Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein “You’re being lied to!” with Avi Loeb [Ep. 482]

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Pique is offering 20% off for life AND a free Starter Kit with your purchase—that's a rechargeable frother and glass beaker to make the perfect cup every time. Just go to http://piquelife.com/impossible Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Are tech billionaires and politicians waging a war on science? Why is there a growing distrust in science? And has theoretical physics been intentionally sidelined to limit major breakthroughs?  Here today to discuss the rise of anti-science are Avi Loeb and Eric Weinstein!  Avi Loeb is a leading astrophysicist, professor at Harvard University, director of the Galileo Project, and founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative. Known as the alien hunter, he became famous for his bold and sometimes controversial theories about UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence.  Eric Weinstein is an investor, financial executive and host of The Portal. Though not an academic physicist, he proposed a unified theory of physics in 2013. He and his brother Bret Weinstein coined the term Intellectual Dark Web to refer to an informal group of pundits. Eric is a vocal critic of modern academic hierarchies and advocates for advances in scientific theory over an emphasis on experimental results. — Key Takeaways:  00:00:00 Intro 00:00:29 The rise of anti-science in the US government  00:24:38 Is AI training us?  00:28:13 Is Oumuamua an object from another civilization?  00:32:20 Fighting against the big 10 in physics  00:42:32 The future of academia  00:48:13 Immigrants in academia  00:59:12 Lack of curiosity  01:09:14 Geometric unity and grand unification  01:14:44 Shelter Island III  01:24:00 Outro  — Additional resources:  ➡️ Resources: 🛸 Galileo Project: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo  🎙️ The Portal with Eric Weinstein: https://ericweinstein.org/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nobody wants to go after the big 10 people in our field. One list is Brian Green, Sean Carroll, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michi Okaku, Lawrence Krause. Then there's a purported leaders of fundamental physics in theory. It is the latter group in which Suskin is prominent. These are just people who went bad and they decided that they would have a career, extolling the virtues of a theory that can't ship and crapping on everybody else who comes up with a challenger theory. But we're talking about UAPs, the Gallo Project, a recent paper that Avi's had out about the search and the construction of new telescopes.

We're also talking about academia, Doge, and what I've been really troubled with, Eric, and I've been dying, I've just missed you so much, but I've been dying to get your thoughts on this. We're surrounded by people in the government that are claiming that AI is science, that crypto is science. We have advisors to the president of the United States that are basically unqualified to discuss science in the extreme. And in some cases, I'm thinking of David Sacks, openly express, you know, almost derision for science, eggheads and so forth, like Avi, like me, and like you. How is this going to affect us in our cultural milieu? I mean, there's a lot of good things going on with Doge and

everything else. I don't think the way they're treating science is right. What do you think about that? It's a very difficult time because, to be honest with you, as a guy who was in Silicon Valley for a while, The anti-science stuff didn't really come out until, oh, gee, in my opinion. So, in general, tech was pro-science, and somehow in the embittering fight over whether we can discuss COVID origins or whether that's above our pay grade because we're all racists to even wonder whether or not it might be the case that this came out of the lab. that was a very low moment where somebody induced, I think 77 Nobel laureates who come out on behalf of the EcoHealth Alliance. So you have to first of all realize that whatever the anti-science aspect of this is very recent and relatively shallow. But what you're getting hit with is what I would call a universal discount factor. For example, if you're a hedge fund allocator, you're so used to being lied to that you decide that you're going to

discount by 25% everyone's projections across the board. That's a typical strategy that you'll see where you realize you're being unfair to some people, but because of the level of nonsense, there are these global discount factors. So I think one thing that's happening is that science is getting hit with a global discount factor. Another thing that's happening is we haven't minted any great spokespeople for science, particularly people, I would say 60 and younger, so that there's no one to defend it. We don't have a clear understanding of the tacit relationships that we're enshrined in Vanne of our Bush's endless frontier compact

between the federal government of the universities. So we are a historical. We don't realize what built the golden goose that laid all those. By the way, Eric, I should say that I interacted with the transition team exactly on this subject, but they didn't listen. The question is, is anyone being invited to Mar-a-Lago regularly? a research scientist. And I mean that very specifically. Tech sounds like science, but all the problems that we're having, I think, is that you're seeing the return of an old trope. The old

trope is that scientists are welfare queens and white lab codes. And you're seeing this beginning with Sabina's increasingly aggressive stance towards funding where once Sabina was sort of a marginal physicist who is treated unfairly in my estimation. She's now a major channel and one of the principal communicators of science. So I think that in part, a lot is going on, but scientists have not learned to make any argument that is powerful to the group that is now in charge. And that group increasingly thinks that the market is everything. If you can't make it in the market, you're nothing. It often does not really distinguish between tests. in science, doesn't distinguish between public health and science, and to be quite honest,

there is a small critique headed our way that we need to be listening to, and we're going to be charged for an enormous critique. You know, part of the problem is the academic community that in the past, you know, before this time, you know, had a sense of superiority relative to the public, did not really communicate the way science is done, which is full of uncertainty, so you have to be frank about it. You don't want to just sound as if you are reliable to pretend that you're the adult in the room because, you know, as an adult, I have two daughters very often. If you were to tell them the truth, they would not necessarily follow what you tell them. And if you want them to follow what

you tell them, then you have to distort what you know. And so that's, you know, that's what politicians often do. But scientists should be frank. And when we have press conferences and we lecture to the public as if that's the truth, it's an inappropriate portrayal of science. Science is work in progress and there are mistakes. Brian knows of a very famous press conference that ended up being a mistake. And so my point is that, you know, we should communicate about science being a learning experience and trying to make the best out of the evidence we have and admit when it's uncertain. And that, you know, partly was the issue with Fauci and COVID. what do you think eric is the natural outgrowth of this interest you know the simultaneously

incredibly high level of interest and gas lighting you know that that we're undergoing you you pointed this out back in december with the new jersey drones avi talked about this and and i wonder do you think if avi transplanted or duplicated the galileo project it sensors as sonic listening device and multi-messinger tools if that would convince the public that either the government's telling us the truth? In other words, is there a level of scientific rigor that can ever convince the government, that the population has been burned so many times that actually we should trust science again? I have a dangerous answer to that, which is, and the public right now is most interested in the tiny number of people who've gone against

the grain. And I would say that Avi is more important than his censors. So Avi's willingness to talk about UAP and to talk about aliens and extraterrestrial. strikes normal people as the kind of open-mindedness that they expect of science. So Avi is one of a tiny number of people with some credibility to this new group. So you can convince people who believe in, quote, the science, the Fauci fan club, with peer-reviewed papers. But how are you going to convince people who are aware of national security concerns, in fact, adulterating science, you're going to look to people who stood up and said something as iconoclast,

whether that's Jordan Peterson or Sabina Hassanfelder or Avi or you or me or whoever, it's a relatively smaller, it's a smaller group. And the key point is if Avi were saying something, it would say a lot more than if somebody who was inclined to poo-poo any kind of a priori interest in life beyond our solar system. So I think that that's kind of the key issue. If you look at the history of why science became important to politics, you know, it really started in the U.S. with the Manhattan Project because politicians realize here is a weapon that can win wars.

And obviously, you know, what it did to Japan was to change the course of the confrontation with Japan. And they realized, okay, we should probably have the National Science Foundation to support fundamental science because it gives us potentially advantage relative to adversarial countries. And it has a geopolitical impact. But over the decades, some scientists started worrying about extra dimensions, about things that are not really useful for society. And then the question arises as to, you know, what do you make of the present-day academia?

Is that really helpful to society? And then, of course, the issues of health and so. So here is an example of another Manhattan moment, Manhattan Project moment. Suppose the asteroid, 24 YR1, were to strike the Earth. So we would find that with a high likelihood, it would actually collide with Earth within seven years. Then you would find kids aspiring to become scientists because suddenly society will be worried about the implications. you know, you could calculate which regions would be affected by the impact and how many people may die if they stay there and real estate value will go down in those regions, people will

leave those cities and NASA will be energized to create a dart-like spacecraft that will collide with the object, deflect it, and then they will become the heroes, saising humanity. And that's a moment that can bring science back to the focus. and astronomers, frankly, would have the highest societal status in that scenario. We can wait for such a moment. Another approach is basically to tell politicians that science is better than politics. Isn't AI that moment, Eric? I mean, we're, go ahead, yeah.

The basic point is, we made you safe, we made you strong, we made you rich. What is your effing prop, period, the end? We meaning scientists. Well, let's be more specific, physics. Okay. I am physics adjacent in this conversation as a mathematician, but basically the key point is whether it was inventing molecular biology, putting you an instantaneous communication, inventing the semiconductor, the World Wide Web, give me a break. this stuff did not come out of nowhere. It's not all based on startups. Every scientist should learn that they produce a public good, which is both inexhaustible and inexclutable, if done correctly.

And the key question is, why do we see ourselves incorrectly? We are this incredibly dangerous ninja priesthood and pretending that we are, I don't know, that science is interesting and it's good for you. And it makes it sound like some sort of, you know, we're trying to sell oatmeal or something. thing. I'm not quite sure. Or pandering for our existence. Well, which is absurd. The basic point is, you have the world's greatest deal, which is that you keep us protected and able to work on things that we want to work on. And when you want to call on us, we're there. And when we start bad-mouthing our own country, we are breaking the deal when they start saying, what is it that you are good for, you know, go get real jobs? They are breaking the deal. And I'm watching a bunch of

people who don't even remember the deal. You don't remember what Vannevar Bush was trying to do, saying we won't do this work in national labs, we'll do it in universities. Maybe the idea is that it's too dangerous to do physics in an open environment. We took out two Japanese cities with a little bit of physics. Imagine what we could do if we really started pushing things. I mean, I think what people need to realize is science isn't always interesting. Sometimes it's dull as church. Sometimes it's the most riveting thing on the planet. It's not always successful. Sometimes It changes everything. Oftentimes it lags. But the key point is it is absolutely consequential. The cavalier way in which increasingly this embittered tech right, which is very recent in its origin,

I thought these guys were going to be our biggest friends and maybe even our saviors. And in part, lying about things like string theory and lying about things like cures for cancer and lying about peer review and pretending that public health is science when it absolutely, in no uncertain terms, is not, has caused this rift. And so in part, what we have to do is we have to reinvent scientific credibility and institutional credibility to people who don't go to seminars. I was at the Caltech colloquium last week in physics. And I didn't see anybody from the crowd of people that gets asked about science and technology

policy. They're never there. They don't even understand the difference between a college and a university. A university's chief mission is not teaching. It is research and the mentorship of people who are to become researchers. Eric, you have dinners with those tech executives. What do you tell them? I fight alone, my friend. I mean, I'm having one tonight with very prominent people in the tech world. And my claim is, I will almost certainly be the only person defending something. science, and they will look at me and they will say, you realize you're defending the people who attack you at your core in the physics community. But that's because you have integrity, Eric, and most many scientists don't. I think Avi does, and he gets, he gets assailed, you know,

maybe not as much as you do, but, but I think the comment you made about the... He's in plenty of negativity thrown his way. The key point is, do you stand alone? When it comes time, a scientist does not fall back on peer review. They fall back on scientific method, consistency. And the key question is, are you willing and capable of standing alone? Now, the problem is, we need more people in those tech dinners, because if it's only one per dinner, if that. Okay. Eric, I'm happy to join you. I think it's really important that, you know, there was a sense of humility because many of these tech executives went to colleges, you know, and they studied there and they had some respect to the people who

taught them, but it was lost because of the interaction that they had later on. So I think it's really important to restore that. And, you know, it's not by these tech people being the tech support of the White House and controlling the conversation about AI. It's about natural intelligence, not artificial intelligence that we should. Isn't there a danger of the same thing happening? I don't think I'm telling tales out of school is what happened with Mr. Epstein, but, you know, to replace tech bros by, you know, super successful hedge fund entrepreneur that had connections all around the world, we can't figure out exactly what he did. But, Eric, couldn't that lead to the economic incentives that you pointed out, which I agree

with? But couldn't that lead to this, you know, very dastardly influence of both non-scientific and maybe immoral or unethical individuals like Epstein? Look, the key issue is what, when I look at the unethical behavior of our colleagues, in trying to destroy new ideas and the proponents of new ideas. I look at them and I say, would they be more ethical people if we paid them less and tried to starve them, or we paid them properly? They worked so marginal. And so I have this terrible problem, which is that my argument is you have to pay my enemies

more if you really want them to evaluate my work. And this is a typical problem. It happened to the New Orleans Police Department, where you had an incredibly corrupt police department, new chief came in and said, we have to pay everybody more so that they feel like they have something to lose and that they're valued within the system. So the key problem here is that the Sabina solution is to threaten to disconnect more of these people. And my solution is opposite, which is we've allowed scientists to become the precarious people who have to more or less follow incentives, jump on every NSF initiative, et cetera, et cetera. By the way, it's not,

the physicists are not supposed to be paid chiefly out of NSF. The physicists are supposed to be paid out of the Department of Energy, which is really the Department of Nuclear Weapons. Sabina very much criticizes the next accelerator. And I think, you know, it's really important to advocate for getting as much data as possible in a way of learning about nature, rather than shying away from experimental programs. It's actually the opposite that we want to cultivate,

because that's the only path for learning something new, getting as much data, as much evident. If you think that the axis of having higher energy will reveal new physics, that's what you should invest in. But the one thing that should not be done is suppress many initiatives that going directions that are not traditional,

which is what has... And my approach to that, my solution to that is, you know, if you don't want to get dirty, don't mud wrestle. So there are all these people who invite me for mud wrestling and I just declined the invitation. So it took me a while to learn that because initially I would respond.

But as of now, I just do what I think is the right thing to do and avoid wasting energy on people who just invite the conflict. But the problem that we're having in some of these areas is that we want to be honest about it and we don't want to pay for our honesty with our lives or support in our careers. So right now we have this really important thing that happened that we haven't discussed on this call anyway, which is Mark Andresen's conversation at the White House that has been replayed numerous times. Well, I heard on a podcast also. He was saying destroy all universities and rebuild them. Eric, you're referring to the fact that he said if you discover something that the government will classify even up to mathematics. Is that right, Arne? That's right.

So explain that to Avi, because I don't know if Avi heard that. particular clip. What he said was that he was given a courtesy heads up as a billionaire. Do not invest in AI. AI startups will not be allowed to be a thing. We are going to choose a couple of winners. We are going to make them giant corporations and we'll put them in a federal cocoon. And when Andreessen and Horvitz said back, I don't know how you're going to do this because that would mean that you'd have to classify mathematics, which is being taught everywhere and you can't classify math, they said, we took entire segments of theoretical physics offline during the Cold War, and they went dark. Now, the interesting thing is that there is absolutely no record of any

physicists that I know being told this, hey, we're going to take portions of theoretical physics, and we're going to make them go dark. So the key question here is, if that's true, did the federal government pull off what in corporate consulting is called, management consulting, is called a soft sunset. A soft sunset is one in which you do not alert the people who are being downsized that they are being taken off long. You want the people to think that they are still working on important problems and they don't even realize that they are being phased out. They're being sunsetted. So the question is,

what was Mark Andreessen talking about when it came to the White House's comments on theoretical physics? And is our lack of ability to move the Lagrangian of the universe beyond 1973 part of a soft sunset of theoretical physics? Because that's exactly the time when quantum gravity is debuted as a concept. You don't find essentially any mention of quantum gravity before the early 1970s if you look at Google Ngrams. So the key question is, did we get soft sunsetted? Is there in chemical, in chemistry, you have a concept of an inhibitor, which is something you add to a ongoing reaction to stop the reaction. Imagine that effectively what we had was we had theoretical physicists hitting it out of the park, and then suddenly they became very unsuccessful.

At exactly that moment, we start to see the appearance of quantum gravity. And then 10 years later, we see the appearance of string theory. Did we get soft sunsetted and we didn't get the courtesy call that Andresen and Horvitz did? What do you think, Avi? I just heard the person who spoke with Andresen in the Biden White House, who was asked exactly this question about what they were talking about. Today, in a podcast, we can ask that person what the discussion was about. It was a podcast with Ezra Klein with a person who was in charge of AI in the White House.

During the Biden administration, the meeting was, you know, around April 2024. I think we should approach, I mean, these people and get more details. Now, the question is, should we push government to reveal what is under wraps, what kind of physics has been hidden? Is it related to UAP? Is it related to new physics that the government knows about and wants to take a double-reps? advantage of in some ways. That would require a very efficient coordination and also even the Manhattan project had spies in it so somehow it leaked. It's just hard for me to tell whether the government is competent enough to put a seal on a very important scientific discovery. I don't know what Eric thinks,

but my fundamental belief is the government is not competent enough to do that. But maybe Eric thinks sideways. Well, I think that the story, you know, again, you and I have both been tracking it when most of our PhD brethren will not, is roughly speaking that between 1952 and 1970-ish, 71, there was this golden age of general relativity that was largely funded by two people who looked like CIA cutouts, Roger Babson and Agnew Bainson. They worked particularly with Bryce DeWitt and Lewis Whitten. There was an entire coordinated series of places that were working on gravity for engineering purposes. A lot of this got pushed out into aerospace companies, which is not a natural home for

theoretical physics, but in particular the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore was where Lewis Witten was posted. And I would say that Curtis Wright was where Feynman was probably going in his story any questions where he's giving physics lectures to aerospace people. So whatever the... I was talking, Mr. Fine, where he's in a taxi cab and he tells the driver. Yeah, tell me a place. It goes to the alibi room in Buffalo, New York. I think that's Curtis Wright Aerospace.

Eric, do you think we should add that to the JFK, MLK, RFCK? That took to be released. If you go back to my appearance on Joe Rogan's program, episode 1945, the year of the Trinity Test, coincidental. you'll see that I've basically been tracking this, and that story has now spread. Jesse Michaels has been spreading it. I would say David Kaiser knew about some of the story independently. But more or less, yes, the golden age of general relativity is probably involved with some attempt at something like primitive space time engineering. There's a 1971 Australian intelligence document by a physicist who talks about Dyson Oppenheimer-Dewitt, a bunch of well-known people to all of us being involved with this. I don't think it was hyper successful, to be entirely honest. We know that the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference had Feynman coming to it under the assumed name of Mr. Smith. So it's really weird behavior.

Herman Bondi talked very clearly about removing the positivity, constraints from general relativity. All of these things had not been talked about much in recent years. And my feeling is I'm trying to get people to open the kimono as to where Babson and Bainson actually cutouts for CIA funding. And then you had these two charismatic, mysterious funders who couldn't be traced to the government. And did we move a lot of this stuff into aerospace because the one lesson of the Manhattan years, obvious, you probably know, is that the best way to keep a secret is compartmentalization. Only the white badges knew what was going on at Lowe's. Salamos. Everyone else merely had a fragment.

Eric, we were talking before you came on about AI and effectively how it's sort of training us. And you've talked about what you coined in your traditional portmanteau or some neologism as your want. Eric, the void's kidding. Hey, keep it up. We'll have a minion soon over here. Okay. You called something fascinating. I first heard from you in Florence last May. But you wrote about it as early as 2017. It's called out-telligence. And I think this is a fascinating concept that Avi might not be familiar with, but effectively, we would discuss the fact that perhaps AI is training us. And I wonder, you know, what Avi thinks about this idea that you've coined. Maybe you can describe it for those that aren't

familiar, this concept of how out-telligence perhaps evolves. And to what extent these GPUs plus LLMs, you know, I call it open-invita or whatever you want, how they might be locked in to a physics model that is doomed never to give us the new physics that you and I and Avi crave. So first of all, what's out-telligence and how does it have bearing on perhaps solving these problems? Let's go beyond the conspiracy to cover things up and stuff that we already talked about. Sure. Artificial out-telligence is something I defined when something without a brain outsmarts something with a brain. So in particular, there's an entire clade of orchids called Ophreys, which convince male pollinators that they are offering a female looking to mate via a replica from their lowest

pedal along with the pheromones to prove that she's ready and waiting. So when these male pollinators are duped twice, the plant is able to pollinate without having to pay in terms of energetic nectar or pollen, which is expensive. So how did the plant outsmart the thing with an actual brain? Well, it used its brain against itself. it said, look, if I can fool you twice, even though I'm not thinking, I get a benefit. So the key thing is you will sculpt the replica of the female of your species based on your own poor eyesight or failure to understand what situation you're in. As a result, what you have is you have something without the ability to think, hijacking the mind of the thing that can think to parasitize itself. So if you wanted to take that into the realm of artificial machine learning, imagine that this thing is basically just linear algebra, but there we are interacting with it and we either reward it by telling it it's doing great or we punish it by moving to another model.

And there are only three elements necessary for evolution, and they'd have nothing to do with carbon-based life. You have to have heritability. You have to have variation so that you're not all doing the same strategy. and then you have to have differential success. Now, all three of those things take place within programs. Programs are the only place with a reproductive system. The only thing man knows how to build from scratch that has the ability to reproduce. You can build a car.

It'll have all the physiological systems of a human being, except for one. It doesn't manufacture more cars. So software is the only place where we can build an analog of the reproductive system, and therefore it's the only place that has ruined. for artificial life. Artificial out-telligence is non-thinking life that uses the deficits in cognition of thinking life to outsmart thinking life. So, Avi, let's examine this. I've been thinking when I heard Eric talk about this for the first time. I actually thought of you, a conjecture that I'm going to make. I want you to play out, play upon it. Could Omuamua be exactly what

Eric's just described? Could it be not, you know, an alien artifact, a light, sale, a probe based on its weird acceleration in shape. But what if it's a smart, you know, and not a smart device, but basically an out-telligent device, an object from another civilization like Eric just described, something that's a simple system, evolving, replicating, spreading across space and time, not to communicate or anything, but could it be fitting the mold that Eric just described? That would explain perhaps, you know, why we see it less as a messenger and more as a trickster or something that, you know, could potentially evade the Fermi paradox. It's not really what we think it is. It's more like what Eric just described. How do you react to that as Oumuuma's true nature, as I'm just conjecturing? This is Eric's idea, by the way.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely possible, and we know the story about the Trojan horse that was thought to be something else. We know that nature is based on natural selection, so that means that the fittest survives. And one way to be the fittest is to pretend to be something else so that nobody suspects at what you're actually trying to accomplish, which may very well describe the interaction of AI systems with us in the future. But we would think that they're serving us, but not really. The best way for us to figure it out is to get as much data as possible. The more data we have, the better, the less we are impressed by superficial markings. You know, I really am happy with a flood of data.

And in my mind, you know, we have now the web telescope. We have other new telescopes on Earth. If the Rubin Observatory discovers a no more like object, we can just put all the resources on it, try to figure out what it means. Our imagination is limited by what we experienced in the past. And that is true in our, you know, when you go on a date, the interaction that you have depends on your past dates. If we are confronting something completely new, we are just responding inappropriately, because we've never seen something like it. And, you know, the academia would be the first to always

make analogies and call it a dark comet and say that it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before, but it's still a rock. And we should not discuss anything else. That is human nature to assume that, you know, to interpret everything in terms of the narratives of the story that you already have. But then the people who are curious are the ones that we learn something. And so I think science offers us this opportunity of learning something new. All we need to do is be open-minded and collect data and put money into the effort. We can't just assume the data will fall into our lap. You know, we have to invest time and money.

And so instead of putting money into things that we already fully understand, like putting, you know, I don't know, a billion dollars towards a future telescope that will measure the power spectrum of density fluctuations of dark matter to the next decimal point. I have to cut you off there. You're encroaching on my how the bread is buttered in the Keating household. I will not allow you to cut off funding for the Simon's observe. No, but I mean the amount of new information that you get is relatively marginal.

And obviously, it's a. safe territory because you know what you will find. You know, the one thing I realized when getting funded by NASA was that they were asking, what will I discover in year one when I applied to grants? You know, that's an oxymoron to say, I'll give you the money as long as you tell me what you will discover. Now, you forgot what Isidore rabbi said. He said, never apply for something that you haven't already accomplished.

Yes, exactly. That's the approach I took. I basically asked them for money for something already written about. And the referees just were not aware of that. And so, yeah, there is something to be said about Mark Andrescent's insights into the way that science operates and the way it should be revised. The question is, should we reboot everything, the entire system, or maybe promote or reward scientists who behave differently? Now, Eric, you've talked a lot about, you know, escaping Einstein's prison, not Weinstein's prison, but what do you mean by that? I mean, do you believe that it's a lack of funding?

You know, my theoretical physicist colleagues that you've debated and met here at UC San Diego and elsewhere, you know, they get by on a couple of glasses of Lavaza or what have you. Avi doesn't need that much. He seems to have a lot of people that show up to his house and give money. I kind of like that, to be honest with you. But besides that, Eric, what is missing? Is it funding? I mean, did Einstein, you know, only make a breakthrough when he got the money from his Nobel Prize in 1922?

What is the prison and what is the most effective jailbreaking tool? Einstein's prison is the distance to the nearest habitable worlds. So that if we imagine that we were going to somehow travel just below the speed of light in an Einsteinian way, full benefits of time dilation, you found the closest habitable planet. You stayed there for an hour and you came back. How much older is everyone here on Earth, even if you were able to make the trip, blickety split. It's a depressingly large distance to the outside world. So that moat, effectively, if there is an Einsteinian speed limit, we have to recognize that it belongs to the map,

which is known as space time, which is not the territory, which is wherever we actually live, where we do not live in space time. But that is our best map that we have. So that's what I mean by Einstein's prison. But now you have a second question, which is, like, what are we doing wrong and why can't we just exist on the dew found on a single leaf at sunrise of a daffodil? And the answer is, first of all, it's an obnoxious question. You have opportunity costs that are set by investment, banking, management, consulting, and big law. And we have to be paid a decent percentage of those things to get the best and the brightest. And that's our own best and our own brightest, because we are the big dogs. I also believe that we have to have to have.

an understanding of what makes science unexciting. And if I'm going to be blunt about the area that I care about, the people who are in a position to jailbreak us by pointing out that space time was a stepping stone in a succession of models to a final theory where we actually have the source code, you cannot let those people use their positions as referees to kill off everyone else who doesn't subscribe to the only game in town theory. The perennial argument is what's wrong with string theory. It's always around what doesn't agree with experience. It doesn't give new predictions. It has nothing to do with it. It's got a murderous sociology. 100% the reason that we actually care and everybody's afraid to say, Brian, if I can take issue even with you,

you took issue with me saying that Lenny Susskind has been absolutely cruel to people who come up with alternates. And you didn't go after Lenny. You pointed out that I used some indelicate French. But the fact is, on the program that he shared with Kurt Jymongle, he said that our colleague, Peter White's math and physics is just bad. I don't think Lenny Suskin knows enough mathematics to critique Peter White. Peter White is by far the more experienced mathematically. I'd recommend his book on symmetry and quantum theory to anyone. You can't have Lenny Suskin, going around like an ignoramus, pretending that he doesn't know who I am when I've talked to him at Stanford extensively. You can't have him going after Peter Woight saying that Peter

White is just bad because he's not. Nobody wants to go after the Big Ten people, let's say, in our field. Well, I think he'll find who the Big Ten are. You've accused Kaku of being one of the Big Ten. He's simply not. I mean, Lenny simply isn't right. There's two lists here, Brian. One list is the five or six people through whom all physics seems to flow to the public. And in that group, that's basically Brian Green, Sean Carroll, Neil deGrasse, Tyson, Michi Oku, Lawrence Krause, it's a very small number of people. That's one group. Then there's enough different group, which is who are the purported leaders of fundamental physics in theory?

And that group has been by far the more mercerous. groups attack anyone coming from outside. But it is the group, it is the latter group in which Suskin is prominent because both, you know, and by the way, we'll point out, Michio Kaku did a fair amount of really good writing on string field theory when that was one of the-1971, yeah. Well, later than that. He wrote a textbook that I can, on another program, I can give you the copyright date. Again, this isn't personal. These are just people who went bad and they decided that they would have a career extolling the virtues of a theory that can't ship and crapping on everybody else who comes up with the Challenger theory. And the reluctance of anyone to want to say

something against Lenny Suskin or Ed Witten or Jeff Harvey or any one of that crew, Andy Strominger, Khrmur, Khrmanvafa, Michael Duff. That is a real problem, is that we just don't have courage. And blacking courage, we're not going to get funded because quite honestly what we do too often And it's not interesting. You want to get interesting. You have to go back to actually working on the physical world in which we live. Avi, how do you react to that? I mean, there's a difference between the popularizers who you and I agree, you know, is an important role to fill in that we get paid by the public. We have to get back to the public. They're our bosses. At the same time, those that are spending their time popularizing often don't spend their time, you know, in the laboratory or at the

blackboard. So how do you balance that? Your colleague, Cameron Vofo, was on my show. And I, you know, criticized him at the standard critique that there's no, you know, tangible, falsifiable evidence against or four string theory that could plausibly come about. He said, no, Brian, you're wrong. And I said, really? And he said, yeah, the string theory predicts the mass of the electron should be somewhere between, you know, 0.0,000, you know, 10 to the minus 32 plank masses and 10 to the 100 plank mass. That counts, right? I mean, that's a prediction. It could be falsified, right? But it's not very satisfying to me. It was like, you know, eating a meal of cotton candy and sprite. But tell me, I've, I've, How do you react to what Eric's saying?

That is cabal. I mean, by the way, Eric, I have to say, wait, wait, wait. You're trying to, not a cabal. Okay, fine. But you're talking to a Harvard professor who's paid very well. I'm a public, you know, employee of the state of California paid less, but I'm paid well. You said earlier, you know, we need to fund them like hedge fund managers.

Fine. But you're talking to. We need to fund them as a percentage of their opportunity costs. But then would you fund Ed Witten and Lenny Susskin? Okay, good. That's very high integrity as is your one. I wouldn't be able to say them in your turn. They're murderous.

No, and so I'm not murderous. How do you react to that? You've got them in any, you could presumably cause the career of a young person who's applying to the physics department or the astronomy department who's got their head in the clouds and is riding a bandwagon and part of the group think that Eric's rightfully decrying. You could stifle them, but you don't. So why is that? My thinking is as follows.

I think we should rethink what academia should be working on. I think it should be tailored to address important. questions that the public cares about, that taxpayers care about. And when, you know, when there are these funding committees that decided about grants, they are full of people from the mainstream that do not take risks or they have their own culture, which takes a lot of risks without any evidence. It doesn't matter, but there is a popular theme within their community and they advocate it. As a result, what you end up with is not much deviation from the beaten past. this is not a good funding approach.

I think that we should listen to those who pay the bill. The public, you know, that is the theme of the new White House, trying to attend to the interests of the public. And I think the same should be true of academia. So if the public really wants to know whether we have a neighbor, we should put money into it. It's not just about looking for microbes, which we spend billions of dollars without any hesitation on.

It's also hedging our bets and trying to look. for intelligent beings. Why is that considered speculative? We exist. There are hundreds of billions of stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy with a few percent of them at least, having a planet like the size of the earth at the same separation. Why would that be complete speculation to imagine that something like us happened there, that we are not the first to join the party, that there are many other civilizations not only existed but died by now. Most of them died. If you think about humans on Earth, there were 117 billion or so, and most of them are dead. There are only 8 billion that are alive right now. This is just an example of a subject that public cares about.

That's why there are so many speculations, and science can address it with the same telescopes that are used to discover the power spectrum of fluctuations or to discover maybe microbes after 10 billion dollars are invested by 2040. Why do we have to shy away from what the public really cares about. This is just one example, but it exists also in the context of, you know, health issues, safety of AI would be a major public policy issue. Why can't we invest in that? You know, there are lots of, why aren't philosophers worried about the age of AI and philosophy of technologies of the future? You know, what to do about the interaction of humans with the machine instead of worrying about what Aristotle and Plato said, you know, thousands of

years ago, they didn't have computers. That's not relevant for society. So philosophy departments should gear up to address the challenges of technologies of the future. That's what they should do. Why is that heresy? I think academia is sort of completely disconnected from society. And I think the solution for it to gain more credibility among politicians would be to reboot its interests. Eric, you've been critical of academia and some of the people within it. But what do you see is the future of it in a world where perhaps our mutual friend, who you introduced me to, Jay Bautachari, hopefully will be confirmed as the director of NIH. But there's been cutbacks threatened as high as reducing, rather, the indirect cost,

which is what we buttered the bread around the university with, to 15% from 60% at Harvard, right? What is your overhead rate, Avi? How about gets more than half a billion dollars a year from NIH? And the change in the overhead right now would imply hundreds of millions, sorry, deficit. I'm all for trying to say things to show that we are men of the people. But to be honest with you, I am a man of the people by being part of the elite, right? This is what happens with snipers, right? You don't want an average sniper.

You want an elite sniper when it's your niece has been kidnapped by drug lords. we're supposed to act on behalf of people who do not look like us. I am not like a Navy SEAL or a Delta Force guy, right? Those are Tier 1 operators. They're very different than the rest of them. Probably was. Yep. Okay.

Quite honestly, you're not supposed to ask the public, hey, should we spend money developing spectral sequences in algebraic topology? They don't know in the same way that if you go to your doctor and you start actually trying to understand the way your ligaments, and tendons and muscles fit together. For your bum knee, you're not going to understand it unless you really study. So I think we should be very careful and realize what Avi is saying is that in areas where we show that we are particularly bizarrely disinterested, the public should be guiding us.

I think that that makes sense. But let's be entirely honest. A lot of the reason that things look the way they do is because of very old cryptic arrangements. So, for example, how do you do? with the fact that only like nine countries have nuclear weapons. We have managed to stop that spread despite the fact that we teach physics. So we've undertaken all sorts of things that aren't clear on the surface. Let's just take overhead for the moment. What is overhead? Overhead is a tacit agreement that we will have federally funded universities that will be allowed to be nominally

private. And the idea was that you take the worst universities. Let's say the university, the University of East Virginia. It doesn't exist. Okay. The University of East Virginia, let's imagine that it's like a tier five universities, way down there. The senator from East Virginia is going to say, why does Harvard get all the money? This isn't fair. So what we did is we came up with an overhead system. And the overhead system was supposed to channel federal money over weaker universities to our strongest universities that were supposed to remain nominally private or very fine public ones like the UC system where Brian resides. Now, the problem with this is that when you have a guy with a chainsaw and shades with

bling going around and the person is saying, like, can you believe this 60% overhead for indirect costs? Well, that has nothing to do with anything. That was always fake. You know, this is very much like, you know, I gave the example, if you started auditing Israel after October 7th and you said, wait a minute, do you realize how much we're spending to give Hezbollah, low-cost pagers and walkie-talkies and provide them customer support? Why are we doing this? It's madness. You would not understand what that line item was. So a lot of what's going on with overhead is that nobody is being open and honest, is that it was a cryptic system. Same thing with graduate students. Graduate students are not students. They're workers. But we call them students

so that they don't organize. The idea was that we'd create a very fine workforce that had very few rights, and it would get to become the professorate of tomorrow while the university system was growing from below 10% before the war to over 50% after the war educating the population. That was a one-time expansion.

As a result, we can't pay the workers in the graduate workforce with professorships where they get to train 20 students of their own, because if you raise 20 to higher and higher powers, it spills out of control. So what you have is you have a system in which even the professors have no idea why the system was set up the way it was. They don't know its history. They don't know how the changes in law occurred.

They don't know why the rules are the way they are. And they can't defend the system because ultimately right now you've got a guy with a chainsaw saying, I don't understand this. Why do you know? Eric, I should say there is an issue of administration and bureaucracy growing much bigger in recent decades compared to what it used to be before.

Because the natural tendency of bureaucratic organizations is that they always grow in size. And when I arrived at Harvard 32 years ago, I had a direct line to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Now I have to go through many mini-deans to reach that person. And it's true that instead of the administrators serving the faculty, which was their original task when I arrived, Now they are actually monitoring the faculty, so they're in control.

Sorry? Fire them all. Well, yeah, but the question, I don't know if it's easy. You know, I spoke about it with Harvard's provost, and that was when we had turmoil a year ago at Harvard, and I brought him seven points that I recommended, and one of them was reduce a level of bureaucracy and administration. That's the one that he had most issues with. It's not easy.

Now, Eric, you've recently tried to engage in on the subject of immigration, which is a part of the lifeblood of major university research. You've pointed out the distinction between college and university. Talk about this first. I want to hear, Avi's perspective. What is the meaning of this? I mean, Vivek Brahmaswami, Harvard class of 2007, you know, has been sort of, I would say maybe a little bit condescending. But anyway, Eric tried to engage with him. I don't think it was successfully yet, Eric.

I'm not sure if that's the case or not. But what is your feeling about, I mean, obviously, you're an. immigrant to this country. You're an alien, we talked about earlier, but not the kind that doesn't obey. Of course, I'm an alien, yes. You're a legal. You're a resident. You're a legal. Yeah. And, you know, my wife always says that she's waiting for someone to pick me up because I came from another star, probably. So talk about class of 2007 Harvard graduate. His debates and that interest, you know, and kind of, what do we need in terms of Americans? Are they lazy? You know, are they incapable of doing the you're going to start with Vivek's framing of this whole thing. No, thank you. I don't want anything to do with it.

All right. Well, how would you frame it, Eric? How would you frame the most interesting debate to two professors who have many immigrants that have come in? I've currently students working on visas here, H-1B and otherwise, and postgraduate work as well. How would you phrase a question to Avi in terms of what question? Well, the question is, what is the appropriate amount of, say, H-1B visas, or what is the appropriate amount of foreign graduate labor, as you called it? Oh, H&B. Oh, why? Because it was installed by the Immigration Act of 1990, which was a conspiracy between Eric Block, who sat at the NSF under Ronald Reagan and this government university industry research roundtable to destroy the ability of American scientific workers to bargain with their employers, period, the end. It's pure evil.

What is the right amount of non-domestic labor, then, at a research university, in a physics department. I think it's really important to bring talent from the world. In my mind, the strength of the U.S., you know, it was taking advantage of that and developing the best science in the world. I mean, we all know about it. And by the way, I came when I was supported by an H-1B visa when I started as a postdoc. I think we need to come up with a policy such that will fulfill the needs of the tech

industry, by the way, that is very different than it used to be. and what kind of skills are particularly important and then train those people and not let them go to other countries. We don't want them to develop the same industries of the future elsewhere. There should be a committee in the White House looking into that and deciding about the amount that would fulfill the needs of the high-tech industry and academia and come up with a policy that would follow that.

And it's really important to bring the best. And of course, they need to stand up to high standards in order to get that permit, there should be some kind of a gauge of the quality of the person you're bringing. Eric, any response for you from the... I mean, I don't want to do this this way. This is very silly. Look, the basic point is that the NSF and the National Academy of Sciences are the worst

enemy of young scientists. They have specifically conspired in 1986 using a guy named Miles Boylan, who's an economist from Case Western Reserve to destroy the ability of American scientists to earn the wages that the markets would have assigned. So you're asking people basically to become scientists only to compete with other people paid with pieces of paper that mean nothing to them. You can't give me anything in the form of a visa because I'm already a citizen. It doesn't make any sense. I've written an entire paper about how you bring the best and the brightest from all over the world into the U.S. using pure free market techniques, something called Kosian rights. Every economist knows what they are. There is exactly

zero interest in this because what the employers really want is a giant discount on labor. They are not really interested in the best and the brightest. Why in part? Because we have the best in the brightest generally year. Now, it's not universally true. Every one of us has colleagues from overseas. But what I will say is that in an integral part of getting access to these funny visas, which not only bring people, but bring benefits to employers by taking them away from employees. What you have is the system is completely misdesigned. And when I say, you know, you could get the same people over here, but you would get no benefit to the employers and the Americans would be not disincentivized from coming in.

We already educate people at an extraordinary level. There's zero interest because the real interest is in money. It's not in science. It's not in, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's always been room for the top, top, you know, fraction of a percent. Those people aren't even on H-1B. They're supposed to be on e-visas. So in part, what you have is I would push everybody to go back to my paper called

Migration for the benefit of all. I would point out that there's no interest because, quite honestly, the CEOs who claim to be free marketeers who only care about efficiency are anything but they're people who want to move more money into their pockets. They don't care whether it comes out of the pockets of their labor. force, which is one of the reasons that... Eric, if you were to check how many of these CEOs came from foreign countries, wouldn't you find a large fraction?

I mean, just think about your friends. The worst arguments ever, Avi, because what happens is that there's no way of measuring the displacement of technical talent in the U.S. that didn't enter those fields. When I think about pushing my own children to go into science and technology, I think I'm an idiot. And why is that? It's because we've rigged the game against them. And so in part, when you talk about these brilliant futures and how do we make this attractive

just the way an asteroid was heading in our way, quite honestly, what's happened is that, you know, typically families descended from European stock who were here before 1965 when the Great Immigration Act was passed, figured out that this is a lousy place to go with a first-class education. Why would anybody want to become precarious when they could have second and third homes, why would they want to live in a different state of their spouse and wait until their late 30s to have their first kid? Nobody wants it. Obviously, Eric, was taking an uncharacteristically, you know, provocative form where he wrote research universities are supposed to be dedicated to scholarship and discovery above all else,

not teaching politics or business spin-ups. They're supposed to be exclusive, not inclusive, a shot at what he, you know, sometimes refers to as the disc, distributed idea, a suppression complex, chokes real science. I'll ask you, Avi, you get a big bag of money. Now four people show up on your doorstep, not just three that came last time. They put a bag of Bitcoin in front of, I don't know. They give you the latitude to do whichever you want to do, but you have to create Loeb University. What does it look like?

And what's included, what's not included, and what would be the main focus of it? Would it be as exclusively oriented towards a betterment of humanity through science, as Eric might suggest? Yes. it would cultivate innovation, free thinking, multiple opinions being discussed and then, you know, trying to get the verdict as to which one is more likely to be successful based on the information we have and then pursuing it in the scientific way. So basically doing what science was designed to do, but without, you know, the need to show that you are smart, which is really poisoning the academic culture, without the jealousy that comes with awards and prizes and pushing people aside,

to get funded. So it will be more about the pursuit of the truth, so to speak, and more about the Socratic approach of allowing a discussion without taking the poison at the end, allowing a discussion of heresy, you know, things that are not conventional, things that are not well accepted and trying to get to the bottom of things, rather than, you know, poisoning those who the society claims are ruining the education of the youth, the way that it happened. in the days of Socrates. You know, I would say that nowadays, academia did not evolve much from that kind of culture where any deviant from a beaten path is being punished for that.

And so my university, well, first of all, I would define research areas or questions that we have no clue about that we can make progress. It will not be whether at the Planck Energy, the uncertainty principle is modified, because we will never get to the Plank Energy in any foreseeable future in an accelerator. You told me that gravitational waves from B mode polarization, if we didn't see it, would be evidence that the universe inflated so much that we're not able to see the gravitons as individual. And it's a stink. You had that base my career on this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wrote a paper about that. But, you know, as a practical matter, I would rather focus on things that we can accomplish in our lifetime because we live for a short time. Now, another aspect is, you know, I started in philosophy. I was very interested in the humanities. And I think humanities of the future, as I mentioned before, are. to be developed because there is a huge amount of interplay between humans and machines that was not addressed by past discussions. There are ethical questions, there are legal issues,

privacy issues, and there are policy, political issues that have relevance to national security. And all these can be addressed within the Lobb University. I think that is a completely new territory that was not addressed before. And of course, if we find aliens, you know, there would be all kinds of questions about. alien psychology, alien literature, and history, alien archaeology. All of these disciplines that used to be dealing with what we have here on Earth will now gain a more cosmic perspective, you know, like what happens in the galaxy. Diversity and inclusion will be about aliens cultures, you know, not about humans coming

from different countries. So, you know, the sky is the limit as to what the universe can offer us. But I would try to be as imaginative as possible. it should be fun to be a member of my community. It will be all about learning new things with a sense of humility, not pretending to know the answer in advance, not lecturing to the public, actually having a lot of engagements with the public,

telling them what we are studying, and making it fun. And I think, you know, obviously there are new universities being established. There is one in Texas, the University of where the issue of freedom of speech is being highlighted. But I see it beyond the freedom of speech, There is also the issue of what should science work on?

Should it be more relevant to society? Having innovation in technology, in science, in the humanities being cultivated, which is not addressed in the new universities. Avi, one last question maybe to tie into some things that Eric and I have talked about in the past. It seems that there's a fundamental lack of curiosity. Many of my colleagues and many of the people I get to interview, and they talk their book literally sometime. I don't begrudge them for that.

I've, you know, boys got to sell us. book, right? But talk about the kind of lack of curiosity that you see outside of your field. Let's go outside of our own domains in particle physics, in fundamental physics, which is obviously, you know, Eric considers, I believe, the, you know, the pinnacle of not just physics, but of science, but of civilization, I think I agree with him. But the fact that people aren't curious about these big topics, and it takes someone like Eric to talk, why are the three generations of Fermio? That's a classic thing. Why don't you study those topics? I mean, yes, these are wonderful, But let me just steal man that.

What would you do in terms of if you had to do something other than search for extraterrestrial technology, intelligence, etc.? Would you be interested in these bigger, you know, ultimate questions of- Yeah, definitely. And what's the barrier to our understanding of them? What is lacking? Beyond the sociology, we talked about that. Eric and I fight about that all the time. But physical limitations, mathematics, do we need new math?

Is AI going to help us? What are the limitations to answer those questions that Eric wants to have answered before he departs? this mortal coil at age May of S-Rum. In the context of large data sets, which we are getting into right now, you know, the Rubin Observatory will have a huge amount of data. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has a huge amount of data. AI will become very useful going through these data sets that, you know, the human brain cannot really accomplish.

And we already saw a Nobel Prize in physics this year that is related to AI. I think that's a trend of the future. We'll see AI assisting scientists. There will be AI agents that are. are cultivating and new discoveries. The question is, who will get the Nobel Prize? If the AI system is the one to crack the puzzle, should it get the reward? Or is it the person who asked the question?

There will be subtle issues about that. Well, maybe AI will write, you know, sequel to losing the Nobel Prize. How about that, Eric? Eric, a product placement. I got a product placement there. Eric, what do you wish that people at universities were more curious about? Would it be, I mean, if you could just say, we need a Manhattan project to figure out how to get off this rock without chemical rocks.

I said this a million times. Nobody's out there. Heart of the problem is the universities are blotting up all the credibility, you know? Eric, Eric, stop with the university. I want to say, what would you do if you ask? No, no, no, what would you devote physics? Forget about the limitations of the real universities that Avi and I work at, okay, and that you've been affiliated with.

But tell me, what would you devote? And how would it work to get, like, what do we need Musk to do or somebody else to do to actually do the solution to the... I don't want to be here with my begging ball, but I'll just say... Not not your begging ball, no, no, no, what would you do? The first thing is, is that you have to figure out where are all the murdered theories? If there's only one game in town,

the only way it got to be the only game in town is by leaving a bunch of theories in a ditch. So right now there's an unmarked grave called 1984 to 2025. I would go and exune everything in that grave that was put out of its misery by some string theorist, quantum gravity theorist, or otherwise murderous person in the physics community.

And I would say, let's get back to the real problems. Before 1984, let me remind everyone what the problems of physics were up until Ed Witten started telling us it was to quantize gravity. Why are the three generations? Why is nature flavor chiral? Why are the 16 particles in the generation? Why SU3 cross SU2 cross U1? Why these internal quantum numbers?

Why does the Higgs have a quardic potential of the type that it does? Why are the Yukawa couplings present? It's the same thing that it's always been. We have to recognize that what we've been through is a tiny number of people completely subverting the field, driving it into a ditch, burying the bodies of everybody who tried to point out that this is wrong. And they've in general quoted two things to do this, one of which is quanting gravity,

this is an idea of Bryce DeWitt coming from about 1952, when he was a postdoc at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Bombay. And the other one is the misapplication of Ken Wilson and his renormalization program with effective theories to basically say, look, nobody's doing fundamental physics. We are only doing electro-week-scale physics. Let's stop pretending that we can get to the plank mask.

Obviously, everything between here and there is just impossible. We were much more successful before these two ideas descended on the physics community. Somehow, the effect of becoming sophisticated about effective theory, which by the way, I think is a huge insight of Ken Wilson. It's just been misapplied. And the claims of Bryce DeWitt, which I don't have the same positive, fuzzy feeling about, before people had those two pieces of sophistication, we were burning up the track. We were amazing. Then we became very sophisticated and we patted ourselves on the back for saying we've figured out why we can't make progress. So I think it's really important to reverse the brain rot that was brought about by

claiming that quantum gravity is the problem of our times, which it absolutely is not, and that these other things are mere artifacts of the physical world that we happen to live in. In fact, they are not. And coming from the Wu Yang Dictionary, which is really the Simon's Yang dictionary, what we can see is that we are almost certainly sitting atop of a differential geometry of which we are ignorant, that is far more beautiful than the theories that we know, and integrating the Higgs field in particular, which is really only needed because of the asymmetry of the weak force, should be a top differential geometric priority. Higgs fields that people work on in mathematics are valued in the adjoined bundle. They're not valued where a real Higgs field is.

We are not doing real science. And I'm just going to say very quickly, how do you know when somebody's doing real science. One, the dimension is four that they begin with. Two, they usually have a one-three signature metric. They're usually dealing with three generations of fermions. The group SU3 is present. If somebody is working in two dimensions with SU2 in Euclidean signature, that is not physics. That is a toy theory. And the problem is we've allowed a group of people now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s to spend their entire career playing with toys when they were supposed to be doing physics. I like that.

You mentioned that about, you know, the exhumation of bodies, Eric, because it reminds me, you know, we can kind of flip Max Planck, he can make him a role in his grave. We can say that science advances now one exhumation after another. Okay, out of time. Eric, I'll give you. Yes, please. Yeah. Just wanted to add that, you know, there was this notion that unification and elementary

particles really are the future of physics, but there is another dimension which is complex systems that involve. of many bodies and trying to figure out their complex behavior. And the human brain is obviously one such complex system. We now have AI that could potentially try to imitate some aspects of it in artificial neural

networks. I would just like to advertise the fact that complex systems are not less fundamental because there are emergent phenomena and we are obsessed with them such as free will, consciousness that might really be just incarnations of the complex human brain. That's all. So the entire field

of psychology may be just a derivative. of a complex system behaving in some ways that are hard for us to figure out. So study of complex systems could become much more. Absolutely, it's worthy, but it's not more fundamental, Avi. As you said, it's emerged. So I think we have to, if I can be in violent agreement with you, I'm only disagreeing by virtue of the fact that we need to be both respectful of the fact that not all questions that are worth talking about are reductionists.

Many are emergent. Very often it's the property of the solutions, let's say, rather than the property of the Lagrangian terms that matter. So we have to make sure that we don't get overly reductionist. That's always been a temptation. But in terms of what affects your life, especially if you get married, it's complex systems affect your life much more. There's an element in Albra Mavi is that things will go towards psychology, anthropology, sociology, and it's when the National Science Foundation started taking in many of these weaker fields because these things were very important,

but there's not a lot you can say about marriage. John Gottman has tried to study. It's very tricky. No, but in the age of AI, there could be a revolution because now we can process large data sets and see patterns that we couldn't see before. That's what I'm saying.

Now, the other thing I wanted to say is there is a question of incentive. You know, what is right now, I think that the poison in academia is that The incentive to get the grant money and to get prizes, honors, awards, and promotions pushes people. You know, it's just like a regression to the mean. They are trying to accommodate the wishes of other people and they are regressing to the mean rather than deviating from the mean and being original.

And you can create a culture in which the deviants will be rewarded. The people who innovate to explore new territories that nobody else looked into, these are the people who would be rewarded because even if they fail, you learn something new. When Albert Einstein made three mistakes, between 1935 and 1940, he argued that the gravitational waves do not exist, black holes do not exist, quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at the distance. He was wrong, but the three experimental teams that discovered he was wrong

got the Nobel Prize over the past decade. So what I'm saying is taking risks is really key. And the problem right now is you are, you know, you are being pushed to the mainstream without, you know, there is no reward that you can benefit from. But in fact, there is a lot of scrutiny that you get when you deviate. There's this notion that Eric's, you know, promulgating, and I think there is geometric unity, which is, you know, unequivocally unique. But it's also unequivocally receiving, you know, very little attention

compared to, as we already mentioned, string theory and other things. When we think about, you know, a geometric approach, as you said, you already offered one alternative. I don't know if I fully understand the implications, because it's just the first time I encountered it. But, you know, is there a danger of, you know, fighting the previous war, so to speak, that, you know, Einstein was so successful, the differential geometry, the geometric methods, churn Simons, all the different, you know, wonderful things that Eric mentioned, do you think that actually going back,

so to speak, is the right approach? Or is it that we fundamentally failed to explore in full great detail these alternative theories of people like Eric and Peter White and, you know, we've talked about others as well? You know, the biggest disappointment, I mean, we started by developing accelerators and then, every generation of new accelerators over the 20th century revealed new physics, a lot of phenomena that allowed us to figure out the standard model. And now we are at an age where you build the biggest accelerator and the only thing it does is confirm an idea from the 1960s, the Higgs boson. And that's all.

And there is no clear evidence for new physics. And so then people ask, okay, well, how do you know, it's around the corner. Is there anything? and maybe we should try something else. And I'm very much in favor of trying something else. There are different ways of getting new physics than just pushing the energy frontier. But we have to be imaginative.

Mapitome, something huge happened that wasn't the Higgs. And that was that all of those supersymmetry candidates got ruled out. Yeah, I mentioned that before. But that is a negative thing. No, no, no, no, it's not negative at all. If our community would listen to it, it's one of the biggest clues out there. Whatever, let me just say this.

If you think about supersymmetry as a freeway, my claim is right freeway, wrong off ramp. Well, I mentioned you with pro-erring super partners, all the super partners were the wrong off-ramp. If you want to say idea, you'd have to hold the conference that says, we had two big ideas in the 1970s, one of which was grand unification, the other of which was supersymmetry. both of them didn't get realized in the most trivial and obvious way possible. Let's go back to those ideas which are great ideas, unbelievably good ideas, and ask how would we reinstantiate them? But we don't do that, do we? So, Eric, you did mention that you had this great, you know,

where you had an experience recently at Caltech. When you hear the modern day, you know, kind of contenders for these things, are they fundamentally establishing a level of curiosity that you feel is going to pursued, even if it's not right. In other words, even if something you don't agree with. And if so, how do, yeah, so where do we go next? You tell me when we can finally have the argument about quantum gravity is not the holy grail of theoretical physics. It's not supposed to be what takes our energy. We are finding that it has failed. We have to have some sort of come to Jesus conference in which we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we tried many things that we now know don't

work. If we do not have that, we cannot ask the question, doesn't anybody else have any other ideas? Now, the thing that I can't understand is you have a person who's like starving, dying of starvation for progress, and they're sitting next to potentially food. But everything that they could eat, they have a different complaint. Oh, I don't like that after lunch and, you know, that's not to my taste, maybe for you, et cetera, et cetera. Well, ultimately, it's time to go through everybody's idea that is not quantum gravity, that is not string theoretic, that is not loop quantum gravity. And this is a big difference between what I would call the programs and the individuals.

One of the things that I found very interesting is that the string theorists are a program. And the reason that they see loop quantum gravity is the only possible thing that they have as a rival, which they're embarrassed by it. because it's clearly wrong to them. But my point is, is that it's a program. And the program people only see programs. I'm much more interested in the freaks, the weirdos, the neurodivergent,

everybody who has a personal program. I may dislike Stephen Wolfram's attempt to remove the continuum, but it's at least original. I may think that Peter Hoyt's two theories about, in particular, SU3 cross-SU-2-1 are not correct, but at least I understand what he's trying to do. He's trying to say, why is the weak force encoded as either on or off rather than just complex conjugates? Well, Garrett least he talks about E8.

It's clear to me that he's got a mistake in his situation that can't get cured. But I understand that he's trying to say that there are novel unifications of fermions and bosons from the point of fractional spin and integral spin. It just doesn't work at the level of quantization. All of these situations are crying out for the same. thing. It's time to stop protecting the quantum gravity group and expose them to the full fury of everything it is that they've used their positions as referees to suppress. The game is over and it's time to move. Choice hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to

help you remember. Same drive different day. Don't you wish you were getting away. Pack your beds and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too. Come face. in. It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh. And free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song book direct at source philtails.com. Beyond that, though, you had a very brilliant proposal that you and I've talked about on Modern Wisdom last September. And that's basically what I summarized in my video about you and Lenny, Susque and others, which I called Shelter Island 3, which would be kind of a conclave, you know, to use the Oscar winner, the title of the greatest minds. And I think we could have the freaks and geeks and everybody that you mentioned Eric, but I'm curious, who would Avi

invite? Avi, we're going to a Shelter Island three, going to the Rams head in. We're going to have, you know, a third generation of it. We're, by the way, multiple Nobel prizes, you know, from Lamb and Swinger and Feynman, all these great things came out of it. Do you think that's a good idea? Can we get funding for it? Can, can Galileo Project be involved? Can Eric and I be involved? Can we get the greatest minds together, even those that Eric, to his credit for his integrity, disagrees with violently and vehemently that he just named. And even people from the Orthodoxy, your colleagues, Lisa Randall, your colleague, Cameron Vafa, who can we, who would we invite? And what should we aim? Papers. Or at least is much more open-minded. No, no. I know. I agree.

Avi, can we do it. Can we do it on Shelter Island? I can get the venue. I can pay for the Ramshead in for a week. We can definitely do it. I can immediately do it. I can immediately. say who I'd not invite. Who? These are the people who are dogmatic. Also people that, you know, when I said, oh, that's an interesting expectation from string theory. Would you then, if we don't see it in nature, would that rule out string theory?

And the person would say, no, it actually rules out my idea of connect because string theory must be right. That kind of mindset, to me, is not very productive. The mindset should be, let's think of things that can be tested and validated, because, you know, it's not about job security, it's about figuring out nature. And nature is under no contract to have the most beautiful theory or the thing that makes us look smart when we deal with it in fancy math. So I would invite people who are originally in their thinking. And that includes, of course, using the universe as the laboratory. I should say that, you know, all together,

it's really important to gain credibility from the political system so we can get funded for the future. I would be very excited to be. be involved in a new way of doing science that is more innovative, open-minded, and cares about understanding the physical reality we live in, not in showing that we are smart, which is pretty much the current status. What types of people would you have there? Let's name some names of people you would have there. I assume Ethan Segal won't be getting an invite to years.

And do you think this is realistic? I mean, do you think the appetite is the same as it was collegially or not back in the 40s when this first two conferences occurred? Yeah, I think the appetite depends on the culture. that you cultivate. Right now, the young people are worried about job prospects, and they align themselves with the leaders of the field just in order to be able to impress them and get jobs.

When they are junior faculty, in order to get funded for their students to be supported, that is really the mechanics of being in academia right now. We should change the incentive if there is funding available for innovative thinking and for sketching a new architecture, rather than being a technocrat. you know, there are people who are able to build the building. They know how to put the bricks.

And these are the technicians that also will connect electricity and so forth. But then there are the architects. These are the people that think big about how the building should look like. And those are the people that we should invite the architects, not the technicians. That's my take on this. Eric, who would you invite? I'd invite a lot of my enemies, to be entirely honest. Who about it?

Raise the law. Well, no, no, because in part, you know, The point is that that's how they roll, is that they don't invite people who are pseudoscientists or whatever. It's like, for God's sakes, get over yourself, guys. We've been failing for four decades. It's not exactly your strong card to play. You know, my feeling about it is I would love to see people like Lisa Randall, like Avi. I'd like to see Frank Wilczek there.

I don't know if Ed Hooft is still. He's there. I talk to that. Yeah. But in general, you know, look, I'd love to have nothing better than to go at it with Lenny Suskin. or doesn't seem to be able to remember ever speaking to be with that. Say who? Exactly.

You know? And in particular, I think it would be very much fun to have some of the talking heads who represent physics to the outside world because, in fact, a lot of those people really aren't up to the task. And I think that in part it would be very violent. It would be very brutal. It would be very constructive, very creative, very exciting. And we haven't had this because what we do is we have, you know, in professional,

wrestling. You call them promotions. You have people who agree to fight each other according to a script. And that way nobody ever gets hurt and you just, you know, you keep going. My feeling about this is anybody who wants to come and claim, oh, we're the only, we're the only fish in the sea, we're the only birds in the sky. That's going to be an incredibly short ride. We just have to make sure that we do it on video. And then in my experience, those people will just not show up. They will say, I'm too busy. That's their favorite line. You know, I don't want to engage in a spectacle. This is beneath me. And so you'll have a very clear record of basically who's been swimming without their shorts. Well, the tide should be, it should be definitely documented in

order to encourage young people to speak up. Well, I've actually talked about this with Louis Alvarez Gameh and Stony Brook and in all series, since we have discussed actually doing this. And I think maybe this is the year it happens. As a suggestion, if Eric can bring in those high net worth technical support people that will actually, perhaps fund the new type of science that we are talking about. That would be amazing. Avi, that's like me asking somebody to give me good recommendations to go surfing. You're at Harvard. I don't think there's too many places with a $68 billion endowment that has raised tuition faster than inflation as let in fewer people than a Starbucks admits every...

Let me just say one thing on this point. If you want to actually get the smart money to come, you treat them like brains before you treat them like wallets. And the first thing we should do, if we're going to do that, is we should have a day or two where we get those people early to come to Shelter Island. And we put together a program so that they can understand what's being fought over because they're very, very smart. The fact is they don't have the particular training in what this is. So the most important thing is if you look at some, you know, it's a little bit like staring at a woman's neckline and she says, eyes up here. When you're talking to very rich people, the key question. question is, would you be happy to be talking to them if they had less money? Right. I was going to ask you, would we invite Elon Musk if he knew he wasn't going to give money? If you knew he was

or Peter Thiel, if they weren't going to give money, would you... I don't know his conference with Peter Thiel, okay? And, you know, I'll just tell you what happens. Somebody will talk down to Peter for 45 minutes and then I'll say, do you have any idea what I'm talking about? And then Peter will ask like three super incisive questions indicating that he has a lot of background in the area. And it's hysterically funny. So, you know, my feeling about this is I don't know what Elon Lose doesn't know. I don't know what Peter knows it doesn't know. Uri Milner is another person. We have to remember that Jeff Bezos was going to be a physics major at Princeton. Bill Gates was going to do math at Harvard.

All of these people, in general, are positively disposed towards physics until we screw it up in math. And so it's really important, in my opinion, to not talk down to them, not talk up to them, but to actually say, look, you are the only people who are in a position to make allocation decisions without having to check with mommy and daddy. It's really important that you be able to follow this so that you can allocate the same way as if you were talking about a sand tip. And the other thing we need to convince them, Eric, is that this is more important than government efficiency. You're then convinced Elon that survival is, but my claim is, are we serious about going beyond the standard model in general relativity, or have those

things set into our brains is basically, well, that's never going to happen. I think that the most important thing to realize whether you love or hate the new administration, it doesn't matter which. It's filled with vitality. And quite honestly, they look at everything from the position of, does it have huevos or does it not have huebos? Right. And if it doesn't have huevos, they don't have the time of day. So if we're going to seriously get back to physics, the dangerous kind, the kind that goes to places where you don't know what the engineering applications are, and they could be astounding in terms of wealth and exploring the cosmos, or it could be game over for planet Earth because it allows you directed energy weapons that you never thought possible, it doesn't matter. If we are talking about doing that,

we can get them a lot more interested. If we are talking about grinding at a snail's breadth of progress in fields that almost certainly aren't going to work, because we've now realized that our current theories are a piece of 24th century physics that mysteriously felt into the 20th century. Nobody's got time for that anymore. Yeah, well, I have a title for the conference, into the impossible. Oh my God, the branding is just incredible. We'll give out these mugs. We'll give out these mugs. They'll be merch for everybody. Here's a mug, everybody. Guys, I want to thank you guys so much. This has been awesome. Eric, it's so great to see you. Avi, it's always great to talk to you. And we got to do more of these. And, you know, just on the

advice topic of or the subject of talking to the most richest people in the world, they say, ask a rich person for money, and you'll get advice. Ask them for advice, maybe you'll get money. But I don't know. Some of them are much more clever than we scientists think we are. So, guys, thanks so much. Avi, thank you for

sending me that beautiful chunk of Omuamua that I'm here. Eric, thank you for sending me this extract from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I hope that we'll talk many more times, boys. This is so much fun. I wish everybody out there, good luck. And I'm serious about this conference.

going to make it happen. And we've got the context. I've got the time. Stopped having kids a little recently. I was informed that no more kids are the only option. What, Avi? As they often say, you have me at the look at hello. That's right. I'll have what she's having, though. That's what I like to say. Eric, Avi, Todarabat. Thank you, boys so much. Great talking to you. Thanks, guys. Good to be with it. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle.

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