differential geometric talent who are looking at this question, because for some reason,

Starting point is 00:08:41 we don't take it very seriously. Yeah. Quite honestly, I'm very sympathetic with the fact that we are bigoted and don't take it very seriously because it sounds completely goofy. Right. Right. Yeah. Even the kind of scene that was shown last night with, you know, I don't know if it was

Starting point is 00:08:58 today or something like that, where the newscaster started off, they broadcast with the X-Files. And, you know, and it's like, if you're trying to make this, take this as seriously as you and I believe it should be taken, then, you know, connecting it to, you know, the theme song or the theme of a television show that was, I want to believe. I mean, do you want to believe in things, Eric, as a scientist? How do you reconcile that? Well, let's put it this way. My life is not so dull that I need aliens to liven it up, right? But let's take three different topics that I think are important. Unidentified aircraft in military airspace. cases, let's say. The second one would be psychedelics and healing. And the third one would be

Starting point is 00:09:47 human sexuality and in particular porn. You'll notice that there's a giggle on each one of them. And as a result, you have these forces that are completely, you know, potentially altering our civilization in various ways. We could be doing a great job of healing with psychedelics. And yet we're still laughing about, oh, so-and-so was tripping, you know. That kind of nonsense. And it's not terrible to tell sex jokes or to tell drug jokes. It's just that there's got to be a way to send the kids to bed so that you can actually have a serious conversation about these things. And one of the problems that we're having is that the public sphere is pervaded by a certain ethos, a culture, which I've sometimes called the degraded state, where you're just sort of,

Starting point is 00:10:37 snarking and you're making trivial jokes and you're meaming and you're calling it awesome and you're saying, oh, you don't get the internet. And it's like, well, actually, maybe you don't get life in the opportunity that we have. That earnestness probably is trading at a discount. And if we were to take psychedelics more seriously, like how many special forces guys who risked their lives for our country could we save if we got some of these drugs off of Schedule I where they don't belong? Are you talking about like psychedelics or what do we? Yeah, I'm talking about LSD. DMT, things that will cause people to raise an eyebrow. The idea that these things are not therapeutic or have a high potential for harm has been disproven,

Starting point is 00:11:18 yet they sit there on a list, which clearly has those as its twin criteria. It doesn't make any sense. The porn explosion is a serious epidemic, and you're not talking about what it really means, whether it's sex positive, which it is in part, and whether it's destroying lives, which it is in part. Why? Because we can't get through it without laughing. And I think the same thing is true with UAP. It's like, oh, the truth is out there. Oh, tinfoil hat. Oh, my God, flying socks. But you shut up. I just don't know, I don't know what to do with it. It's like these are the serious issues of our lives.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Our Pentagon released a report. And if it is just them having a few yucks, you know, hey, I got it. We'll put out a report and we'll talk about UFOs. I think we scientists should follow it down just the way the amazing Randy did. Yeah, the problem is, you know, I had a live stream with my friend Kurt Jiamungal, our mutual friend who is somewhere in the chat room, I hope, and was with Tom DeLong and this former CIA operative named Jimmy SemiVan. And I got a lot of heat for that one from a lot of people that watch my show. How can a legitimate scientist entertain this? And then I had on, you know, you and then a skeptic like Michael Shermer together just after the, you know, prior to the Pentagon report in June, and we want to get to that. And, you know, so I get it from all sides.

Starting point is 00:12:39 But one thing, you know, I haven't asked, you know, besides you and Michael I would have back on, you know, I don't know if I'd have, you know, Tom DeLong on. In other words, I think I extracted, you know, as a UFOologist would do, you know, extracted all the kind of interesting content from, I think he's a great guy, fun. You know, I'd love to hang out and go skateboarding and play music with him or at least play Spotify. You know, that's the only thing I can play. unlike you, but I found it very kind of unsatisfying, that, you know, kind of the evidence that he was presenting and including the remains. No, but let's be, let's be efficient about it. What's really going on is something different, which is that people aren't actually listening

Starting point is 00:13:20 to try to figure out what's being said. They're trying to say, tell me the minimal thing I can hear from you, so I know I never have to listen to you ever again. And that's been confused now with like, it's not the scientific method. it's the internet method. And the internet method is like, I just want you to say something dumb that I can, maybe if I have to,

Starting point is 00:13:40 I'll take it out of context, but almost everyone has brain farts or they lie or they get caught in something. And then the idea is, can I just put that on repeat so I never have to see you or hear from you again? And I think that that's a large portion of what science has been doing.

Starting point is 00:13:54 I don't want to respond to crazy people who say, hey, I'm bending spoons in my garage and I've been abducted and you have to check out all of my claims because I have a warp drive that'll get us out of here. Why are you ignoring me? Like that person writes to me. Well, okay, so we need better ways of dismissing claims that aren't this wholesale. You can't talk to somebody.

Starting point is 00:14:19 One of the things that we have is in the Neo-Darwinian world, we have a claim, no creationist paper has ever passed peer review. Okay. So you're staking everything on the idea that you have a filter and that nothing has ever gotten through the filter. Well, what if somebody does a pretty terrific study of something? And then they leave the door open to creationism. Are we going to lose the science because they made an offhand remark at the end of their paper that maybe we have to rethink things and it could be, you know, it might not even be a creationist paper. As soon as you come up with these rules, like, you know, no scientist has ever done. It's a desire for artificial cleanliness is what it is.

Starting point is 00:15:05 And I think that what we've got to recognize is that a lot of the people that you see who are giving you this heat are coming at it from this different perspective, which is I want Omuamua to go away. I want Avi Loeb taking the series. I want to just say he's a careerist and that this is just an attempt to get money. And I understand where that's coming from, but it's also an incredibly destructive impulse. I mean, can you imagine if when Benjamin Jesty took cow pus and stuck it into his family to try to keep them safe from smallpox, what would be said about him on Twitter? Right. Whereas you and I have said, you know, with James Clerk Maxwell's equations that were propagated by gears and vortices and, of course, in ether, and let alone it made great advances. And actually in cosmology, our hands aren't as clean as those wonderful Darwinian evolutionary, macroevolutionary.

Starting point is 00:15:59 Because we published many, many papers on the steady state, the quasi-steady state, all sorts of other things. In addition to things like the multiverse, which our friend and mutual E.W. Ed Witten has come to apparently learn to love. This is crazy. I mean, I don't know if people are following this story. Yeah. I don't want to summarize it. I can summarize the multiverse perspective. If you want to talk about the landscape, or at least the string theory aspects of it,

Starting point is 00:16:27 which are very short. Why are you, I'll use a Britishism. You're very brave, Brian. Perhaps you should go first. Well, maybe Edward is following this conversation. I doubt it, too. He only seems to follow things that are negative about Israel. But be that as it may.

Starting point is 00:16:48 If he's out there, he's always welcome to come on. I noted there was a CERN Courier, which is one of the most prestigious, you know, kind of non-journal type journals that is a must read, that he had an interview and kind of commemorating, I forget exactly what the occasion was, but he was kind of reflecting on, you know, 25 years since maybe, I don't know, the miracle or something like that or the construction of CERN. And he was saying, you know, how much of his perspective has changed. And in one sense, he said very little, it's been so spectacular, successful. The standard model is very hard to break and to make progress. And, of course, the interview asked him about his thoughts on things like the string theory landscape, which postulates that, you know, for all the different possible vacuum configurations, there are corresponding different constants of nature, laws of physics, perhaps even.

Starting point is 00:17:47 and this is known as the landscape or the swamp land, depending on who you talk to. And it has a very direct correspondence. And some say that's a good thing. I think it's kind of frightening, actually, but to the multiverse of cosmology, which is postulated by logical extrapolation from inflation theory. So he's now saying that, you know, he used to not like these anthropic kind of arguments, but, you know, he's learned to kind of adapt to them and adjust to them as part of natural a natural expectation. And, you know, basically, we should stop telling the universe what to do.

Starting point is 00:18:20 But as one person said, you know, isn't that just giving up? Like, if you're going to just adopt the multiverse or the landscape as a possibility, then, you know, what point is there in doing physics at this point? So how did you react to that interview, you know, that I sent down? Oh, boy. So first of all, let's say the positive part, which is that I think there was an old view that nobody holds anymore, which said that if we could just understand the law, maybe pre-laplos, if we could just understand the laws of nature, we could compute its consequences and know the future. And I think that this strong reductionism doesn't really exist.

Starting point is 00:19:00 It's a straw man in our day and age. Everyone now understands that some of the properties of the world are sort of properties of the equations or for the few physicists in the audience, the Lagrangian. Some parts of this have to do with the solutions of the equations, that certain solutions of the equations have certain properties that we think of as normal, but there are other solutions that we know nothing about. And so we are stuck in a subset of the solutions. And some of this has to do with, you know, what might be a confusion that we should be on the lookout for. You think that there's a number that means something, but that number is actually the value. of a field that changes in space in time. So I might say that I'm kind of chilly in this room.

Starting point is 00:19:49 It's probably 64 degrees in here, something like that. But it's not a uniform number. It's a number that changes depending upon where I am in the room. And if I said that the temperature in the room is 64 degrees, I would be making this confusion in a way that's very easy to understand. So I think that there's a lot of room for kind of humility and discipline with respect to saying, I wonder what part of this is anthropic, what part of this is a property of the solutions, which is part of the equations, what is a vacuum expectation value that is actually a field that has been excited to some level, that is reasonably constant where we live, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's all healthy and positive.

Starting point is 00:20:26 And I think it's great that he said that. The part that I don't like is, wait a minute, you just took the entire field of physics on a nearly 40-year adventure, which was characterized. in the early portion by getting rid of your competitors, by saying, well, I have the whole thing wrapped up by noontime tomorrow because they're only, you know, a finite number of theories to investigate and nothing else has the power and glory of string theory. All who can see it will be healed. Amen. I mean, the crimes of string theorists are very different than the issues with string theory. String theory is not going to hurt anybody. It's a bunch of equations

Starting point is 00:21:04 and ideas and complex of stuff. But when you have people, you know, even that we respect, like Maddie Cyberg saying, oh, string theory will be right because if anyone comes up with anything that isn't string theory, we'll call it string theory. And you're thinking like, well, that's, are you allowed to say that? I think that what we need to do is to recognize that collegiality in academics is a resource. And what academics looks like in the absence of collegiality, where you're just full hunger games, right? And you announce your strategy, hey, you know, I only invited you to dinner so that I could execute you and eat you, you know, well, wait, what? I have this very strong negative feeling. So you're telling me we should work on something

Starting point is 00:21:51 and then if we get it right and you have it wrong, you'll just call it what you were doing to begin with and you're announcing us to the world. It's sort of a joke, but it really isn't. I think that there's something about string theory, that it's an enormous complex of interrelated ideas that clearly means something. We don't know what it means and what it means may not be about physics. What it means may be about pure mathematics, infinite dimensional structures, extended objects, all of this stuff. When we found out that quantum field theory wasn't about physics in the 80s, it was a complete shock to me. And it didn't seem to register to too many people that when topological quantum field theory came out,

Starting point is 00:22:32 it was very similar to what happened with ADS-CFT sort of a decade later, which is that, that you connected things that showed that what you were working on didn't mean what you said. So for example, with strings, it was claimed string theory could do things that gauge theories couldn't. But then if you have some sort of holographic principle or duality principle or any kind of a principle that says, oh, this string theory is dual to a gauge theory, you just sort of undercut your own argument, much the way, you know, in my opinion, when we found out the topological quantum field theories existed, that they didn't have anything to do with physics. They had to do with the formal structure.

Starting point is 00:23:11 And it was very much like liberating calculus from wherever it was initially discovered in the sciences. Turns out calculus is useful for everything. So you might invent, let's say, quaternians or something for a very particular purpose. But once you've invented it, it belongs to the world. And I believe that partially what we found out is that the justification for string theory

Starting point is 00:23:34 has somewhat evaporated. which is maybe gauge theories can do what string theories can do. Maybe there are dualities and relationships and holographic principles and correspondences that are much richer and that maybe string theory is hanging together in a certain mathematical sense, not because it has anything to do with the physical world. It could be hanging together because it's a piece of pure mathematics, much the way quadratic reciprocity is true, but it doesn't need to come from the physical world as we know it.

Starting point is 00:24:05 Yeah. When I look back, again, you know, it's always dangerous when physicists talk about history or philosophy or religion. But I think, you know, it's... When they're sober. We shouldn't be, you know, forbidden to talk about it, but we should do so judiciously. And, you know, and I look at, you know, some of these comments. And I've had the honor and pleasure of, you know, talking to many people over the past couple of years since I started this project. And I keep coming back to this question of, you know, what, of what, and I'm not. the first to do this. Obviously, if, you know, Feynman said, I don't care how beautiful your theory is. If it doesn't agree with the experiment, it's wrong. But Eric, we're in a situation when they're, you know, we're told that the experiments don't exist. They can exist. We can't make them. And I often say, you know, look, if I told Ed Witten, you know, in 1971, when he was working, you know, right next door to Frank Wilczek. Wasn't 73? Well, well. Oh, yeah, they're wrong. Oh, really. Okay. Well, yeah, you know as. I think he was working on the

Starting point is 00:25:05 McGovern campaign. Anyway, keep going. Again, so I retract what I said about physicists and history because obviously I'm talking. I'm a podcaster. I'm an internet. You're an internet celebrity. And I said, well, what if I told you back then, you know, we'll have these colliders, but they won't collide, you know, protons and antiprotons or electron scattering. No, they'll collide, you know, entities made up of 10 to the 56 neutrons together. Two of them, you know, 30 solar mass neutron stars. or whatever, multi-multasolar mass neutral. We'll collide them together at a few times the speed of light.

Starting point is 00:25:41 Would you take that? Would that be enough to tell you? Would they have said at that point, Eric? No, we need something beyond the LHC. I mean... It's an interesting question. Yeah, I mean, what do we make of this, you know, because a theorist will hide...

Starting point is 00:25:55 Let me say this. An experimentalist will hide our results. I'm speaking on behalf of myself only. We often hide our... I wouldn't say dirty laundry, but we'll hide behind the upper limit. So what is an upper limit? An upper limit is saying, you know, we're not going to put a stake in the ground.

Starting point is 00:26:09 We made a detection. You know, we know it's not bigger than a certain value. And so, therefore, you know, we don't have to do quite as much to rule out or to rule out other competitive explanations because it's consistent with noise. And so you don't spend your time, you know, seeing what other sources of noise, you account for the systematic noise, the statistical noise, and then you're done with an upper limit. A detection is different.

Starting point is 00:26:29 Now, I think the corresponding complementary perspective, as Frank Wilczek would call it, is when a theorist says, oh, we can't know unless you tell us either the vacuum state of our own theory or you build us the future, future galactic, pan-galactic collider. So I think physics has a problem and that we have a courage problem. And we're not really willing to go out and say, that's impossible or, you know, the fruit on the apple tree is way too high to be picked. Got it. A couple things. First of all, so your first, it was a crypt, your first point was a cryptic reference to, I think, LIGO and what we can pick up now. That's right.

Starting point is 00:27:09 I should point out that Murray Gelman, as early as 1983, at the Second Shelter Island conference, is very clear in his keynote speech that we should be using cosmic rays and the debris from the universe as a substitute accelerator. You know, in some sense, a more powerful but less predictable one. You get what you get. You can't schedule these collisions between black holes the way you'd like to. So getting beam time is kind of a weird thing, if you know that reference. I would say that the issue is what we talked about before.

Starting point is 00:27:53 The reason nobody wants to say sharp things is this idea of, and I'm going to bring it back to Feynman because I'm having a weird beef not with Feynman so much, but with the fact that the internet has discerned a lot of meaning from him, which is just wrong. He was planning to the cheap seats. I think that he made a lot of very simple, powerful statements, which people love because they don't, they're not very difficult to understand, but they're also not correct. They're pithy. So one of them is, is that if your theory doesn't agree with your experiments, it's wrong.

Starting point is 00:28:28 no, that's not true. I mean, the issue is the instance of your theory, the instantiation of your theory is wrong, provided that the experiment was in fact done correctly and there is that discrepancy. But I think that what we're, we really haven't acknowledged this point. We've developed this very bad habit of the going after the kill shot. Oh, Blas Cabrera saw a monopole in his laboratory. On Valentine's Day in 1990. Yeah. But it's never happened again. So he can't be trusted. Who's next? Right.

Starting point is 00:29:01 Right. Right. Exactly. And then the next one is like, oh, the string theorist, they said that they were good to do everything and they didn't do anything. Frank Wilcheck promised supersymmetry from the LHC run one. What about Gordon Kane? Loser.

Starting point is 00:29:14 And the answer is this is ridiculous and it's unbecoming. It just shows that we're not really a science at the moment. Can you imagine if QED was wrong? Quantum Electrodynamics was wrong because Dirac, you know, got this prediction of the proton and the electron wrong. This is dumb. It would take out Einstein. It basically is a rebellion against,

Starting point is 00:29:36 and I'm going to be like not so nice. It's a rebellion like by the copyrights, by the copywriters against the authors. It's like, oh, if I can find a spelling error, then I can throw out Hamlet. Oh, really? I didn't know that's how science work. So thanks for the information.

Starting point is 00:29:54 I think it's really important that we stop trying to go after string theory. I think string theory is not going to hurt anybody. The key issue is string theory culture. And the thing that I'm really against is the idea that we don't want to say certain things. We are all so thankful that Ed Witten passed through that we don't want to talk about the fact that he probably made a disastrous bet veering the field towards string theory in a very unconcentrated portfolio of approaches. And it's not an anti-Ed Witten point. If you ask me what, you know, the closest I get to an anti-Edwitten point is why aren't you taking responsibility for what you did to the field?

Starting point is 00:30:35 Right now it needs to be wide open. It needs lots of different people. And I think that the strength theorists have a persistent sort of complaint, which is none of the rest of you have taken the issues of renormalizability and compatibility of gravity with the standard model as seriously as we have. And therefore, we don't trust you with the car keys. And I think that, you know, in some level, well, maybe you guys didn't take seriously enough the idea that this wasn't really beautiful. Like the argument that this is all so beautiful has empowered our friend Sabina to go on an anti-beautyote that has really nothing to do with anything. It's just that the string theorists used beauty. Oh, Eric, I lost your sound.

Starting point is 00:31:19 Oh, no. Did you do something? Hello? I'm not hearing you anywhere. You hear me at all? Or YouTube. Is your phone acting up? All right, we lost him.

Starting point is 00:31:35 So I'll take just a second to chime in with two, you know, for every Feynman quote, there's an equal and opposite Feynman quote. And in addition to his saying when he won the Nobel Prize that if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. He's also rumored to have said that if you can't explain it to your grandmother, then you don't understand it. So which one was it? So Eric, I see, I know I don't see you. I hear you, I think, on Twitter. Can you say something, Eric? Eric, can you hear me?

Starting point is 00:32:13 Eric, I hear rustling on, at least on Twitter spaces, but I don't hear. And I've lost you on YouTube. Now I hear myself. So people are saying, yeah, I can hear you on Twitter now, yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah, there we go. Stable enough. I see.

Starting point is 00:32:37 I see you. I hear you on Twitter. Let me turn it down. Let me see, do I hear you on YouTube? Say something again. Can you hear you? Are you? Yeah, I hear you.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Yeah, I hear you now. I think it's fine. Folks, can you say anything else? Can you let us know out there if you can hear us? There we go. Eric, can you hear me? Yeah. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:32:58 Okay, so we're talking about Ed Witten, and I do want to make one comment. I want to get your reaction to this because I have a guest coming up by the name of Christopher Sweat, who is kind of a philosopher. He's an intellectual, but he's African American, and he hates this notion of black intellectuals. He hates to have, you know, be thought of of this, you know, who is speaking for the black community and, you know, let them come forth and they are intellectuals. Like, you know, I don't know if anyone thinks of me as a white intellectual, but the point, you know, Ed is, and now you're frozen again, damn it. Can you? I hear you on Twitter. Can you hear me, Eric still?

Starting point is 00:33:41 I can hear you. Okay. I hear you on Twitter. I don't see you on, let me, yeah, log you back in. But the point being that we have, you know, this notion of leaders in a field, and then these leaders have some responsibility if they're going to accept that mantle. And as Christopher is saying in the black community, I mean, who can possibly say that they speak for the black community as a black intellectual, etc, etc. And this is right or left. I'm not, I'm not, you know, choosing science. But in the context of, you know, of a particle physics or string theory, you know, clearly Ed is a leader in a certain sense. What does that entail? What responsibilities does he have to, you know, as the de facto leader in the case where there is no leader, you know, let whoever, is willing to lead come forward. So what responsibility does Ed have?

Starting point is 00:34:30 After all, he's made very clear statements about string theory, including that he believes that string theory is the only theory of, you know, any form of geometric or a theory of everything that can incorporate the Yang Mills equations in a self-consistent manner. Well, this is nonsense. I don't know how to say it politely. Ed Witten is a leader as is David Gross. I think that Nima Arkani Ahmed is a non-string theory leader. You find out who the leaders are by who gets the keynotes and who makes decisions about where the field is going to go and how DOE funds things.

Starting point is 00:35:14 This is nonsense. We have to recognize we have leadership. and I don't know why Christopher Sweed is in this conversation. Ed Witten's a super important human being who directed the field to an enormous extent at a time when it was lost. And I think it's really important to recognize that we don't experience leadership in our time. I don't know that somebody's given him the talk that says, hey, this isn't your field. It wasn't Einstein's, it wasn't Newton's, it wasn't Dirac.

Starting point is 00:35:45 You have responsibilities. You're 70 years old. this year and you have got to do certain things that aren't up to you it's a it's it's the burden of leadership and for some reason we're living in an era in which nobody feels any burden of leadership um you know i think that for example uh george i and glasheau felt too much burden when their SU5 um theory was not immediately confirmed for proton decay and they immediately fell on their swords. Well, you know, as per earlier discussion, it's not like Grand Unified theories went away. It's not even like SU5 went away. But this idea of in an era in

Starting point is 00:36:26 which everyone survives, making a mistake doesn't end up as a kill shot. And also your colleagues are decent enough to give you credit for your work even if there's a flaw, a flaw somewhere in the theory, there's a fly in your ointment. And I just, I don't know what planet I'm on. It's very clear that when you're 70 years old and you've spent this much time on a theory and you've taken this number of resources, human, financial, and otherwise, to explore an idea and it has this little to show for itself. And by the way, I've written extensively about all the positive externalities of the string theorists, you know, geometrising quantum field theory. And so there's no shortage of positive things I can say. It's not an

Starting point is 00:37:10 anti-them thing. But it's sort of an at what point do we become adults? And I think that it's really important to recognize that most of us are saying wrong things about science to avoid offending Kumran and Ed, you know, and Strominger, Colchinski and company. I think that these guys really probably want to get off this train at some level. I think that they want to say something about the field needs to be open and we made some mistakes. And I don't think we need truth and reconciliation, but I think we need to be decent. And I think we need to recognize that the real problem was string theory culture, not string theory. And the reason that it was problematic is that it attempted to put other cultures to the sword prematurely based on what it said it was going to do and then failed to deliver. So you say that you shouldn't fund them because we're about to do everything and then you don't do it.

Starting point is 00:38:05 I want to know, well, can we hear more from the people who don't work in physics any? Can we hear more from the people who you've trashed? I think about the bootstrap community from Jeff Chu. And I think it's really important that we recognize that, you know, catastrophe theory of Renee Tom didn't work out necessarily the way we expected. We've had all sorts of big theories that, you know, maybe the Reggie calculus didn't go where we thought it was going to go in general relativity. Whatever it is, it's really important and necessary that we cut this out,

Starting point is 00:38:39 Are we scientists or are we postmodern philosophers who play with equations? You know, hopefully for many of you out there, I also do solo videos where I do kind of explainers about experimental physics. There's a lot of theoretical physics out there in the world. And I love Sean Carroll and I love Sabina. And I love Brian Green and the guys at PBS Space Time who I've collaborated with. But I think I want to really kind of up the ante and kind of production quality of those videos where I'm explaining. topics in experimental physics, not just in cosmology, not just the theoretical aspects, although I will get into theory on occasion. As Eric knows, I like to dabble in theory the way a drummer

Starting point is 00:39:20 dabbled more than that. Well, I'm not a profile. I always say to my students, Eric, you know, I say, you know, you're an experimentalist, but that doesn't absolve you of the necessity and burden of understanding the theory. All you are absolved of my student, I will say, is that you don't have to come up with new theories. You don't have to invent new theories. or really, you know, look for extensions or corollaries to them, but you need to understand them. Otherwise, you're just kind of, you know, almost robotically going through the motions. And that's not why I got into physics to train a bunch of AI, you know, non-sentient beings. And I'm blessed to have so many wonderful students working with me and also to have in a wonderful amount of high school students, one of which is particularly close.

Starting point is 00:40:09 Eric, and I want to get into that. And how to train a student? How do you want to train your kids? If you're interested in getting your kids interested in STEM, hit the like button. Because Eric and I are working on a project together with our children. We're kind of doing a swap of a certain kind where my child will learn and get recommendations from Eric, in particular about experimental physics and experimental cosmology. and I will teach his son about, you know, Gage,

Starting point is 00:40:41 no, no, I'm just kidding. We actually do the opposite. So I'm sort of coaching, mentoring Zeb Weinstein, who's a brilliant and talented young man that I'm grateful to have some form of influence with. And Eric is tutoring my son, my oldest son, on, you know, the most beautiful ways to get adjusted to, as a 10-year-old can, at least,

Starting point is 00:41:03 to get adjusted to the concepts of higher mathematics, Starting with, of all things, higher dimensional geometry topology with a book that Eric bought for my son recently called The Shape of Space, which I'm enjoying him reading to me. It's really wonderful, Eric. And I want to thank you for that on behalf of my son and myself. Before we pivot to how to raise a child that you're interested in becoming a STEM professional, which I think we have, you know, in the last six months of working together on this project with our children, we have some insight into and in particular how to do things like bypass the BS kind of introductory, you know, stuff that you can get past very early on. And this is risky for me, Eric, because I'm a public university professor, right?

Starting point is 00:41:47 So part of my, you know, my lucre comes from having students enroll for all four years. But if I can get them to bypass your son or your daughter to bypass two or three years, I'm all for it and get straight to the good stuff, which is more fun, by the way, for me and you to teach. But I want to get back to Geometric theories because you were extremely, again, you had a great year. You played Old Town Road on your birthday at a little Nazax. Before we get to that, to that, let me just. Go ahead. Go ahead. It's not really fair, though.

Starting point is 00:42:21 I think that what's happening with Zev is that he more or less kicked us out and then invited us back in. He made a study of physics, what is taught as to undergraduates. He realized the same courses occur multiple times. He effectively came up with an entire plan to self-teach a physics major. And I would love to take credit for that, except I didn't do it. And I think you can take some credit for it, in part because you challenged him with something where you said, look, you know, it's going to actually take more time and effort to train you than you're imagining. So this doesn't become a net positive. And he's like, hold my beer.

Starting point is 00:43:08 Yeah. Before you give me a homework assignment, you know. Well, and, you know, we were locked down during COVID to some extent. He said, okay, what do you feel like if I take this summer and burn it on a physics major that doesn't exist? And I said, well, you've never taken calculus or linear algebra. How are you going to do that? He said, do you believe? And I said, okay, I'll try. So I still don't know how he somehow bootstrapped himself into seemingly having the, I mean, am I wrong about this?

Starting point is 00:43:40 He seems to have more or less the knowledge of a physics major with some holes in it, but it's pretty much like quantum and classical electromagnetism. I think that it's a wonderful thing because it's a huge shot across the bow about, do we need to teach these courses multiple times? Exactly. Well, and furthermore, Brian, one of the things we've been discussing is the fact that you wait until your second year of graduate school, often to take general relativity in quantum field theory, the two theories that sort of define everything, and they aren't

Starting point is 00:44:19 even required of every experimentalist, which I had no idea. Right. Different universities have these different requirements. So in part, I think what Zev is doing, is essential in that if we need more time so that everybody learns general relativity and quantum field theory, we have to figure out how to compress the physics major so that you can do more, more quickly. And again, I think that he wanted to impress you that he didn't need to be a net drain on your time. And that also sort of inspired me with your son,

Starting point is 00:44:50 that when your son gave an unbelievable math answer to a group theory problem without any equations or any symbols that we were able to serve up to him. Just let's hit him with Jeff Weeks, the Shape of Space, which is a wonderful book, which is really about higher topology. It's kind of an advanced concept beyond college for most people, but written in a way that's engaging for anyone to read. And so I think what we need to do is we need to use these channels that we have,

Starting point is 00:45:18 in particular, to get more people from backgrounds. You know, you and I come from Jewish backgrounds, which have a reverence for learning. if somebody's coming from a culture that maybe put a higher emphasis on the arts, sports, or something like that, we need to get this stuff so it's less painful, more fulfilling, and more exciting to the imagination so that you don't happen to, you know, need to be in this game. Because I certainly come from an academic family. I know that.

Starting point is 00:45:45 I was just going to make the joke. You know, you hear a lot of people talking about, well, I'm a first generation, you know, college student. And I'm thinking, like, our kids are, you know, they can't even be first generation professor, you know, PhD. You know, your kids have, you know, two Harvard PhD parents, and my kid has at least one, you know, Ph.D. from an Ivy League school. But what do we say? And, and schmata salesmen for grandparents. And so, you know, in a weird way. And same with mine.

Starting point is 00:46:09 Yeah, my mother didn't graduate from college until she graduated from Western Connecticut State at age 55 of the degree in social work. But my dad, of course, did. Now, I want to, but I do want to say, we did spend time with one of my best friends, the best man at my wedding, Stefan Alexander, jamming along with our kids. and talking physics and drinking a little bit of wine, let's be honest, okay? There's no harm in drinking that wine. We had some roti and Steph got some great delicacies, you know, that he would used to cook for me back when I was at Brown. But, you know, Stefan is a product of the public school system too, and you and I live in California. And the fact that we've had to go out of our way, you know, to really craft a curriculum for our children because the power.

Starting point is 00:46:56 that be won't do it. That's ridiculous. And I am so, I'm, I've never been so disgusted with the, with the leadership that we have. And I, and I said to Stefan, look, you're black, you know, for those that don't know, Professor Stefan Alexander, he's a president of National Society of Black Physicist, full professor at Brown University. He was the E.E. Just professor, a Boucher Award.

Starting point is 00:47:14 The guy's got all possible credentials that you could ever want. Okay. This man is a product of the public school system. He said, I would not be talking to you if I didn't have exposure to calculus. Like we wouldn't have been friends. I mean, forget about like, yeah, he wouldn't be a professor. Like, I wouldn't, he wouldn't be in my life. Brian, this is just stupid.

Starting point is 00:47:33 And it's important that it's important that we learn to say no to people with bad ideas, no matter what color skin or what their sexual orientation. If you've got a bad idea, I don't care if you're Jewish, Muslim, Christian, atheist, you've got a bad idea. And the idea, for example, of getting rid of standardized testing in California is completely insane, this idea that math is discriminating. It's also, I'm just going to be very blunt about it, it's also extremely bigoted. How many of our friends who are all for this kind of this nonsense secretly believe that black kids can't do math? And it's offensive to me. It's like, you know what?

Starting point is 00:48:15 They're going to be just fine. Let us at them. And get out of the effing way. This is just stupid. You're not going to take the entire, and this claim that math is biased against people of color. Have you taken a look at our winning Math Olympia team? There's one white guy on it. Wow, but then they'll say, oh, those are Asian Americans. Those are, you know. You know, I don't have time for stupid. Let's talk about smart.

Starting point is 00:48:41 No, the thing I like to point out is, if you go to Nigeria, which is one of the most advanced technological civilizations on Earth, and, you know, just they don't teach two plus two equals anything other than four. any other top university. So let's stop saying it's white supremac. I can't countenance that. Well, please let me know how alternate mathematics works on your tax return. Let's just, you know what, we take these people too seriously. All right. So let's go positive then. Let's talk about like specifically what we are trying to do with our kids. And I think a lot of it comes down to time. And this pandemic has been a great challenge. It's been hard, you know, being around, you know, a bunch of kids all day long and then having to teach another bunch of kids, other people's kids, and dealing with COVID tests every

Starting point is 00:49:26 single afternoon. It seems like there's a COVID test to take care of. And I just, I just, you know, thought about it, but like when are we ever going to get this time back? This is a gift. Like, I wouldn't probably have had time to spend, you know, with my kids, let alone your kids, in the sense that we have now. And we've kind of developed a little, and it's an experiment. And I always say, you know, people are like, we're experimenting with our kids. Well, I'm an experimental physical physicist, so, you know, F off if you don't like experiment. I've experimented on my kids since the day they were born, for sure. And what else do we have? I mean, they're going to blame us no matter what. So we might as well have some fun with them. And I think the most fun thing that you can do

Starting point is 00:50:03 is not, but by the way, for those of you out there, neither one of us is pushing either one of our children to follow in our footsteps. And in that sense, I don't want them to. Right. It's much more durable if they don't. And to see the- But that's not the issue, Brian. The issue is that they want to know what are the coolest things in the world? Well, it's not a career decision. The ability to talk to a 16-year-old kid who has more or less a bachelor's degree's worth of knowledge of physics. And to have him correct me, and I didn't come to physics through that route. I went through a totally different channel. It's a wonderful thing to view it as culture. And just because you know, you played the oboe doesn't mean that you become an oboe.

Starting point is 00:50:49 player. You know, it should be the case that you can learn quantum field theory and general relativity and differential topology without having to make those your career. And we don't have a, we don't have an idea that that's possible because we make it so difficult that by the time you're done, you want a career and you need a career and it wouldn't be fair to you not to have a career. And I think that in some sense, that's part of the problem is that we need to make this much more simple to explore the most beautiful ideas in the world. And, you know, it's also a great comeback to that whole Feynman thing about, you know, if you

Starting point is 00:51:23 can't understand it, it's because the person explaining it didn't make it make sense. Right. Well, but they couldn't understand it. It's wonderful watching the fact that this stuff is understandable and watching the fact that it trips people up in exactly

Starting point is 00:51:39 the same places. You know, for example, you might say that there's a Hilbert space of states, you know, and that the points in the Hilbert space are the states of the system. And, well, that's not true because, you know, there's an issue of projective Hilbert space or maybe it's not really a Hilbert space.

Starting point is 00:51:56 Maybe it's, or maybe it's a rigged Hilbert space. There are all sorts of ways in which we, we just go quickly over things where we're slightly lying. And it's been really interesting watching the 16-year-old figure out that there are a bunch of lies that are told as the, you know, as scaffolding and then the lies are removed later. It's crazy that we teach chemistry before quantum field theory because it's dependent on quantum field theory. And so, you know, in a weird way, I think I'm getting a lot out of this time watching my child teach himself, which is not the same thing as teaching my child or teaching your child. My plan for your child was to buy the book and to have Isaac teach himself the subject with me getting him out of the ditch whenever he gets into trouble.

Starting point is 00:52:43 But it's really the old Kung Fu Panda point that the turtle teaches the panda. It's not Shifu who teaches the panda. It's the turtle. And they only have two conversations in the entire film. But it also underscores this need. I had a conversation. I was honored to be on Tom Billioux and his podcast recently. And he's very much hoping you'll go back on his show.

Starting point is 00:53:04 And he and I chatted a lot. And he doesn't have children. And he made that an intentional decision, he and his wife, Lisa, that they weren't going to have kids. and that this is something they didn't want the, you know, quite frankly, a slight burden and so forth. And I said, well, you know, I didn't get on my high horse about it. But I said, you know, because there are people that can have kids. And for us to say, well, you could only make an impact if you do, you know, kind of teach your own kids. And so, but I said, look, Tom, you can be an ideological parent just as much as a biological parent.

Starting point is 00:53:33 I don't think particular importance to be paid to, like, who produced the sperm or the egg that produced a certain king. you know, he asked me like, well, don't you feel closer to your, to, to a biological kid than some kid you adopt? I said, Tom, you know, God forbid, you know, it happens that a parent is told. Let's say someone comes to you, Eric, and says, you know, Zev, uh, it kind of looks like you, but, but he was actually, uh, he's, we mixed up at birth in the hospital, you know, we accidentally mixed him up and, uh, he's not your kid. It happened to a friend of mine. No way. And he had, he had five kids. No way. And it wasn't, wasn't, wasn't a question of a mixed up in the hospital, but another, uh, less fortunate.

Starting point is 00:54:10 situation. And the child that he's closest to isn't his. Yeah. But again, Tom Bill you is doing great things in terms of giving relations. Oh, yeah. I didn't finish. No, no, of course. I know. I know. All the usual. I am disturbed about the antinatalism. I think it's very important that we try to recognize that there's a reason that we have our own biological children. But when that doesn't work out, there are a whole panoply of options, including mixing, you know, sometimes a mixed family with adopted kids and not up to, or taking on other people's children and pouring your wisdom into them. Our friend Melanie Nottkin has talked about. We have to talk about something which is uncomfortable, which is that there are preferred states of the system,

Starting point is 00:54:54 but there are lots of situations in which you get into a non-preferred state and it can be as deeply fulfilling or more fulfilling. And for some reason, the nuance isn't present to talk about that, but in general, I think both of us agree, have babies. I will point out that the whole demographic transition from high numbers of children to lower numbers of children has been an incremental version of antinatalism. As you give people opportunity costs, particularly women, they tend to have fewer children. Also, of course, as more children survive, they tend to stop having many children expecting that some of them won't make it. But to get back to it and sum it up, yes, I think that this time of COVID has been huge

Starting point is 00:55:38 if you've used it to try to not only teach your children, but have your children have the freedom to teach themselves while you're at home and to just watch the process and try not to interfere too much. Yeah, and just to close out that little vignette with respect to Tom, you know, I did say to him that I found it very, you know, very interesting that he has, you know, made a commitment. And his decision to not have kids can only be verified by him to have been a bad one on his deathbed. And he admits that. If I regret it on my deathbed, then I know it'll be a bad decision.

Starting point is 00:56:10 I said, he'll never know. We'll never know. But there's a side benefit, which is that I think we can know. And one of the ways that we can know is that we can know that being an ideological father or mother is impactful. And I think that comes down to our kids. Like, our kids might listen more, like Zev might listen more to me about certain things. and about academia or maybe in experimental physics sense. And they're just lacunae that you and I have in our parenting and knowledge base

Starting point is 00:56:37 that can be fulfilled by the other. And I think that's so powerful that my son will like, like, oh, Eric told me to do this. Like, I'm wondering, Eric, can you tell him to clean up his room tonight and put away? Because he's going to listen to you. He may not listen to me. But that is a very, very powerful observation. I think that I'm seeing that sometimes you need, as Hillary Clinton, you know, once said, it takes a village.

Starting point is 00:56:58 I say it takes a multiverse. And to have an input just shows you the benefit that you may not be this person's father or mother, but you could impact them in a way that maybe their own biological parent couldn't have influenced them. To an extent, Brian, we do need uncles and aunts and all that kind of stuff. I think Melanie and Jordan Peterson, you know, trying to fulfill that's really important. But I also think that, you know, we're also dancing around things that aren't true that sound good. I mean, I think the fact is, is that I've watched your five kids listen to you because you put

Starting point is 00:57:28 the time and you build credibility and the way in which you parent. And, you know, I do think that in part we've gotten into this lazy thing about teenagers. They always rebel. None of this stuff is really true. I think the point is if you have really good, strong families, kids figure out that they have to both disambiguate, well, they're going to have to figure out the difference between what they believe and what you believe and what's right for them and their time versus your time. Sure. But I also think that, quite honestly, families are super important, and we in the United States made a huge mistake by thinking we could rely on the market to take over many of the basic features of family life. And I think we're being taught a lesson that as children come home to live, that's not failure and that's not weird. It's the fact that families are an important auxiliary with respect to markets. Markets fluctuate. there are problems and there are wars. And it's important that some portions of your family are strong enough to take in the weaker portions during tough times and help people out. And I think

Starting point is 00:58:35 that these are starting to be real tough times. I think they can get a lot tougher than this. And I think we should be making a much larger bet on families and a smaller bet on the market as fewer and fewer people. I mean, Tom Bill Yu has been able to get the market to work for him. But most of us can't get the market to work for us at the same extent. And I think it's really important to recognize that I don't want to pretend that Zev doesn't listen to me or Isaac doesn't listen to you. They're really listening. And we've got to set an example. And it's tough because in some ways I don't think we've ever been told that we're the adults. And so in some sense, you kind of look around the room and say, wait, wait, wait, me? No. It's time to lead.

Starting point is 00:59:15 And each of us with different, you know, kind of like gaps in our own father's upbringing. But I do want to point out one market force that's really troubling along the antinatalism. and then we'll move on. But there was a tweet over the summer by this mathematician John Carlos Baez who was at UC Riverside, famous guy, brilliant guy. And he was saying, like,

Starting point is 00:59:34 I'm going to spend most of my time thinking about climate change. And so here's a talk I give about climate change. And in the talk, he talks about all the things you can do to stem your carbon footprint. Okay, this is cool. Let me listen to it.

Starting point is 00:59:44 He's a bright guy. Let me, and he goes through the mathematics of it and it comes out with, you know, don't eat meat. Maybe, you know, I can cut back on a couple kibbasas every now and then. It'll be tough, but maybe for the plan, I'll do it.

Starting point is 00:59:57 Don't take so many airline trips, especially at conferences. Well, you know, Czech Plus. I haven't been to, you know, very many conferences lately. They've all been over Zoom. And I don't know if that's a particularly good thing or bad thing. We'll talk about that some other time. And then another thing is like, don't have kids or adopt. And that was the last thing.

Starting point is 01:00:13 And I was like, excuse me? And it's more than just like a factor of five. It might be even 10 times more impactful. If you don't have a kid, according to John, than if you do, then if you cut out meat and driving cars and going to conferences. So I was like, well, isn't that logical extrapolation that nobody should have kids and or maybe we should commit suicide, John? Like, I think that's so fatalistic and that's so under, it's so depressing to me, Eric,

Starting point is 01:00:39 that a scientific mind as great as his would fundamentally, I mean, what if, not just the next Zeb Weinstein, there are people that aren't born. There are many millions of people that aren't born. So are we going to stem the possible country? to getting off of this planet or bettering this planet or healing the carbon crisis itself by not having kids? What kind of advice is this? I have a hard enough time with self-hating Jews. Self-hating humans is a bridge too far.

Starting point is 01:01:05 I think I can't do it right. Especially mathematicians. Can we get on to another topic? Okay. Let's go on to that. I don't want to talk about nihilism. I want to talk about what I call the Assair project, which is a schema for me, hopefully, with help from folks like you and Luis Alvvvvvarez. Alvarez Galeemé Alvarez Gameh at Sunni-Brook, Stefan Alexander, and hopefully folks like Paul

Starting point is 01:01:28 Steinhart, although I haven't asked him yet. But we're going to do like a Shelter Island three. We're going to recreate these famous conferences that really set the stage for the future of experimental and theoretical physics going, you know, from the 1940s and 50s to the 80s, I think the last one was sometime in 1980s. And we're actually going to do it at, you know, the Rams Head Inn and Shelter Island at some point. Okay. So stay tuned for that if these are the kinds of things that turn you on. But I've been noticing an asymmetry that certainly your theory of geometric unity is controversial. It's gotten, you know, flack and so forth, and we're not going to get into that necessarily.

Starting point is 01:02:08 But I haven't noticed a symmetric property wherein people, A, to the extent that they'll criticize Witten because they'll know that he's not going to listen or doesn't even know who they are, if, you know, Sabina or me or you. quite frankly, if we start, you know, skewering him for now adopting the anthropic principle and the multiverse and the landscape, that's one thing. But other theories of everything, for example, Peter White, who you're, you know, friendly with, I know Stefan is friendly with. He's given a lecture at Brown University, at Stefan's invitation about his new theory. And I just thought it was particularly touching to me that you had the, as we say, the mensch-lechai, you were a mensch. You went through his theory, which you don't necessarily think is ultimately going to prevail

Starting point is 01:02:54 or be correct and might have some flaws that we can get into. It's a good idea. It's a good idea. But it's more important, the meta idea is that he has the idea and that you're taking it seriously. And I noticed that you're going to be doing this thing with Brian Green and Sabina and Michael Shermer for some reason, our mutual friend. But, you know, talking about theories of everything. And I made a joke, you know, I think we should give a nubal prize to the person who doesn't come up with a

Starting point is 01:03:18 theory of everything. But what you should say what that's a reference to. Yeah. That's a reference to the hedronic resonances of the 1950s and 60s where somebody said, we should give a Nobel Prize to the person who doesn't find it in. Come on. I was trying to steal a joke. Come on. Give me a break. We're amongst friends here. Sorry, sorry. Go on. You know, in Judaism, that's actually a great sin. If you say like, you know, I'm going to steal that line. That's called Ganevas Das. No, no, no, no. I was supplying the reference to show what an erudite. I know. I know you. Yes, exactly. Okay. So getting, what do you make of this asymmetry that people like our friends, Sabina, or others will say, I don't have the time, you know, to even learn about Weinberg, sorry, Weinstein or Wolfram or Garrett Lisey or now Peter Woit, a lot of W's in there, by the way. But she'll make a music video about it. You know, I love you, Sabina. But, you know, she has time, you know, it takes a lot of time to do this stuff. But I want to ask you, what do you make of this lack of,

Starting point is 01:04:18 even Peter White on Lex Friedman's podcast not too long ago when he was down there in Austin, Texas. Shout out to Lex. He might be listening. And I was honored to go on the show, and hopefully that'll air in the near new year. But with Lex, you know, Lex asked him point blank, like, what do you think of Eric's theory? And he's like, I don't know enough about it. And it's kind of the standard BS. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 01:04:41 I'm a little sick of people saying they don't have the time for stuff. I, as an experimentalist, made a joke that my theorist friends in the fifth floor of Mayor Hall didn't find very funny, but I was like, you could tell that the pandemic's coming to an end. This is before Omicron. Because the theorists are back, their theorist offices are back to the usual state of solitude and emptiness. Meaning that, you know, they kind of do things, but we experimentalists, we have to come with payroll. And I have a half million dollar a month payroll.

Starting point is 01:05:07 I have to come up. Yeah. And we have my friend Lee Kronin is in the audience. He has the same kind of payroll. We're experimentalists. We're building stuff. We're going to Chile. We're going to Germany.

Starting point is 01:05:15 We're going to raise funds in the NSF and Washington. DCs. I said, if you don't have time, like, who's going to have time? Brian, that's not, it's not real. You know that it's not real. All right. Well, tell me what it is. Well, it's that this is super uncomfortable. I don't like being the person who's both explaining what's going on and the person putting forth the theory. It's not, it's not fun. Let's ignore GE and just say generally speak. Why doesn't Sabina look at Peter White's theory? Well, in general, the idea is that it it takes on some responsibility that as you take on a theory and you start to look at it and try to understand what the person is doing, you might have to acknowledge, oh, that's a cool point. That's new. That's interesting. Or I don't understand this. Or I don't know whether it solves the problem that the person is claiming or seems to be claiming. And so in part, everybody's guarding their reputations or they're attacking people's reputations. And I think it's really important to notice that the whole point of academics was to get people. beyond this. Can't we give you a credential and vet you enough that we can trust you?

Starting point is 01:06:23 And the situation with respect to, let's say, Peter Woitt's theory, right? Peter White has a really interesting idea. He didn't say it this way, but he said, the strong force has a collection of symmetries that looks very, very strange. It doesn't, it's not a, the weak force and the electromagnetic force have symmetries that are commonly found in all sorts of systems. But the strong force has this set of symmetries called SU3. Let's make that the centerpiece of a theory. And what we'll do is we'll take that and we'll stick it inside of something called U4, and we'll quotient U4 by U3.

Starting point is 01:07:01 We'll get the strong force out automatically. And then there'll be a version of space time with four spatial dimensions and zero temporal dimensions and one with one time dimension and three space dimensions. We've had this puzzle about wick rotation from one into the other. We'll use the fact that the S.O.4 part that looks like four space-time dimensions has an asymmetry between its left and its right factors. He does a lot of interesting stuff to come up with a suggestive stylistic picture for why the world is in part the way it is. And he doesn't go on to claim that he's got three generations in the model of matter. but the point is it takes, I don't know, an hour and a half to sort of really grok not only what he's doing, but why he's doing it.

Starting point is 01:07:53 And now I'm a partial... Oh, an hour and a half. Sorry, I didn't know it was an hour and a half. Sorry, I retract my concerns. Well, you can do it a lot faster if you want to just a cursory overview, right? But in part, the real thing that nobody's saying is we don't take any of these people seriously. If you're claiming that you're making progress, you're lying. And in fact, if you're not-

Starting point is 01:08:16 We would never do this an experiment. Well, I understand, but things have gone insane. Why is that, don't work? Is it because we value, secretly value theoretical physicists more than experimental physicists? Well, sure. There's a way in which we value theoretical physics when it works, more than we value generic experimental physics, when it works. Who would you rather have on your interplanetary rocket ship, a theorist or an experimentalist?

Starting point is 01:08:40 Well, first of all, we haven't always had to choose. We've had Enrico Fermis in our midst, right? That's true. One, I don't want to get into, I don't want one more version of Bloods versus Crips, right? They're all welcome at my Shabbat. West Coast here. I'm throwing up the shin symbol. Is that a gang sign?

Starting point is 01:09:02 The shin gang, yeah, the most feared gang. Okay, go ahead. But that's not really what's happening. What's happened is that we've stopped believing in ourselves. We don't believe that there will be an Einstein and a post office. We don't believe that there will be a Galileo threatened by a Pope. We're sort of reenacting all of these things as theater. And I think what you see that's really disturbing to me is that I don't care for Stephen Wolfram's approach.

Starting point is 01:09:30 But I'm certainly glad he's doing it. And I'm glad that somebody is saying, let's take the discreet more seriously than we take the continuum. I mean, the continuum to me is the salient clue in many ways. But the fact is somebody should take the other bet. Somebody should say, well, maybe the universe is more like a computer, not just to get money out of Silicon Valley, but, you know, because in fact, information is a different basis than we've had previously for trying to understand the physical world.

Starting point is 01:09:56 And what I don't understand is by stepping out of the academic, you know, I can say I'm a podcast host. I'm a mathematician. I wasn't even trained as a physicist. You're an MD. I wasn't even trained as a math. Whatever. I'm an MD.

Starting point is 01:10:10 at Teal Capital. What's really happening is that you guys in theory don't believe in each other. And you're trying to take each other out. Anybody who's doing an isolated thing like Wolfram or Weight or myself or Julian Barbour or Garrett Lisey or whoever, I can find things like, you know, Garrett and I have talked for for ages about his theory. I don't believe in it. It's not dumb on a bunch of different levels. I don't think it hangs together. But the fact is, is that... But your criticism of him is an act of love. It is an act of love that you are going to take him seriously and you're going to actually confront... No, but it's not just an act of love. It's like, the reason I tear you apart is because I love you so much. That's why you beat me, but... No, I'm so freaking sick of all of

Starting point is 01:10:59 these stupid Twitter answers. You know, it's like anything that sounds like sophisticated on Twitter usually fails in real life. Uh, I, I like, I, I like, Gary. it a lot. And I've got a lot of love for him as a human being, and we've hung out it a lot. I don't think his theory works. It doesn't mean that it can't work one day or they can't remove some of these issues. But I think that stylistically, it's got tons to recommend it over one more drone looking at Kalabi Yao manifolds as part of a string theory program or, you know, yet the 12 millionth paper on Ashticar variables, you know, in a new light. And so in part, and I have, and I I think, you know, we actually have to note that Sabina, in her older incarnation, was positive

Starting point is 01:11:44 about the fact that people were spreading out. I don't know what's happened to Sabina recently. I'm very disturbed by some of the stuff that I'm seeing. But she's historically been that in some sense, it appears to be much more reflexive and sweeping. And I think that, you know, in part she was much more cautious, more careful, more subtle, more nuanced. And it's become kind of the, oh, please, model. And I think that the first version of Sabina was doing a tremendous favor to the field that the field did not repay.

Starting point is 01:12:16 And I think that there got to be some bad blood. And I watch as people sort of go into these intellectual smaller worlds because some bad thing happens to them and they overreact. I think it's really important to recognize that we needed to give Sabina more love when she was the conscience of the community. And she was saying things that we didn't want to hear. And then it's gradually, yeah, gradually it's going to become, why should we spend money on accelerators, right? Why are the theories of everything? Or why is it always men who are pestering me with their grand dreams? And, you know, this is stupid.

Starting point is 01:12:48 It's not at the same level as the rest of Sabina's critique. And in part, what I'm looking to do is to say, I looked at Peter White's theory because I believe in my own. And I looked at Garrett's because I believe in my own. And it's not, my belief in my own theory isn't. you know, I don't need it for a meaningful life. It's a guess. It's a shot on goal. And all of these things are not true.

Starting point is 01:13:15 Some of them might have some salvageable parts, but in general, these attempts to guess what the fundamental structure is are not being listened to by anyone. Like I will claim that Peter White, likely nobody on planet Earth almost, is really reading it, taking it seriously and thinking about it. And the same thing is true with Garrett. And the same thing is true with Stephen Wolfram and Julian Barbour. Maybe in Wolfram's case, because there's money there, there's a little bit more. And I've learned that, okay, this thing about trying to signal that it's not all about money doesn't actually work in a world that believes that everything is about money. So it may be that I have that wrong as well.

Starting point is 01:13:52 But I do believe that what we're seeing is that people aren't trying to take these things seriously in a positive idiom. The only thing people are doing is they're saying, well, maybe Jacques Disler, and Garibaldi can take out Garrett Lacey. It's like the kill shot. And I think that the kill shot is killing interesting science. Why are you looking to dispose of people? You know, in combat, we refer to this as pink mist. Oh, you got dragged, you got owned.

Starting point is 01:14:22 The pawnage is extreme. We need to get these people out of the academy and out of the sciences. I should say that I once watched somebody destroy his career over lunch by coming into the MIT cafeteria and badmouting a professor named Arthur Maddock, who I believe is now gone. And I was very close with a very senior member of that department. And without getting into the details, maybe I'll do it later when I feel more ready to. He told me that it was not worth it to have a rotten colleague spewing bile in a department because it was going to have the effect of taking down the entire department

Starting point is 01:15:05 to allow that kind of poison at MIT mathematics. And I think that it's a really interesting cautionary tale, that the old guard understood that collegiality was a resource needed to do research. If you don't have collegiality, if you go for these killshots, you're not going to get anything done because there's a level of trust. If you think about the RNA tie club, where you had mostly physicists trying to figure out the structure of the genetic code, which they failed to do, Marshall Nirenberg eventually did it.

Starting point is 01:15:35 But you had all these great names like Teller and Feynman and Gamoff and Watson and Crick, of course, being a trained as a physicist. And they shared their ideas because they knew there was enough for everyone. And like, I don't know, more than half of them, I think, ended up with medallions to show for it. And I just, I think it's really important that we drive the anti-collegial out of the field and let them know that they can do something else. with their lives. They can become tabloid journalists. They can become, you know, professional snark podcasters or something. But I think it's really important to recognize that we have to

Starting point is 01:16:14 read each other's research with a different eye. And I do think that somebody like Peter Waite needs to be taken seriously. And I'm super disappointed that he fell back on something that he, you know, he's got my number. He has an idea of what I work on. He doesn't want the responsibility of saying, oh, I think Eric's on to something, or I think Eric's full of it. And, you know, I think in the last year, or at least since April 1st, 2021, I haven't had a single physicist talk to me about my reasons for believing in three generations, that there are only two and there's a third imposter generation. You can just break that out of GU and say, huh,

Starting point is 01:17:00 We have this puzzle why there are three copies of matter, and you've given an explanation. Let's talk about it. So what I can tell you is it's not that we're not interested in. We've come to understand that taking an interest in the physical world as a theory, as a pursuit, is too dangerous to your reputation. You spend all this time accumulating a reputation. And then you're given the opportunity to try to add new ideas. and mostly what you're going to have is the possibility of immolating yourself if you do anything original.

Starting point is 01:17:36 And this is crazy. And I think what we have to recognize is that we have to restore collegiality by being minorly anti-collegial to the really anti-collegial among us. And we need to show them the exit. And we need to give them a few days worth of food before we put them on the ice flow. but ultimately they don't belong in our subject because they're too costly and they don't contribute enough. When I look at how many people are, you know, coming up with purported solutions, it can't avoid evade my notice that pretty much all of you folks who are engaged in this are not.

Starting point is 01:18:14 You people. You people. So my best friends are theor. But you're not, you're not, you know, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you know, in other words, the people that are engaged. The academic freedom. Yeah. No, no, but I'm saying, like, Peter is not an academic. He's not a tenured professor. Sabine is not a tenured professor. Why is Peter not an academician? What, no, I'm saying. Let me finish.

Starting point is 01:18:36 What I'm saying is the people that have the freedom to investigate these things, the Wittins, etc., are not investigating it. And the people that don't have, you know, permanent positions, shall we say, in the academia setting, such as you, Peter. Peter's a, you know, he's a lecturer. He's an affiliated, you know, research, but he's not a tenured professor as far as I understand. He also runs the IT system for Columbia's Mathematics Department. That's great. I'm just saying he's not a tenured professor. There's a difference between tenures.

Starting point is 01:19:05 I know, but we have a situation. I'm not saying, Garrett, let's take Garrett. Garrett's not a tenured professor, right? But all you guys who actually have a lot at risk, in other words, you're not fully backed by tenure as I or Ed Witten, and I'm not comparing myself, but just to say that you would expect the reverse, the people. people that have this freedom to take it. And I've often thought that, you know, in physics, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a deep question. Should we really have tenure for, for physicists?

Starting point is 01:19:31 I mean, it's very different than, you know, a journalist or something. And I'm not even saying that we should have it, you know, I certainly don't think we should have it in our, in our public. No, we should fix tenure. Tenure, meaningful tenure was taken away from you guys in 1953 by the American Association of American University. It's the AAU. When they backed away from their communist professors or anyone claimed to be a communist. professor saying communist did not deserve academic protection. Right. Right.

Starting point is 01:19:57 So basically the universities caved to Joe McCarthy in 1953. And then you guys have been not very good at getting enough funding, getting enough insulation to defend the universities. And quite honestly, I'm furious with the professor, not you in particular, because you're bold enough to have me on, which is a huge thing. The real problem is the number of, you know, I was just, I was just in the physics department at the University of Chicago, and I was talking to some of the senior people, and they said, oh, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion is like a tax, you know, and I was thinking, well, why don't you speak out against it if you don't believe it? It's like, oh, because it's too expensive not to pay the tax. I said, well, then it's a protection racket, right? If you can't speak out as a professor, then you've failed, and you've failed to protect the universities as the citadel. in which we hope to have our sense-making apparatus. So partially, I'm furious that people haven't followed the Serge Langs of Yale University.

Starting point is 01:20:58 You know, these people cared, and they would tell you to go screw off if you came after professors. And just, you know, the story that I was telling about the senior mathematician who said we will not have a member of our faculty who goes after other members of our faculty and spreads bile and poison. The system has to be defended. So my question is, what is Ed Witten doing to defend the system from, let's say, you know, a colleague he deeply disagrees with? Is he speaking out or is he quiet? I hear people speaking out in safe ways.

Starting point is 01:21:35 You can badmouth Israel for sure. That's a safe way to speak out. But I don't know that you can easily, you know, really talk about what's going on in the fields. And so the way I look at it is that the AAU started this problem. The professors have become weak. We had champions like Serge Lang. We haven't replaced them. It's important, for example, to realize why the eulogy for Abdu Salam was written in Arabic by Yuval Neiman,

Starting point is 01:22:07 who's a right-wing Israeli physicist and politician. It's because there was a sense in which we were all above these things. collegiality was a force to be reckoned with. You could beat the crap out of someone with collegiality, like ending a tenure bid if you were anti-collegial. And what I see is that we've abandoned our culture. We don't know, as you know, Judaism has a strong prohibition against gossip. Yep.

Starting point is 01:22:37 You know, it's like blow on a dandelion. Now please, you know, go gather the seeds. We don't defend our culture. And so we're not our culture anymore. We're not the culture of Dirac or of Einstein or of Schwinger. Do you think that's a reflection of the broader political polarization? I mean, I was listening to, I think on Lex's show with Tim Dillon, I know he's maybe not a good, a good friend. Okay, good, good.

Starting point is 01:23:01 So I don't know of your nature. Anyway. He makes jokes that other people latch on to and I have to deal with the problem that he's like, I don't understand. I made a joke. I'm a comedian. Yes, you make a joke. But then what happens is that the jokes become harassment by a bunch of people who aren't

Starting point is 01:23:16 really very funny. But Tim, I don't know that I have a problem with Tim. Okay. So anyway, I think to Lex, he said something, you know, like in 2000, the 2000 election when, uh, when there was this contested battle between Gore and Bush, you know, I remember coming into work and my boss, my late boss terribly, Andrew Lang, said, you know, I'm just checking to see if we have a country left anymore. And like the exact same words were said, you know, like right after the 2020 election, but it was like serious, like, I don't know if we have a country anymore. Like, how much has changed in society over 20 years is just in. insane. And I wonder, like, I've noticed in collegiality, too. When I started graduate school in the 90s,

Starting point is 01:23:52 it was normal. Like, we were, it did feel like everything was open. It was just after Kobe discovered the fossil imprint of the, of the antisotropy and the microwave background that was crying out for an explanation. This is Kobe Bryant, the famous basketball player. Rest in peace. Rest in peace. No, this is C-O-B-E. You've got to say these things. Come on. You're proving that you're a youngster. you're a Gen Q or you're Gen Iota. Anyway, the point being that we have this society that is ridden with hostility, with like these kill shots, these pawnings, and so, but it's in the political realm and like, you know, January 6th or, you know, the country was almost over and we're ended,

Starting point is 01:24:35 and democracy died and dark and blah, blah, and like the stakes seemed so high. And then the joke in academia used to be like the fights are so intense because the stakes are so low. Yeah, that was always a wrong statement. I think it's wrong, too, because the stakes at a metal level couldn't be higher if we lose the educational system. So I want to talk to you about another idea that I've been kind of, you know, floating, kicking around in my mind, which has to do with blockchain. And I want to just tell people, Eric's wallet address are the middle 20 digits of pie.

Starting point is 01:25:05 So if you want to make him a deposit, he's open. Just the middle digits of pie, Eric. Okay, he's not laughing. Anyway, the point. being what are the opportunities for, let's say, and I saw a tweet by Andrew Huberman over the summer, something like, oh, look, get ready for the next thing in science is going to be like, look down my microscope and get my NFT, and that's the next big thing in science to fund private research and even public research.

Starting point is 01:25:32 I found that horrifying, like, in a sense that, first of all, we've already paid a tremendous amount to the U.S. government, those of us who pay taxes for these discoveries and for the laboratories and for the training of the scientists. Right. Yeah. Burn it all down is coming. Yeah. What? Excuse me? When people will not defend the universities, they will not defend our public schools. There's no moment where somebody in a position of authority says, enough. The New York Times is not meant to be a propaganda instrument. The universities are not meant to be indoctrination camps. Science is not meant to be a postmodernist free for all. There is a there is a, there is a, there is a, a concept of mustn't there are things you mustn't do you're permitted to do them they're not necessarily illegal and it's not a question that you shouldn't do it like all things being equal i wouldn't do that if i were you there's things that you mustn't do so the most frequent example i give is you should be allowed to burn the flag and you must not burn the flag it's not it's not really well aren't

Starting point is 01:26:36 i free to burn it yep if i call it self-expression are you telling me i can't yeah you can but you mustn't Well, where does this mustn't come from? It's kind of a first principles thing. It's part of our culture. It's part of the oral Torah. If we don't start exercising adulthood in terms of a culture, in terms of getting rid of these problems, people are taking away a very different message, which is that every institution is over, that everyone who, all there is is money, there is no concept of a compact or an agreement or an understanding that isn't enforceable.

Starting point is 01:27:12 A lot of what's going on with the blockchain is, blockchain is people talking about it. How do you deal with zero trust? So right now, what we keep wanting to show is that everyone is bankrupt. Brian, you just love money. You went into physics for the money. It's like, I don't even know what to make of these things.

Starting point is 01:27:31 No, podcasting. I went into the podcasting for the likes and the followers. I just had somebody today from Google tell me, you know, read the room, Eric. Nobody wants to talk about UFOs. We're locked down with Omicron. And like everybody says, actually, that's exactly what I want to talk about. We've got this deranged set of easy answers.

Starting point is 01:27:52 And those of us who believe in nuance and intelligent civic life have to stand up and say, we're not doing this anymore. We need to create an expectation that you can sit down at a dinner without having somebody, you know, pee in your food or throw a pie in your face. or try to steal your wallet. And, you know, what we were talking about, the entire University of California system has gotten rid of standardized testing.

Starting point is 01:28:21 Well, let me just say something about that. As a dyslexic, as a learning disabled guy, if you want to use that language, that was my only ticket to college. I couldn't prove that I had a brain in my head using grades. My executive functioning wasn't there. I don't even know if we used words like that when I was in high school. So what you just did is you just took away the dreams of a bunch of people who are not doing very well in high school,

Starting point is 01:28:50 but had one way of demonstrating that maybe there were something called teaching disabilities. Right. And, okay, so now you just took the entire University of California. Why? Well, because people of color aren't good at math. Bullshit. Not only are Asians good at math, I think black kids can be good at math too. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:10 The whole thing is so confused. And where were we? When did we stand up en masse and say, over my dead body, you morons, get the educators out of education? We've got a serious problem. There's way too much ideology. I think that the problem, Brian, is that nobody believes in tenure because nobody's exercising tenure almost. We had this guy Abbott invited from University of Chicago to MIT, you know, and then he's uninvited.

Starting point is 01:29:38 Well, more or less, we've got to. to start shutting down universities that aren't universities. And if our universities are not going to be universities, if they're not going to be citadels of learning, if they're going to be all about babying wrong ideas because we're all terrified that we're going to get called a bigot, misogynist, transphobic, Islamophobic, et cetera, et cetera, it would be better that we not have these structures. Now, when it comes to this issue of NFTs, yes, we had a great situation in which the federal government effectively paid for universities through overhead. It was a very complicated cryptic system that was worked out that wasn't open, wasn't honest,

Starting point is 01:30:18 but it worked in a certain level. And we had tenure and we had an ability for people to earn a living and survive. Now everybody is terrified that they're going to be disinvited, deep platform, they're going to lose their grants, they've got to submit things into this weird peer review black box. And the whole thing is unconscionable. So my feeling is we need to get the best parts of the university system out and off of the Titanic before it sinks. So Titanic University is going to go under based on the poisoning of academic life. And it's important to recognize that universities contain some things that aren't done anywhere else in our civilization, except for maybe a few institutes like perimeter or the Institute for Advanced Study. We've got to go rescue the best stuff

Starting point is 01:31:10 before the Taliban take over the art museum and start smashing idols, you know, which are our statues. We've got to, we've got to, we saw this in Iraq with ISIS. It literally happened. We saw it with the Bamayan Buddhas in Afghanistan. Do you think this is coming from without, to, to destroy the American academic system from within? We are executing a self-extinguishing program. This is like antinatalism at the level of a country. We're not going to have something to pass that's worth passing to our children. There may still be a country. It may still have a Department of Motor Vehicles. But what this country is supposed to do is to rid itself in some sense progressively over of its baby fat over, you know, decades and decades and become the thing that it was

Starting point is 01:31:56 always imagined to be. It didn't start off as a particularly just place. I actually have some sympathies with the idea of saying, let's look at the 1619. is an important date in American history. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that we forgot. But I think one of the things that was really important is that we forgot how this country has progressed and how it's gotten rid of its own immorality progressively over time. Yeah, almost uniquely. Amongst Western civil, I mean, fighting to end the Civil War, to enslavery.

Starting point is 01:32:27 Yeah, I think Britain has gotten a lot kinder as it's gotten a lot less powerful. Sure. That's a burden that we have, right? But let me pivot back to the original question, which had to do with opportunity. Because I don't, you know, I see our mutual friend Lex is in the audience. You know, he doesn't like it more too negative, right? So let me talk about opportunities. Going forward.

Starting point is 01:32:46 2022 is upon us in about a week. What are you looking forward to? And in particular, you know, are there opportunities? For example, if there is a way in utilizing the blockchain or something like that, are there opportunities to benefit society? You know, I hear a lot about Web 3, and I made a joke that like Albert Einstein's, like, I don't know with what weapons, you know, World War 3 will be fought, but I know World War 4 will be fought, but I know World War 4 will be fought, you know, World War III will be built on, but Web 4 will be built on AOL, CDs and 25K DSL. But in all seriousness, what opportunities can such a technology, it's obviously incredibly powerful? It's huge.

Starting point is 01:33:31 Yeah, but we're going to go through a period right now where Jack is trying to focus us on Web 2. And Mark Andreessen is trying to focus us on Web 3. And part of the problem is that Web 2 and Web 3 both depend on profit to bootstrap themselves into existence. Then you have the Bitcoin versus non-Bitcoin version of crypto. And I think that a lot of good can be done and a lot of harm will be done using the blockchain. I think making things immutable, trying to use math rather than violence, eventually math will come to resemble violence. If you consider the state is a monopoly on violence as per Weber's famous definition of what a government is, I think that in part you'll find people including things in the blockchain that we desperately want to remove, but we can't get rid of.

Starting point is 01:34:21 We're headed into some very weird place where lots of good things are going to happen and lots of bad things are going to happen, and we're going to be spun and sold things. I saw Naval Ravakhan asked the question. Can you please explain Web 3 is not a Ponzi scheme because my mom is worried that that's what I'm getting involved with. And Naval said, oh, absolutely, it's a Ponzi scheme. But this time it's our Ponzi scheme. Every generation gets one, which I think is just some, you know. That's the American dream.

Starting point is 01:34:49 I don't know. I don't know how to do. The problem is whatever is going to be making people money is going to have boasting rights until it fails. It's like when mortgage-backed securities took part in what was called the Great Moderation, we hailed Alan Greenspan as an Oracle and as a deity. And where did that go. And that's what we're going to do right again with NFTs, with the blockchain. We're going to continue to build golden idols.

Starting point is 01:35:17 And each calf is going to disappoint us if we don't see it for what it is. And I guess what my concern is is that Bitcoin fixes this. or Bitcoin fixes everything, which is its more extreme version, is a really dangerous idea. And the same way, you know, the NFTs are being sold in a cult-like fashion. This is normal, but it's also destructive. You know, the railroads were probably sold as, oh, my God, you're not going to believe it. We're going to be able to connect the coasts. And you'll be, you know, at your cousins in California in days rather than weeks.

Starting point is 01:35:55 Okay, fine. these things are needed to build the railroads. But then it always comes to pass that we come to see things in a different light. And if you're swept up in the NFT madness, if you're making a fortune or if you're about to lose one, this is sort of one thing. I think that the thing that's concerning me is the extent to which people are saying, oh, your funding isn't working, move to the blockchain. So, for example, I put a tip jar on my Twitter page because someone told me,

Starting point is 01:36:26 that micro payments were the future, and I didn't believe it. And so I've had it open for a few months, and I've made almost 30 bucks with over half a million followers. And so I think that this is partially nonsense. And I think people should actually open their tip jars to figure out what their future is. I actually had a tweet about I said, well, you know, which has made you more money? Has it been your substack, your tip jar, your clubhouse tipping, or something, or else, or your dot E-T-H domain. And basically, they all add up to about, you know, about zero, except for the people that are, you know, running it, selling the ether domains. And I'm not against that.

Starting point is 01:37:06 I think, you know, I look at these things, Eric, and I look at it as a positiveist, I want to see, it's cool. It's fun to do this. Look, I don't need to do podcast. I mean, I'm remunerated nicely by the state of California. It's fun for me to do it. I enjoy talking to people like you. I probably wouldn't have met you, by the way, if it wasn't, I met you a long time ago, thanks to Stefan.

Starting point is 01:37:23 But we wouldn't have gotten, you know, kind of engagement that you and I have and the fun that we have. You know, I wouldn't really trade that for anything. And so. But I would take it back into the Citadel if I could. Okay, go ahead. In other words, in other words, I'm on the web, in part because it's an opportunity to disintermediate the gatekeepers. But you have to realize that it's a cesspool out here. Or more.

Starting point is 01:37:47 It's a thankless, yeah. Maybe I'll say it differently. It's a bathroom in a gas station. And sometimes it's a little bit better maintained. Sometimes it isn't. When you've got to go, you've got to go. But it's not a place that you would want to hang out if you had other choices. And I believe that if our physics departments and our math departments, if our pedagogy,

Starting point is 01:38:10 if our schools, if our civic and civil society was in better shape, the constant need to get around somebody's idiocy. I mean, you know, you saw it with Joe Rogan interviewing Sanjay Gupta. It was just like trying to say, no, no, no, you guys lied that I was taking horse dewormer. It's like, well, but perhaps, perhaps that was a little snug. We didn't clarify it then. Hamina, yeah, right. It's just like, you mother Fs, cut the crap.

Starting point is 01:38:40 You're just making everybody distressed everything. So when I claim they're coming to burn it all down, Brian. I'm quite serious about it. The younger people are watching us as adults, and they're saying, my God, why would anyone read a newspaper? Why would anyone join a political party? Why would anyone want to go to school? And I don't have great answers for them.

Starting point is 01:39:01 I just think we should save what works from something that's sinking. And what I find fascinating is that no matter how much I talk about the need to insulate science with money and to make professors, rich enough that they can afford not to go along with Anthony Fauci and Peter Dasick or Ed Witten, right? So we can get independent minds speaking up to get rid of this sort of sinking each other's theories not because we're trying to actually make them better, but because it's just fun to be a dick. I don't hear anyone coming back from the world of people with money. And it's fascinating to me. It's like, I don't think one person with a 10 figure,

Starting point is 01:39:45 figure, 11 or 12 figure asset base, finds this interesting. It's not that they don't hear me. They very often clap me on the back. I mean, you personally met Jim Simons this summer. He personally invited you out to Long Island to spend. I think he's very interested in, but he may be the exception. He is, but he did ask me, do you have your own funding? I mean, it's just, there's some point at which...

Starting point is 01:40:12 I have to... We have stuff that's cheap, that's inexpensive. Like, what theory is relative to what it takes to keep you, you know, amused with your toys, theory is a tiny fraction of this. That's true. We aren't even immunizing journalists. Journalism is cheap. You know, I'm not a journalist.

Starting point is 01:40:36 I'm not advocating that we make journalists, because I'm trying to get rich. Maybe I should become a journalist to become rich if that works. But we are not immunizing anyone. More or less, the people with FU money have zipped their lips or they're apologizing to China constantly. Or, you know, we have people who have real courage who are advertising things, you know, or keeping a substack,

Starting point is 01:41:06 which is gated. I always find it funny when Twitter says, says to me, do you want to read the article first? And it's like, well, there's a paywall on that article. I tried to read it. And then it says, be careful. Things get heavy sometimes. Like my mother.

Starting point is 01:41:20 Yeah, exactly. Don't you realize people are going to die if we don't do something. This is about, you know, COVID. And you say, well, why don't we lift all the paywalls so we can read the articles? Or, can I, is it okay to ask you about Jeffrey Epstein and the Maxwell trial? Sure. Okay. What do you make of that as, first of all, I want to know the, it's unlike any trial I've ever witnessed.

Starting point is 01:41:44 And I obviously haven't paid, you know, the logarithm of much attention and knowledge that you have. But walk us through, what is going on there? It's excluded. There aren't even like court sketchers in the, what do you think is going on? Let me ask you a question. What do you think is going on? Why is the narrative being crafted as it is? Who, quibono and quovatus.

Starting point is 01:42:04 What's going on here? To use Hebrew. First question, I don't think that the fact that there's no video in the courtroom is interesting. You know, that's normal. I think you see some very interesting, subtle stuff. One is that most of what I've been hearing about is Jeffrey Epstein's relationships with girls who are on the verge of becoming women. and that's important and it's interesting but forgive me for saying so if you take a relatively I don't know experienced 17 year old and a 12 year old who maybe hasn't gone through puberty

Starting point is 01:42:58 and you say well those are the same thing because it's all children and something magically happens on an 18th birthday I think you're not being honest about the horror. I feel like what we just had is we had a bunch of girls in high school who, you know, he shouldn't have been doing anything with, I personally believe we can respect the 18 line without much of an issue. But the issue isn't really pervy behavior about a rich guy with high school juniors and seniors.

Starting point is 01:43:34 I've shown pictures of Jeffrey Epstein with like a, a 12-year-old on his lap. And I've noticed that the FBI footage of Jeffrey Epstein's Florida place, there are pictures which are kind of hard to see on the walls, which have stuff at a much, we're talking about a sick, sick human being. And we are not talking about it in real terms

Starting point is 01:43:57 because we're afraid, right? Like it's terrifying to say, oh, there's a big difference between a 12-year-old and a sexually adventurous 17-year-old. I know that'll be misconstrued, but honestly, we don't love our kids enough to say what's true. I don't think that we've gotten into the issue of how Jeffrey Epstein, like I tried to dig into how do we protect these people if they're part of CIA programs. We just had this release of information that people who have been in child sex crimes not being prosecuted by if they're members of the CIA. We have some sort of an informal structure that we need to blow up right now.

Starting point is 01:44:41 I believe that this is about sources and methods. I believe that when the intelligence community says sources and methods, there is an agreement effectively with our prosecutors not to proceed. And my feeling is, no, you lost. You ran an enormous operation almost certainly that people could trip over. It was a bad operation. It was a dumb operation. It wasn't even ultimately an effective one because it wound up in the middle of the public square.

Starting point is 01:45:09 And right now you're intimidating all of us. And how are you doing it? Probably through privilege. My guess is that we should look at something called investigative privilege, like attorney-client privilege. How do you keep documents out of the public? I believe that we have various forms of privilege that are being used in an exotic fashion. I believe that we have something called an event deconfliction system. You should look up something called case explorer, I believe, or safety net.

Starting point is 01:45:38 There are a bunch of these systems. I believe that this is what is called a, I've been told, it's called a blue-on-blue incident where local law enforcement trips over something at the federal level or that's protected. We had an AP reporter ask Alex Acosta what he meant by the fact that Epstein belonged to intelligence, and he gives this weird rambling answer that he clearly prepared. We have not seen the records from Villard House, which account for a hedge fund, which I claim never existed. I don't believe that when we say disgraced financier that we're telling the truth. I believe what you're watching is that somehow there has to be a system to keep the CIA and other agencies from being discovered by local law enforcement.

Starting point is 01:46:29 and if they're undercover, if they're running a front company, whatever that system is, is showing you in real time how to do something in full view of everyone where not that much is occurring. I don't think that the prosecution was particularly spirited. I don't think that the allegations that really matter, which is, is the state protected, seem to be front and center. I don't really understand what the relationship between,

Starting point is 01:46:56 you could make an argument that one member of the prosecution should have recused his or herself based on connections to the government that are in the family. I don't think that we've talked enough about 12-year-olds and very young people. And I think that you're watching a mopping up operation where the information that leaked into the public is being handled as what was at one time called a limited hangout. And my feeling is that this is probably the intelligence community. screwing up in full view of the world. And we should recognize that when you screw up, you lose rights. We should probably take power away from the intelligence community and whatever this,

Starting point is 01:47:38 this agreement or understanding to use various forms of privilege to keep these things out of the courts. I actually subscribe to the idea that when it's working correctly, we should be doing this. But the problem that I'm having, and I'll be very clear about, I don't think there is any reason ever for using a 12-year-old in a compromise operation in a honeypot as an intelligence gathering as part of the intelligence world. And if we have to do things like that, I'd prefer that we not have countries and just call it a wrap on the human project. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot.

Starting point is 01:48:24 Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer and host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. C-store online for details. I think that what we're talking about is I know that there is nothing that justifies this. I would prefer that the countries involved simply cease to. exist if the only way they can exist is to use exotic sources and methods that have to be

Starting point is 01:49:00 protected in this fashion that look like this. If 12-year-old girls are being endangered, let's just call the whole thing a wrap. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Before we wrap up, we have to wrap up in about 15 minutes being told by higher powers down here. And I know you've got things to get on to. I want to thank you so much for your time, but a couple more topics. So you want to talk about inflation? I want to talk about inflation. I want to talk about COVID and Fauci and Collins. And I want to talk about what this year meant to you and highlights from this past year

Starting point is 01:49:38 and what you're looking forward to in 2020. I want to end on a high note, okay? All right. So, you know, witnessing all the great stuff that you went through. And maybe we'll have to, you know, defer some of those to the next quarter. Maybe we can have a dedicated talk about inflation and the economics. a lecture series that you gave in Chicago. I'm just worried that the world is going to be subjected to something very brutal.

Starting point is 01:50:02 And I really want to alert people, because I don't know when we're going to get to it, that the calculation and understanding of inflation does not belong to economists. I've heard you say that. What does that mean? Is this Boskins? What is this? Well, let me just. I don't believe that virology belongs to virologists.

Starting point is 01:50:27 Right now, I'm very often forced to wear a face mask, check myself constantly. My entire life has been disrupted by a virus. You let a virus get out of a lab potentially, then you lied about it potentially in the Lancet. You got multiple Nobel Prize winners to act as if we're all racist for asking the questions. F you get out of the way, this virus belongs to us all, right? We have to recognize that it's not your domain. possibly suppress the vaccine for political reasons a month before the election. I don't even want to get into it. It's ridiculous. The calculation of inflation does not belong to

Starting point is 01:51:03 economists. There's nothing in it that if you have calculus and you have a certain amount of linear algebra, you can understand what it is. And right now, for example, the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics, I believe, has claimed that it's moved to a cost of living framework, which has to do with saying, I need to know how much you like coffee relative to tea so that I can figure out what your inflation is if coffee becomes more expensive. And hedonics. And then, well, it's different than hedonics. No, no, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:51:33 And additionally. Then they said, oh, we don't actually have to compute your tastes and your preferences because of work of a guy named Erwin DeWort or Diewort. And you look at his work, he's confused by the Bohm-Earonov effect. In other words, he makes a statement, there's something. called the Walsh multi-period circularity test, which is basically going around the Escher or Penrose stairs, right? And you can count that how many steps you go up, by the time you come back, you don't actually come back to the same level. This is known from physics. It's known from

Starting point is 01:52:11 differential topology and differential geometry to be a real effect. And the person that we're betting our entire calculation of inflation on in some sense is a guy who doesn't understand that there's something called the Ambrose Singer theorem, which states that you should not expect things to come back to normal once you've gone around us a circle. You can look at this in terms of the quantum hall effect or Barry's phase. We all get this. The economists are confused. and just the way, you know, sometimes you need biologists to enter linguistics to figure out, well, which languages are really related to each other. We used to think the Turkish was related to Finnish. It turns out not to be, and you can use genetic analysis in part to sort this out.

Starting point is 01:52:58 Banditurkum. Banditurkum. You're saying, I am a Turk. Yes, for my Turkish friends in the audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Then you have a situation. I didn't understand why you were doing that. Then you have a situation in which you have to enter a different field.

Starting point is 01:53:18 The physicists had to enter molecular biology. Well, the economists have been entering all sorts of fields using what they call economic imperialism, which they've decided is a good thing. They say, we're the only science, we're mathematical, you can hold us up to scrutiny. Okay, I claim that you've bet the entire calculation of inflation on the work of a guy named Irwin Divert or D-Wart, who does not understand that the Walsh multi-period circularity test is negated by something called Ambrose Singer-Hollinomi. We've got to get involved and take this stuff away from the economists until they

Starting point is 01:53:54 actually understand what it is that they're doing, because what they're using this for is discretion. You can change the baskets of goods. You can change the formula that you're using to compute things with to get any value you want. You want to rotate energy and food in or out. You want to decide that, you know, maybe hedonic adjustments to quality are larger or smaller. The more discretion the economists have, the more we are in danger of having our rates of

Starting point is 01:54:23 inflation dialed up and dialed down to values that are convenient. And particularly at a time when the money supply has expanded and exploded. By the way, interesting that we exploded the money supply just at the moment we changed the reporting for the series so that if you mentioned that M1 has exploded, people who are trained in universities will say, oh, you can't go by that because they changed the series construction. So whenever you're going to change something dramatically in real life, change the formula that you use to construct your series at the same moment, and all of the people with master's degrees will come to your defense that nothing can be said at all. It's just an amazing feat.

Starting point is 01:55:01 Right now we have the Fed commanding that money be printed, and we also have the Bureau of Labor Statistics with way too much freedom to report what the effect of that inflation is. And so my claim is that people like us have to get involved in this. And you have to be prepared to say to a thousand economists, you're wrong, go read the Ambrose Singer theorem. You don't know what you're talking about. So pivoting to a less controversial subject, COVID, lab link. So over the summer, I coined a term for you a nickname, a nom de plume, a nom de plume, that you're the atomic clock, that you are right more times a day than the atomic clock.

Starting point is 01:55:45 Now, you know, sometimes when we're on the basketball court, okay. Clearly, you haven't talked to my wife, but okay. That's right. Whenever somebody introduces me for a talk, you know, and it's like my Wikipedia biography or something, I always say, yeah, thank you for my mother for writing that entry. and now for the rebuttal, my mother-in-law. No, no, she's actually very lovely and loving person. COVID. Let me see.

Starting point is 01:56:08 We talked about it. We mentioned a virus already. You've been saying longer than anybody, including your brother, that this had all the patterns of an intentional byproduct of maybe perhaps benevolently intended research, but, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? But this clearly seemed to, and this is back in total. 2020, early 2020. What have you, you know, besides the awful kind of, you know, human costs that we've endured and accelerating and now with this new, new variant, like variants aren't going to keep popping up.

Starting point is 01:56:43 But tell me, like, how have you, is there one person, you know, people are always asking me, when's there going to have the portal back on? I always say, like, I hope never, because, you know, that means more people will come and watch them on my podcast. But I'm just kidding about that. But if you had one guest, you know, that would come on. Who would it be? Who would you most like to talk to to get the straight truth about it? Would it be, you know, Pfizer, you know, CEO? Would it be Eric Topol? Would it be Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins? Who has the answers or can at least shed some light and not just heat? Because I know you'd be respectful, but who would you most like to talk to about? It's an interesting question. It would very likely be somebody, well, let's look at what I did do. I contacted Mark Potashney.

Starting point is 01:57:26 Who's that? Exactly. everything that happens happens on the podcast circuit and so one of the dangers that we have is it's like okay would it be peter mcculloch or eric tople or peter t and like all those people have tons of knowledge but um mark patashney uh who wrote the genetic switch uh on on phage lambda and t4 bacteria phage i think um he's a giant in the field um and he's one of these guys who's just completely irreverent doesn't give a crap. He put me in touch with the, I guess, one of the discoveries of MRNA early on in this.

Starting point is 01:58:06 So part of the problem is, is that there is this podcast circuit. I meant that as a framing device, not literally, but yeah. No, I appreciate that. But I also worry that we're all susceptible to the idea that we keep having the same people on air who are public facing. You know, we both commented that Ed Witten, I think, did only one podcast that I'm aware of. Maybe he's done more, but he did, the universe speaks in numbers with Graham Formello, who was a guest in your program. And, you know, he's the big dog.

Starting point is 01:58:40 I would love to, I would love to see more NEMA in the world, but Nima's working hard on what Nima is supposed to be doing. He's supposed to come on to my show next year, but we'll see. Inshallah. So the problem is, I think that what we really need is virologists who, are not cowed by Anthony Fauci. We need people with independent money. And I think one of the reason I picked Mark Tashney is that he, I think he bought a Stradivarius after he founded a biotech company that did well and he learned to play the Bach Double Violin Concerto when he was like over 40.

Starting point is 01:59:16 Remarkable guy, very, very honest, brutal in defense of science. So my concern is that if you take what just happened with Peter McCulloch on Joe Rogan and some of these debunkings of him. I think it's disgusting. I think what you have is you have a group of people. There's no way Peter McCullough is a wackadoodle who knows nothing about anything. I listen to how much information he has. I can tell when somebody has a ton of knowledge. He may not be entirely truthful and he may say some things that are very inferential and very dangerous and even irresponsible. But I found the problem is that what he did was extremely informative and extremely irresponsible at the same time. And there's this whole thing about

Starting point is 02:00:07 pick aside, why are you sitting on a fence? It's like, who taught dialectics? Were they sick? And there was a substitute teacher who taught fence sitting. Like, is it the thesis or is it the antithesis? Which is it? It's like, shut up. What you have is that I want to listen to Peter McCullough and I also want to listen to Nick Christakis who are very bitterly opposed to each other because in part what people are doing is they're taking their responsible commentary and they're doping it with irresponsible inference. And almost everyone is doing this. I'm not positive, Brian, that we aren't.

Starting point is 02:00:47 You know, there's only so many times I can say fund your scientists and insulate them. Sooner or later, I'm going to say something crazier, right? because nobody's listening. And I really believe that what's happening with COVID is that we need to get Fauci and Dazick out. This is another one of these things that is almost certainly inferentially to be some sort of a workaround.

Starting point is 02:01:10 We signed the Geneva Convention on Biological Weapons, I think, in the 70s. We've needed a workaround because we have to protect ourselves defensively, but we're not allowed to work on this stuff offensively, and offense and defense look the same. So is it any surprise that there's like a real, weird infectious disease vibe that combines kindly doctors with bedside manners trying to keep us safe with people scouring the planet for the most dangerous stuff and weaponizing it, telling us it is also to keep us safe.

Starting point is 02:01:42 I think if people will look at the EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Dasick, who's blocked me on Twitter, you will see people, again, I don't hate them. I don't, my guess is that they're part of a program. And that program has failed. Right. It might have had legitimate origins, you know, mandate. But it may have had cryptic work. It's like I'm not against cryptis in the state. But my feeling is that somebody needed to understand that cryptic behavior on behalf of a government has to be in an entirely different level. If you're going to do Keystone Cops Clown Show in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while, you know, invoking all of our Nobel laureates to tell us that anyone who questions this is a racist because Anthony Fauci is science itself.

Starting point is 02:02:23 and Francis Collins needs to play the guitar. Poof, coronavirus came from overseas. I mean, it's as bad, it's like I'm 56 years old. I would be a better head of the NIH or you. Or we could just pick my son or your son at 10 years old. I don't want people that we can't trust at any level. Now, I personally would not want that kind of a position. People always ask me, will you run for something?

Starting point is 02:02:48 It's like, no, I'd rather recuse myself. But at this point, Brian, some of us have to leave. And we've got to say that this isn't science because science is taking it on the chin. I think that, you know, we're in a bad marriage with public health. Public health has been running up our credit card like crazy. And I think it's time for a divorce. And we need to say, you know, baby, here's your half of the community property. Go on, keep spending the way you've been spending.

Starting point is 02:03:16 You get the Lambo. Right, whatever. And get the hell out of my house because I'm trying to do other things. And I think that the problem that we have is that too much of public health is a gold digger when it comes to science. It wants all of science's respectability. It wants science's respect, but it's not willing to put in the hours. It's not willing to actually understand, well, how did science get to this position of respect? And it's time for us to say that the educators are not basically scholars and public health people are not scientists.

Starting point is 02:03:50 and where we are is in a terrible situation where, for the most part, we have two stories that don't contain all the truth. There's sort of the crazy plandemic story, which is filled with almost certainly conspiratorial nonsense, but gets right all sorts of errors that we've made, probably in a covert bioweapons program, which isn't that surprising, probably around the idea that we put too much stuff on Chinese supply chains that needed to be inside of the U.S. A giant failing of economists who didn't notice that supposedly efficient things aren't efficient when you're having your geostrategic rival manufacture, your essential commodities. We've had a colossal failure of the previous leadership.

Starting point is 02:04:40 And I think we need to recognize that we now have the right to investigate whatever we were using to shield Ralph Barrick and Peter Dasick. It's like maybe we shouldn't have shielded them at the beginning. Maybe things were working. But when you have a screw-up, this colossal, we need to investigate the Lancet. What happened to one of our most respected journals? And I guess that's my biggest concern is that we're going to have these battles. Did you see Peter McCullet on Rogan? Oh, did you see Chris Sarkas on Sam Harris? It's embarrassing. And both of those guys have truth and we have to recognize it. It's our job to come up with the synthesis. It'll be a battle over podcast conducted not by telegraph.

Starting point is 02:05:25 Let's get some people who are not podcast guests who are extremely disagreeable, very, very honest and highly respected in the world of virology, particularly older people who are at the end of a career, who grew up in a different world. Yeah, who have FU intellectual capital. That's right. Or who don't have that much time left. Mark's old. And, you know, he's always been. courageous. And my claim is, let's look at the people, for example, who ran to the defense of Margot O'Toole when she was being savage by David Baltimore at MIT. Let's see if any of those people are around. And let's get back to people who are willing to take risk on behalf of younger college. Reclaim it. Okay, we've talked about January 6th. We've talked about crypto apocalypse. We've talked about Fauci and COVID. We've talked about awful things in the Maxwell case. now I want to pivot to a hopeful subject, something hopeful, the Silurian genocide of 1916.

Starting point is 02:06:21 Can we talk? No, I'm just kidding. That's a plateau on the surface of Mars. Speaking of Mars and speaking of the next year that's approaching us rapidly approaching at the speed of one-dimensional time. Eric will get that reference. Not many others out there will. But what are you looking forward to? Let me recap your year as I saw it as a as a Maxwell demon appearing in, not the Gislane Maxwell, Gaeline, Max.

Starting point is 02:06:49 I don't even know how you say. Gileane. Gileane. Okay. I hope to go through life, never knowing how to pronounce that. I saw you doing many things this past year. Starting off with tremendous, you know, public kind of influence as a, both through your, you know, massive followings on Clubhouse and elsewhere. You got me on to it one night in your backyard.

Starting point is 02:07:11 early on in the year, helping consult with many people working through very serious issues and becoming one of the most popular people on that platform. And then later on the spring, April Fool's Day, I had you on. You did some other guy named Joe's podcast, as I understand it. But you came out after. You got the April 1st. I got the scoop. And that was a huge accomplishment.

Starting point is 02:07:34 And I was glad to have an honor to have a tiny, tiny microscopic role in it, but giving you encouragement to continue that project. I think it's incredibly valuable. Then a few months after that, you've got really the world's attention fixated on this issue of UAPs, both from the perspective of perhaps transdimensional travel, but also for the interest and actually care as you have for the military and to take this seriously. And people's lives and hearts and so forth are at stake. Soon after that, your birthday, you were playing guitar on stage. front of, you know, at the ice house, I believe.

Starting point is 02:08:14 Never happened. The glass house. The glass house playing Old Town Road by our friend Little Nas X on stage. And then later on in the year just contributing in so many different ways, giving lectures at Chicago and physics and economics. How many people have done that? And so it was a great year for you. And I'm just, I'm just wondering, you know, how do you top it?

Starting point is 02:08:39 What are you looking forward to in 2022? It's going to be a big year for you, for me, for our families. What are you looking forward to next year? Connection. Explain. I think that one of the reasons that, you know, I keep wanting to restart the podcast in various ways. And I guess I keep thinking. Please don't.

Starting point is 02:09:00 It'll hurt my rating. I'm just kidding. I keep thinking, don't people realize that this wasn't about a podcast. I mean, like, I'm trying to hide behind being an entertainer. But it's like, we have to get up off the couch. We've got to do a bunch of stuff. And I think people found that it was entertaining. And I was happy because it was supposed to be entertaining.

Starting point is 02:09:19 But it was supposed to be inspiring. It was supposed to inspire people to, you know, like your money is about to be inflated away by the Fed. Are you going to do anything about it? Your government may hold information about UFOs. Do you want it? You have a situation in which our children are imperiled by state protected pedophiles, if I'm not mistaken. Hey, dads, pit forks, what do we think?

Starting point is 02:09:48 Torches? I'd be up for it. Standard testing and calculus and algebra for... And so all I hear is the, you know, it's supposed to be uplifting. We'll get to the uplifting part. But what I hear is the mouths of termites chewing through our shared infrastructure.

Starting point is 02:10:06 Like the planet that we live on is a house is being, I can hear the termites in the drywall. And I'm trying to say, we really need to do something. People are like, okay, Eric, what are you going to do? So what I'm really looking forward to is connection. I know, for example, that if somebody told me,

Starting point is 02:10:29 hey, I know why there are three generations of matter. I was like, how sure are you? I'm not quite sure how sure I am. Well, let's talk about it. That's more interesting than what did Kim Kardashian do last week in her relationship with Pete Davidson? I don't care. Oh, Kanye is going to be mad.

Starting point is 02:10:46 I don't care. I don't know why we are wasting our time on interpersonal nonsense when we can connect on things that can save us. And I think that what I'm really interested in is trying to understand how to connect more meaningfully with a smaller number of people. And I thought the podcast might be that. And I've gotten unbelievable people to come through. And a lot of people have put in a lot of work and done beautiful things.

Starting point is 02:11:12 And I want to thank them. And maybe I should do some individual episodes for that. Please do. Start with a Hebrew astrophysicist from San Diego. Okay. But I think that what we really need to do is to listen to each other. And that's why I've been listening to. And let me just say something really positive.

Starting point is 02:11:32 When I went to the University of Chicago to lecture in the economics department, there was some guy on Twitter who's an economist at Yale who said, said, wow, Eric Weinstein paid to lecture at Chicago. You didn't pay me when you lectured here. Well, the guy in the talk who was the most, like, the guy was riding me the hardest. This guy named Harold Ullig. And he was also the guy who the next morning was adamant that I meet with him because he wanted to actually understand, well, what is it that we've done?

Starting point is 02:12:06 And I think that the biggest detractor or the biggest critic in real terms, not Twitter critic and just like being a jerk, is going to end up being potentially the biggest supporter of the theory because it was an important and meaningful connection. And I think one of the things that really encouraged me was how serious people at Chicago are, in particular the econ department. I know that they took a lot of heat for inviting me. And I put two papers up on their money and banking workshop page. Unfortunately, I took my wife off of one of them because of just how nasty so-called econ Twitter is. And if you want to know why women disappear from academics, just look at the amount of bile that was spewed trying to suppress me, which didn't work. I am really excited about the University of Chicago. And I'm excited about the University of Austin.

Starting point is 02:13:00 Yeah, they've taken some lumps and people are like, oh, my God, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you. Pinker defected and Zimmer left you and it's like, okay, maybe. Maybe it doesn't even work. But I'm excited about people who, to use the old Theodore Roosevelt line are the man in the arena, the people who are taking the risk to do something positive. It's not the credit accounts. Well, a good critic is a constructive one. But now we've developed this new thing about like, well, you won't face your critics.

Starting point is 02:13:27 Well, no. I won't face Mike Tyson as a boxer either. You chew off one ear. you cease to become a boxer. I think that what we need is to connect, to become collegial. And what I hope to do is to figure out what I did wrong, not finding the right people. I think maybe take this behind a paywall, maybe take this someplace which is smaller. I like the idea of having a large audience, but I do notice that I said in Tim Ferriss's

Starting point is 02:13:55 podcast that you should only want to be famous to about 3,000 people. Right. Well chosen. So I think that the thing to do is to connect. And I think people like Lex, and by the way, my brother, I think, was very early being public about the COVID coming from a lab. So I think that Brett has tried to be very courageous. He's gotten super chewed up. And I think that people need to defend the people who've stood up for you.

Starting point is 02:14:22 Joe stands up for you. Brett Weinstein stands up for you. All sorts of people are standing up for you. And they're getting bloodied. And so I think what I want to do is I want to do is I want to. to connect and make these things meaningful. And I think you and I are going to try to figure out how do we restore the scientific process where people talk about speculations, then they talk about instantiations.

Starting point is 02:14:43 We test the instantiations with data and theory of its own coming from experiment. And then we come to actually conclusions. And in order to do this, my goal is to rid the world in part of what is destroying collegiality and civility, particularly within the sciences and then expand it from there. Well, I love that notion of connection. In fact, Lex and I spoke about this when I was on a podcast. Hopefully that'll come out in early 22. And I said, you know, the meaning of life for me is to make, to build things that would

Starting point is 02:15:17 devastate you were they taken away. And I gave the example of, you know, a parent, you know, once you're a parent, there's an infinite number of ways that your life could be made infinitely worse. And there's a finite number of ways your life could even be made 10% better, right? I mean, your daughter gets married or, you know, whatever. Or you win the lottery and, yeah, you have a few money. Okay, as I've said before to you, you know, Jim Simons only has one yacht. Okay.

Starting point is 02:15:41 And he's lost two children. And I think it's incredibly important to think about this kind of notion of connections are those things that even if you don't have kids, that if you envision they were taken away from you, how devastated would you be? And I think you did that with the portal and you do that. I think you need to bring it back in some incarnation or another, and not just for personal reason, but I do feel like you... I really appreciate that, Brian. You're making this deep, huge impact that very few people can have.

Starting point is 02:16:09 And I think to those of whom much is given, much is expected, as the good book says, and that is the hitchhackers' guard to the galaxy. Anyway, my friend, it is late. We've been doing this for a while. I want to ask everybody who's listening on my YouTube channel to subscribe to Eric's YouTube channel. follow him on Twitter, wherever else you may find him, Clubhouse and elsewhere. And if you're following Eric, if you'd give my channel a view, that would be worthwhile too. I have a big, big plans for my channel in the next year, as well as my educational endeavors. And the first

Starting point is 02:16:48 deployment of the first instruments in the Simon's Observatory, you're not going to want to miss that contributing to our understanding of the evolution, composition, origin of the universe. and possibly maybe other universes. We'll have to talk about that next time. And you're going to be doing something with theorists to advance this idea of a healthy connection between theory and physics experiment? That's right.

Starting point is 02:17:11 Yeah. So I call it the Assayer Project where we'll be examining using Bayesian and other inference methods to understand how much credulity, how much influence, how much conversation and connection that we should be making between experimentalists

Starting point is 02:17:24 and theorists. And there's a tremendous amount of exciting things coming out. I've had already recorded great interviews with Harry Cliff and with Reinhard Gensel winner of the Nobel and Jocelyn Bell Bernell who lost the Nobel Prize about where we can go as a scientific

Starting point is 02:17:39 community to best make progress with the limited amount of time, resources, energy and so forth that we have. So for now. And do think on a cloudless night about looking up at the stars and realizing that they don't know anything about Twitter

Starting point is 02:17:55 or Instagram or Snapchat and how many things we are now fenced out of that potentially, if we were able to change our physics picture, might go from being impossible or wildly improbable to doable. It doesn't have to be science fiction. Start dreaming again. And if you have dreams that you think might actually matter and you're a little bit worried about being too earnest in public, get over it and let me know whether or not I should bring back the podcast and what you would want to see.

Starting point is 02:18:27 see on it and whether that's something that's important. Yeah, leave a thumbs up on the video if you think Eric should revive the portal. I saw what you did that. Yes, and for now, wishing everybody a wonderful journey into 2022, healthy and safe end of 2021. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas and Shenatova. Happy New Year to everybody out there. We love you all.

Starting point is 02:18:50 And thanks for joining us on this little trip around the sun for this past year and look forward to many more in the future. Good night. And thanks for all you did over the last year. Yeah, I love you, Eric. Bye. I love you, too. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Starting point is 02:19:13 Hey, y'all, just a simple request before you head out to the rest of your day or night. And that's to sign up for my Monday Magic Messages. These are simple, sweet, short conversations that I want to have with you. And they entail the following subjects. One is a memory. one is an appearance that I have had. One is a genius idea from around the universe of ideas that I explore. One is an image or an idea. And the last is a conversation, my podcast or my videos with the guest of Douciman, the guest of the week. So if you'd like to do that, please go to Brian Keating.com and there's a pop-up and you'll get to subscribe to my mailing list.

Starting point is 02:19:59 And I make it very easy to subscribe to, very easy to leave if you should want to leave. And I hope that you'll find these Monday magic messages quite interesting. Because as Sir Arthur C. Clark said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I like to bring you a new perspective from the universe into the impossible and do so with an eye towards the things that are most interesting. So I hope you'll subscribe. Again, briancaiding.com, sign up and your money back if you don't like it. Of course, it doesn't cost anything. Thanks, y'all.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein: UFOs, Crypto, Fatherhood, & The Portal Podcast Reboot ​(#204)

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein: UFOs, Crypto, Fatherhood, & The Portal Podcast Reboot (#204)