Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 1 of 2: Eric Weinstein n- WTF Happened in 1971: An INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Birthday Extravaganza 🎉! (#181)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, everybody. Welcome to part one of this special two-part birthday Russia Shana edition of Into the Impossible with Brian Keating and Eric Weinstein. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Happy birthday to you. Thank you, my friend. It is great to be with good friends on a special auspicious occasion just after the new year. Shana Tova, let me be the first to wish you a happy $13,000,000,782. That's what we cosmologists now say.

Starting point is 00:00:41 I see. And can we fine-tune this to the Jewish calendar or what? Yeah, we synchronized. There's some calibration error in the very beginning. Some Lorentz Factor. Did I ever tell you my Lorentz Factor story? No. There I am, minding my own business,

Starting point is 00:00:55 wandering the fourth floor of the American Natural History Museum in New York. And we're going past all the dinosaur fossils, and I see this very proper, firm couple orthodox Jews wandering around. And I said, look, I mean, I just ask you guys a question. As a co-religionist, you guys take the scripture more seriously than I do. Do you believe in the origin story is told in our sacred texts? They said, of course. I said, how do you square the fossil record with modern science? And they said, well, we thought about it.

Starting point is 00:01:31 that for a long time and we decide that if God was moving sufficiently quickly relative to earth then the Lorentz factor could account for it all through time dilation so they worked at the speed of God that is that's quite admirable I have to say it's better than the you know God put the dinosaurs and made them look like they were old that that kind of time dilation is not is not something I you might as well learn a little bit of physics that's right although I did try to use once the red shift and blue shift effect for a radar gun with a with a police officer and those were two pretty lonely nights in prison and it's funny I use the radar gun example as a

Starting point is 00:02:17 example of a co-vector something that eats velocity vectors along a particular axis and spits out a number in a linear fashion we don't think about what does a co-vector look like but in some sense a contravariant tense or whatever you want to call it. Good example of that is a radar gun. Yes, and radar, of course, one of the two twin inventions of World War II that enable the victorious allied forces to win. And by my reckoning, Eric, and by some of your local tweets, recent tweets, that might have been one of the last things America really won.

Starting point is 00:02:52 Maybe the space program, you can argue that was incredibly successful. I want to ask you just yes or not, Are you optimistic about the future? No. Okay. Do you think the next 50 years will look anything at all like the preceding 50 years of life of myself on this planet? Not a chance. And a couple of those two things, the pessimism or lack of optimism, to be accurate.

Starting point is 00:03:17 No, no, it's not lack of optimism. You're asking me about relative probabilities. And I do believe that most branches of the decision tree are pretty sour at the moment. That is not to say that we don't have remarkable possibilities, but I don't see anyone in a class of people who can move the dial procedurally interested in any of the ideas that come from people who might be able to really contribute something new. So I see that in general, the people who are sitting in the chairs that can get things done or who can command those resources are very, very much trying to make sure that they're on the part of the Titanic that goes down last. But they don't seem to be interested in trying to get off. That's so amazing because today my in-laws called me and wished me a very happy California

Starting point is 00:04:11 admission day. You know, today was September 9th is the day that California, our great state, was admitted to the union. And I used to look at California when I was a wee lad and think, I'll never be lucky enough to live there. and I'll never be, have the good fortune to live there. You've lived here for a good deal of your life. How do you think the local factors are affecting your, you know, kind of forecast or your optimism slash pessimism relativity?

Starting point is 00:04:38 Oh, I don't think it's local at all. I mean, we've got a global pandemic. We have, we used to have a lot of really evil leaders that were really talented. And maybe you could even argue that we have fewer evil leaders, but they're much. much, much less talented as well. Now, in the case of a talented super evil leader, you don't want the person accomplishing their evil deeds efficiently. But it is insane to me that we have been breaking these conventions that are part of our culture when we are the nuclear, we're the thermonuclear stewards of the planet for the most part. I just don't understand us. Look, Brian, you're catching

Starting point is 00:05:21 me in a bad moment because it is your 50th birthday. and I want to be joyous and positive, but you're asking questions about a world that makes absolutely no sense. And by the way, I would say that when I started making these style points, and years later, even after I started making them, when I was doing the edge essays and I was talking about, like, you know, professional wrestling will take over the world and all that kind of stuff, or the original one about go virtual young man

Starting point is 00:05:52 about my coming to grips with the blockchain. because it fell into my line of sight early. Those pessimistic predictions, in some sense, that we had to depart the planet for the electron layer and that everything was going to become fake, I don't think that that's that surprising anymore. I mean, the number of articles that I've read that have figured out that everything is professional wrestling

Starting point is 00:06:16 unaware that there's any prehistory of this concept, this is clear. Look at the CNN numbers. Nobody's watching. Nobody believes. Nobody really thinks that a 78-year-old president makes sense. We can't figure out anything better to do. And I really, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:06:36 I mean, you can't ask me about hope in an average sense, because I think there's a lot of things we could do, but we're in no position to do any of them. Yeah, I started to review that. I'm going to have hopefully Balogy, our mutual friend, and influence on the podcast. And he's just, he makes you, Eric, look like, you know, a cheerful pep squad leader. I mean, and I don't say that lightly or with any disrespect to Balogy.

Starting point is 00:07:05 And I'm anticipating his appearance here in a couple of months. But, you know, hearing this retrace, and then I have to, you know, I'm a contrarian. So I'm going to push back with respect on you and to some extent on Balagy. But to say that this generation doesn't have. even more potential. You know, when you look at our kids, we look at our friends' kids, when you look at the students that I'm blessed to teach here, when you look at the technology, the increase in power,

Starting point is 00:07:32 the things that you can do now. I told, I was, I interviewed our mutual friend Ben Shapiro last week, and I said, Ben, you complain every year you come out with a new book, you complain about suppression of free speech. Here's your like 10th book in three years about the suppression of free speech. What gives? And by the way, Ben, you credit most of the, you know, kind of aggregating annoyance of technology.

Starting point is 00:07:52 with this oppression. And I said, and we're using this platform right now. I said, Ben, you've got 3 million plus followers on Twitter. You've got this huge Facebook following, YouTube following. You met your wife on Grint on Tinder. You have an only fan's account. All right. I got to go.

Starting point is 00:08:12 And, you know, he had to admit that this was true. That technology, we have the power in this little app and this phone. You and I are tweeting and twittering, whatever we're doing. I don't know. This is my second Twitter space. But anyway, Eric, we have more power than the kings and queens of Queens, of New York, of, no, of the ancient world. How can you be pessimistic? This is the greatest time in human history.

Starting point is 00:08:37 And we live in the greatest country in human history. Why be pessimistic? This is the weirdest thing is, hang on a second. Brian, can you just open your mouth? Stephen Pinker, are you in there? He's coming back on. No, don't worry. Well, but this is Pinker's bizarre.

Starting point is 00:08:52 I don't expect physicists to neglect a potential term. Right? So, you know, famously ballistic pendulum, you should a bullet into a wooden block on a string. The block absorbs the bullet and swings up and, in fact, comes to rest. So where did all the energy go? Everything is at rest temporarily. The answer is, well, you converted kinetic into potential. So that's what we did.

Starting point is 00:09:17 We converted our problems into potential problems of catastrophic proportions. And of course, if you throw out potential terms, you can get away with all sorts of things. You can get free energy because, hey, you don't have a conservation law. You can get something for nothing. Your chicks for free. That kind of thing doesn't really appeal to me because it's just a very simple slight of hand. I don't even know why we discuss such things. Furthermore, let me just push back a little.

Starting point is 00:09:46 That power, I think you should have Jeffrey Tubin on your podcast and ask, you know, what does it mean that you can broadcast everywhere to the world, you know, and that you can meet from people? I actually asked him, Eric, and he said he doesn't have enough time on his hands. Time on his hands. Come on, that's a quality joke. Give it to me, brother. Come on.

Starting point is 00:10:05 No, it's mean. I don't, you know, I've really, no, I'm bringing it up because I think that in some sense, actually, it's one of the things. I think I'm sick of me. Occasionally, I don't mind a zinger if somebody really, really deserves it. But the fact is that the reason everybody jokes about Jeffrey Tubman is everyone knows the danger of having microphones and video cameras and suffused through your lives that you don't control and don't understand it all times Broadcasting to God knows whom and so Let me get to your your your basic point. Yeah, there's a lot to be thankful for it's been very very peaceful

Starting point is 00:10:41 But you know Many many take a good farsing, you know The key point is is that Daniel a 525 is relevant. And the writing is on the wall. It just hasn't, it's not evenly distributed in terms of how to understand it. How much of the dye was cast in the year of my birth? I mean, the most monumental things that I'm aware of in 1971 involves something really prosaic and not really known by too many people. And that was the, you know, the final decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard in August 15, 1971. I don't remember that. But,

Starting point is 00:11:21 That takes two years actually to fully unwind until 1973. So you've got to be very careful because the Bitcoin community has monopolized the discontinuity. And I really think that Tyler Cowen is probably the tireless force that made more people aware of this. It was sort of a cult curiosity that I used to use 75. And then this website appeared called WTF happened in 1971. And by tying it to 1971 precisely, they accomplished the feat of fusing the discontinuity of the early 70s with Bretton Woods and the grand finale of the decoupling of our world currencies to convertibility. in gold. Now, I'm irritated by that because it's not their property and it really has, I think, to do with things that happen upstream from policy. So I really believe that if you look at all of

Starting point is 00:12:38 these crazy graphs, Tyler was right to focus us. There were other people who were part of this cult And I tie it probably to science, that science is upstream of technology. Technology is upstream of innovation, and therefore the economy. And I believe it was the fact that science stopped providing the seed corn for this whole growth regime that sort of so the scenes of our own destruction, because the key feature that the U.S. that wasn't understood is an Achilles heel is that it's a very complicated, counterintuitive, enlightenment-based culture. And it has to pay a dividend to keep people interested.

Starting point is 00:13:25 Now, I'm happy to be fascinated by free speech and liberty and all of these things sort of for their own sake. But I think that's a minority position. It has to pay off in homes and vacations. And it has to pay off in a sense of the future. And I believe that the future collapsed. We don't have a picture of life after our own demise that matters to us. for the most part. Now, you do, and I do, because we have kids. But imagine you didn't have

Starting point is 00:13:52 kids and imagine that you didn't necessarily believe in a bearded dude in the cloud or an afterlife. How do you make sure that you get people to care about the world beyond their own death? And I don't think we have an answer for that at the moment. This is a point of serious discussion with Sam Harris, my friend, who I believe that he's quite correct that if we could care about our own death reliably at scale and the world that follows that, we could be ethical people, but you can't get most people to care about these abstractions unless it somehow pays off for them. So heaven is a dividend, a second home is a dividend, you know, great prospects for your children as a dividend and the system stopped paying a dividend and started revealing itself as having a

Starting point is 00:14:44 pyramidal structure in the absence of growth. So we're talking with Eric Weinstein. I'm getting some complaints on Twitter that people can't hear you. If you could move the phone a little bit closer to your mouth, I know. The phone of the mic. The phone. The mic is totally fine. You're fine. But if you have the phone open, I have the phone in a briefcase. It's going to cause a feedback loop. Let's try it. Let's do an experiment. All right. This is my one birthday extravaganza. Speaking of my birthday, I would be honored if any of you would give me a follow on Twitter or on our on YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating in both locations.

Starting point is 00:15:23 I do interviews with the world's brainiest and most fascinating folks, from billionaires to Nobel Prize winners to both in the case of Eric Wines. But later on today, we have Eric's friend, Julian Barbour, on the first. the podcast talking about his provocative. I do not know Julian Barbour. Well, he knows you. And that's all that matter. And I know of his work. I appreciate you.

Starting point is 00:15:46 So the Janus Point will be discussed later on at noon Pacific 3 p.m. Eastern. So I do hope you'll tune into YouTube for that. Dr. Brian Keating on every platform that is available. So it's natural to look back. And that's fitting for this term, the Janus point, when you look back and you look forward. At the same time, like the Roman god of, you know what? Janus was the god of, Eric. Pardon me?

Starting point is 00:16:10 Do you know what Janus was the Roman god of? Deception. No. No. He was the god of portals. Portals. Is that right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:16:21 He was the god that went forward and backward simultaneously, and he did so in January. That's when January is named after him, because we look back, we look forward. I'm always fascinated by origin stories. And I want to know, actually, I've never asked you, what got you interested in science to begin with? What's your scientific, your mathematical origin story? It's a weird question. My father's talked to me about relativistic effects. And I'd never heard of length contraction, time dilation.

Starting point is 00:16:52 I was a little kid. He used to give me legal problems. Like, you know, a guy goes down to the dock to see a boat called peerless and agrees to purchase it for $100,000 thinking it's a steel. And it turns out that there's another boat. called Peerless for $10,000, it's worth $10,000. It's a junker of a boat. What should happen, given that the two people had two different models and they agreed to something? So that was the style of problems that he as an attorney would give me. That was called the good ship peerless

Starting point is 00:17:25 given to him in law school. And then one day he just sort of sprung on me, what do you think happens when something goes faster than you can imagine close to the speed of light? How would you perceive it? And they started telling me these things, and I couldn't believe what he was telling me. It was the most romantic, bizarre, the idea that the universe contains such counterintuition and beauty and perverse beauty at that, I was fascinated by. I think the other thing that really caused me to sort of go towards science is that I came to see most adults as saying wildly incorrect things and just sort of ubiquitous. constantly incorrect, not occasionally they would screw up.

Starting point is 00:18:13 And I think that as a kid, I started to believe that more or less the self-description of the world was so wildly off that I couldn't even believe that that was possible. So you have to ask yourself, am I crazy? And one great way to check whether you're crazy is to try to understand some mathematics, some physics, some biology, can I I program a computer so that the code compiles. And so in certain sense, it's also a check. Is my brain functioning properly? And I think that what I learn is that you're not allowed to analyze the world in which you live

Starting point is 00:18:55 without being considered insane because the description is so far off. And was this also not communicated to your younger brother, Brett, who is also a scientist, along with his wife, Heather Hying, will be on The Into the Impossible podcast, thanks to Eric, being the shotgun and the shit making the shit look between myself and Brett. And we will host them for their new book, which is wonderful. I'm reading an advanced copy called Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century. I want to ask you about that book. I don't know if you've read it, but there's a lot of you in it in a certain sense that only the biggest,

Starting point is 00:19:38 most magisterial kind of concepts are addressed. But in one passage, they say, something to the effect, they're talking about a Tibetan herdsman and how his epigenetics influence himself and that he essentially passes on his genes by sheer force of will because there's nothing else for genes to do but reproduce. And I thought that was a little bit teleological. It was describing this kind of machination or thought process to what is in an essence, not only in the case of DNA, but cultural epigenetic manifestations. These are not things that can be really thought to have purpose. What do you make of that?

Starting point is 00:20:16 Do genes have teleology? Do they know what they're doing? Do they have a per? If so, how could they possibly know that? Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199, and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove 7 piece outdoor dining set for only $499.

Starting point is 00:20:41 This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. Only Exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Well, not in the standard description. There's a key question about, is there any kind of a look-ahead function so that anything can have purpose? And I think, you know, the way Brett developed it, he came up with a, you know, a term that I quite like, which is perception-mediated selection.

Starting point is 00:21:19 When you can, when you're consciously, see, there's an old question about what is consciousness? And one of the theories is the consciousness is what is, that which can possibly direct non-smooth muscle to contract is one of the theories. And, you know, you think like, well, that's kind of a weird, a weird generating function for something like consciousness. But the point is that directing your body to do things, eat this and not that, you know, make an advance romantically on this person and forego that person. All those sorts of basic reproduction, fighting, eating, evading predators. That may be the sort of the reason for consciousness.

Starting point is 00:22:11 And I think that once you have agency, I'm... I'm very fond of pointing out that intelligent design is actually weirdly part of Darwin through perception-mediated selection. Now, people don't like that, the idea that you can choose, for example, to make a mule by crossing a donkey and a horse, and you can choose to breed those lines independently in order to make more mules. You are intelligently designing the mule. Now, the reason that scientists don't like that is they want to put a perimeter around

Starting point is 00:22:47 the word intelligent design because they want that term to result in instant death. Now, I don't believe that Jesus belongs in discussions of selection, and I don't like the religious explanations, the young earth stuff. But there are also a lot of scientists, incidentally, who are religiously motivated to try to figure out selection paradigms and Darwinian paradigms to make them work because they don't feel that the current understanding understanding of selection, particularly the Neodarwinian sort of synthesis, is valid. And this issue about how purpose arises, now I'm sort of, I take an atheist scientific perspective, which is that purpose grew up in our consciousness, or to some extent in our subconsciousness,

Starting point is 00:23:38 as an aid to fitness. So the idea is that that which aids in fitness is retained on average. That's how I think it goes. But somebody else might say you're just ignoring how miraculous life is and the fact that it occurred here may be a sign of purpose. And I think that there are people with whom you can have that conversation who are scientifically honest and religiously motivated. And there are people with whom you can't have that conversation who are either crazy from, you know, they're Jesus addled and their scripture addued. or they are so focused on getting rid of religion that they become irrational. And you see that, particularly in some of the older Darwinians, who would like to say,

Starting point is 00:24:31 we tied everything up with a bow in the early 70s, and there's no need to revisit it because we kill God and the deed is done. That's right. There is no God, and Dawkins is his prophet. Well, you're repurposing an old joke about Paul Derrick. And so I would caution you not to. Okay. I will say about Paul Dirac, he was not only the inventor of the antiparticle,

Starting point is 00:24:55 but he was sort of the anti-eric in the sense that there was said of Dirac that he would never use two words, Eric, when none would do. He was not very loquacious, as they say. Go ahead. You're going to rise to Paul's events. Well, first of all, I mean, the closest analog to Paul Dirac, if we're going to do physics history, as you well know, was it Oppenheimer's letter of recommendation who said Feynman was a second Dirac but this time human? The important aspect of Paul Dirac is not the quirks of his personality, and I do think that Graham Farmello did a wonderful job raising the issue of autism and neurodivergence in the case of Paul Dirac.

Starting point is 00:25:36 But Paul Dirac said quite a lot for a guy was supposed to be silent. And in particular, I think he is the most courageous in that he was, he and Einstein and Yang were all willing to chip away at the fairy tale we tell about the scientific method. And directs in particular his 1963 Scientific American article points out that a kind of naturality, which often gets called beauty, which is confused. And I think by the string theorists and Sabine Hassanfelder has gone into this at great length. But Dirac's concept of beauty, different from the string theory concept of beauty, is one of robust intellectual coherence, and that we should privilege systems that have robust intellectual coherence because the agreement with experiment is highly dependent upon the instantiation of an abstract idea. So if you choose a slightly different instantiation, you may show zero agreement with experiment, even though the basic idea is right. And I would say that I am not the anti-Dirac by any means, nor was Feynman.

Starting point is 00:26:48 He was a pro-Darachist, and I'm a pro-Daracist, and I think that the superficial aspects of personality are orders of magnitude less interesting. Yeah, and when I think about these notions, as we were talking about origins of life and of consciousness just a minute ago, I couldn't help but think of my friend Stephen Meyer, who wrote a book, The God Hypothesis, and how it dovetails with something you said over a year ago now, I think, on the portal. And you're talking about Schrodinger states in society, in culture. You're talking about the reason that we fight about things like abortion, which is in the news, or ending military conflict or Second Amendment, et cetera, is because we can't really handle the quantum superposition needed to have subtle this. nuanced discussions. And I was thinking about that in the context of origin of life, because

Starting point is 00:27:47 it is true that there is no explanation in any cosmological sense of the low entropy state of the origin of the universe. There's no code or something that traces itself to a low entropy state, which is not in some level organized by some mind, as Stephen points out. And that's not proof of God. You know, my, as I've told you in the past, my problem with origin of God, origin of life and all these things is that it always will at some point I have to agitate for a personal God. But in the context of things like these superposition states, another one that you and I have talked about a lot is the existence of aliens and unidentified aerial phenomena, where it's not clear that one side has the monopoly on correctness. And I wonder, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:35 How many of these Strodinger states can a society handle? We've got to cut it out. This is getting absolutely absurd. I mean, let me go back to my own. I don't know why I have an interpretation of quantum mechanics that I don't know who to reference it to, but I don't know who other than me says it this way. The weird thing about quantum mechanics is that, or quantum theory more generally, is that you get to ask bad questions of a system,

Starting point is 00:29:07 and the system responds by giving you answers when it really shouldn't. And that's a puzzle to me where if you say of a state, you know, are we in a situation where we need freedom or we need safety when you're talking about the coronavirus? Clearly, we both want freedom and safety, and we want to somehow balance them in a free society. To say you will only accept one or the other is madness. And that's what a quantum question is. It's where you're asking a superposition, well, which are you? Are you Catholic or Protestant?

Starting point is 00:29:54 Are you pro-Soviet or against the Soviets? There's no idea of anyone saying, I actually really appreciate, you know, some aspect of the Soviet Union and I really detest others. So this all or nothing thinking is sort of asking inappropriate questions of superposition states. And that's what quantum theory does. It gives you artificial answers at random, whereas classical theory tells you you're asking a terrible question. Now, questions are called observables, answers are called eigenvalues. And the answers that are on the multiple choice portion of the exam are called eigenstates. And you ask a question where the answer isn't any one of the multiple choice answers.

Starting point is 00:30:38 It's some combination of them, and that's not something you can opt for. So I think that in a weird way, there is a parallel in our society where we're not allowed to ask good questions that speak to quantum superpositions, at least they're analog in questions of policy. But where do you see us going now? Let's get controversial with science. With the role of science as the replacement for religion, for gods, for deities, where do you see us going where science is sort of being politicized?

Starting point is 00:31:11 Not sort of. Let me just be bold and say it. Science is being politicized. It's being used as a cudgel. And I wonder, you know, if we rely on science. You know, Carl Sagan used to say, here, I'm going to bring in my finger puppet. It's my birthday. I can use as many damn finger puppets.

Starting point is 00:31:25 puppets as I want. Okay, there's my finger puppet, man. I'm going to give you the finger. Carl Sagan used to say it's a real tragedy when a society has unbridled technology and no understanding how it works. And, but I think now, now we have, you know, kind of almost the, like we have worship of science. We have integrated science completely, technology, and we're sort of worshiping science. And so where do you see that going? Is that the, is that the reason for pessimism about the next 50 years when we turn 100? I don't even know how to answer this question. Nobody's really, well first of all, science isn't in one state.

Starting point is 00:32:05 And I would like to bring this sort of to the 1971 through 73 issue that you used to sort of launch this episode. Biology has a million things to do because the phylogenetic tree fanned out in all different directions. And so, you know, if you understand something in fruit flies, do you understand it in zebra fish. Do you understand the same thing in C. Elegans, the nematode or in, you know, Muspredis or something? You can ask the same question a bunch of different times and there's no shortage of systems. So we're nowhere close to exhausting biology. Is it as exciting as the 10 years between the discovery of the double helix for DNA and its understanding as the genetic code by Marshall Nirenberg a decade later? I don't know. You can

Starting point is 00:32:54 figure that out for yourself. Is it a good? as exciting as the operon, the pajama experiments. I don't think so, but you can make a good case that things are plenty interesting. I wouldn't disagree with that. Math has been proceeding at pace. There have been lots of great things that have happened. What the heck happened to physics is the really interesting

Starting point is 00:33:18 question, because its behavior was very different. The last person, the youngest person, I think, to really contribute to the standard model turned 70 this year. So there are no young women or men who have contributed to the standard model under the age of 70. And that loss of physics, I don't think people understand how catastrophic it is because physics has passed like thermonuclear weapons out of the public. consciousness. And it's the only subject that has really powered the economy at the level of

Starting point is 00:34:03 growth that we've seen through semiconductors, through communications, and electromagnetic spectrum, what have you, through the World Wide Web, which came out of CERN. When we lose physics, we lose also hope. And I really think this goes back to the alien question. Let's assume that aliens are here and just stipulate to that for the moment to explore that branch of the decision tree because people are terrified to even say those words. If they are here, do we think that they got here through time dilation from distant galaxies and that they've just accepted that the cost of exploring the cosmos is that you never get to see anyone again? I don't know. Most likely not. Most likely if there were aliens here, and this is something I think I haven't said fully in public,

Starting point is 00:34:53 they would be here because somebody somewhere in the galaxy would not only know about Einstein but would know about a theory that did to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton, which is to render, you know, Newtonian physics is a limit of Einsteinian physics. Now the question is, what is Einsteinian physics the limit of? And so when people think about, is it possible to traverse the cosmos, they always say things that are really very puzzling to me, One of which is you must be talking about faster than light communication, faster than light travel. And I always say, well, no, you're trapped in an Einsteinian paradigm where that's the only way to do things in your understanding.

Starting point is 00:35:32 But if you have a more complete theory, it may be able to evade the speed limit, like knowing a shortcut, rather than, you know, zooming around on a ring road. you know, if you can go across the middle of the road, for example, you can show up someplace far faster than somebody would imagine if you had to traverse a much longer path. So I personally think that if you want to imagine that humans survive, the odds of us surviving on a single terrestrial surface where every stupid person has a vote. And imagine that you have an Elon Musk, not of a space program, but somebody who has their own individual nuclear weapon, you know? When you start to democratize the power of the nucleus of the cell and of the atom, it's very dangerous for all of us to be on the same surface because you could have a virus escape from a lab. You could have a nuclear exchange whose radioactive fallout, you know,

Starting point is 00:36:38 gives us very few places to hide. We've got to fan out. And if there's an opportunity to leave, we've got to take it not because this isn't a great place, but because we have to diversify so that we're not all in the same experiment. I don't want to be in an experiment with our current leadership. I don't want to be an experiment with an anti-scientific world that is depending on science, hating science, abusing science. I want to use science so that we can separate so that people who have full belief in total freedom

Starting point is 00:37:13 or total safety or believe that two plus three equals a chicken or whatever that is that they believe. They need their own planets. They need to explore those ideas on their own planets. And those of us who basically want to build our families, build our knowledge of the world, try to be decent to each other, be open to markets but recognizing that they have failures. People who want to lead a more reasonable life need a divorce from people who think that you can continue with, like the fourth turning model oh you know it's a cycle and it always goes through no it doesn't always go through this as i've come to say um strong men make good times and nuclear weapons

Starting point is 00:37:54 good times make weak men weak men and nuclear weapons make end times don't don't give me any more of this infinite cycle nonsense um so you know my feeling about this is aliens or hope in part if there were aliens here i would say that the odds that the einsteinian theory is merely an effective theory, shoot way the heck up. It means that those singularities of Schwartzschild and the initial singularity of the cosmological models are telling us that the theory isn't complete and that there's probably a way of evading the speed limit without breaking it. That's the madness I'm willing to share with you on your breath.

Starting point is 00:38:34 When I think about these notions, again, not to bring it too much back to your brother's new book, but he makes the powerful point that, you know, the fundamental element of society is the campfire. And around the campfire, tales would be told and stories would be woven and nonfiction would be told as well. Here's how you catch a rabbit. Here's how you, you know, what kind of cream to put on a burn, et cetera, et cetera. And no one person, the message I take away interpreting my own way, no one person can have all the information. And that's kind of arguably, you know, another reason for diversity, if one can use a, a term and that we need sort of no since nobody can have it all maybe the guy who believes in

Starting point is 00:39:16 you know in something kooky and two plus two equals a chicken maybe he or she they think that they know the best way to weave a net to let the minnows go through how do you in other words how do you know who to what what's bathwater and what's baby i have to say i've gotten completely bored of this question and it's not nothing against you but we are living in a time that privileges this idea of like, no, one person and we're all a community and we're all getting to get. So stupid. Look at the Patriot Act, you know.

Starting point is 00:39:52 One person opposed the Patriot Act in the Senate. That was Russ Feingold. And, you know, it's a community. It's a coming to get. No, stop it. Russ Feingold was right. The rest of you idiots were wrong. It was very clear.

Starting point is 00:40:04 This was a degradation of our freedoms. And one guy has the ball, period. end. There is no more. That's the way I view it. Very often, and it's nothing against the campfire and the beauty of Kumbaya and all that stuff. Sometimes things are broadly distributed. Sometimes, as famously Freeman Dyson, the physicist needed Freeman Dyson, the mathematician, but the two of them weren't talking to each other, even though they both lived inside of the same brain case. First guest into the impossible podcast, Freeman Dyson. Perretchen.

Starting point is 00:40:36 time. But what I'm trying to get at is, you don't know what time you're in. And I haven't read what Brett said about the campfire is not the fundamental unit of human civilization. You know, any more, do orchopods have campfires? It's an abstraction. Do they have culture, though? Sure, they have culture. Bacteria have culture, but I mean, there's culture and there's culture.

Starting point is 00:41:04 Again with the dead jokes. No, I think that the point is that, you know, he's saying something important, but I don't want to have to comment on whether the campfire is the fundamental unit of civilization. I want to ask, why are Peter is mentioning on Twitter, our friend Peter McCormack, He's saying we should have the creator of this website, what the F happened in 1927.

Starting point is 00:41:37 I don't want to have another Bitcoin conversation. I love Peter. But seriously, you don't get to repurpose the 1970s thing as just some simplistic thing about Brettonwood's Bitcoin and real money in Austrian economics. And I'm also sort of sick of this whole cyber hornet phenomenon where anybody who dares say anything against Bitcoin, you know, there's also harassment issue in that community. Sure, sure. Yeah, I don't. But again, you talk to Brett about the campfire,

Starting point is 00:42:12 talked to Peter McCormick about 1971 in Breton Woods. I personally think that this is completely misguided. The danger, it's like what Black Lives Matter did to everybody's frustration. It took everybody's frustration and said it's all about George Floyd. And the Bitcoin people said the early 1970s is all about Bretton Woods, which it isn't. And it's not all about the campfire. This goes back to the issue of these are simplistic perspectives where we've got to pull back. And, you know, physics needs to restart our economy and get us off the planet.

Starting point is 00:42:54 And there's all these ideas that we're going to become wise or our money is going to solve everything. Bitcoin fixes this, Bitcoin fixes everything. No, we need to separate. We need distance from each other. Some of us are so dangerously confused. And think about somebody who, like, for example, doesn't accept physics and doesn't accept the law of the excluded middle because they came through some critical theory department

Starting point is 00:43:19 that tells you everything is relative. That person is broadcasting their message through code that they do not understand and could not actually do themselves using their theories, using zeros ones, the electromagnetic spectrum, engineering talents, all sorts of things that they reject. And then we build this entire thing for them to broadcast, hey, you know, that's just your opinion, man. It's just like, you need your own planet.

Starting point is 00:43:47 You get a planet and you get a planet and you get a planet and I don't want to be on any of your planets. I want to be on planets with sensible people. One of my kids likes to play a game called Solar Smash, where you live. literally nuke different planets with high-powered lasers from some vantage point in space. Why are so many economics professors poor? I want to get to Elon Musk and his retweeting or liking you, et cetera. And by the way, I wonder, you know, I heard yesterday, you know, some famous guy, this guy, Chris Rufo, I think, he got unverified from Twitter.

Starting point is 00:44:20 And I was like, well, that's, that's, you know, like my mind. Look, we've all accepted that all of our conversations are adulterated, right? Like if you look at craft singles and it says American cheese product or something like that. Cheese flavored. Why? You know, and you're surprised that there's some weird ingredients in it. It's not just coming out of account. Yeah, I don't ask the question again.

Starting point is 00:44:50 Why are so many professors of economics poor? First of all, economics basically splits into two categories. There are people who are vying for power and there are people who are trying to do sort of technical work. And in general, I don't find them to be the same people. So the microeconomists in general are not trying to get to Jackson Hole and conferences to figure out how the Fed should steer things or whatnot. I think that the basic problem is that it appeals to a very rigid mind. So if you build everything around Homo Economicus, which is what we did historically,

Starting point is 00:45:35 which is this model that clearly doesn't represent how human beings actually are in the world, you tend to select for very rigid thinkers who have a particular penchant for finding surprising things that people, lies that people tell themselves in each other. So famously, a professor of economics who we're familiar with suggested that no one should give gifts because it's much more efficient to give cash. And that's what economists have historically liked to do. They have this idea that relentlessly and unflinchingly, they apply tools of utility maximization.

Starting point is 00:46:13 This is sort of a definition due to Gary Becker, finite constraints, and they try to turn humans into robots and make the robots maximally efficient. And if that's what appeals to you, it's very likely that you're not going to be very effective in amassing wealth. I mean, particularly if you're doing global macro trading. Global macro is a very strange thing. If you have real macroeconomists, because you can invest in macro instruments, why would any true macroeconomists

Starting point is 00:46:51 need to pester the government for taxpayer dollars if they had theories about the future? that gave them an understanding of the world, they should be able to speculate their way into wealth. It turns out to be much harder. So it's weirdly adversely selected for people who claim that they can understand macroeconomics, but in fact, through their applications for grants, reveal that they don't know how to predict the future. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Starting point is 00:47:20 Enough. Enough to get lost! or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises.

Starting point is 00:47:40 It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. So now my follow-up, you walked right into my trap, sprung on you, my birthday present for today, talking to Eric. Eric Weinstein, proprietor of the portal podcast and other plosive things that you can find on the world wide web contained within walled gardens such as throttled accounts and so forth

Starting point is 00:48:05 and verified blue check marks, etc., etc. But you can get me a birthday present, and you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. Dr. Brian Keating, I'm talking with Dr. Julian Barboor later on today at noon, and I have conversations with Michael Saylor and Peter Schiff, and I also have nine nobable. prize winner soon to be 10 and maybe even 11 or 12 for my new book think like a Nobel prize winner comes out in two weeks can pre-order everywhere books are to be pre-ordered but Eric the reason I brought up economic what makes you think that physics professors are any different in other words why are they broke so to speak in the sense that not a whole lot of

Starting point is 00:48:41 them you know what I A trust to watch my kids or B trust to fix my my 1979 Volkswagen rabbit come on if you gave physicists money and autonomy and you let them get back to their actual culture. Wouldn't you trust them a whole lot more than you do right now? And I think this is the thing that's really irritating me. Why, if you ask, do I trust the NIH? Do I trust the CDC? Do I trust my government? Well, the answer, of course, right now is no. But it's very leadership dependent. And I don't trust physicists right now because physicists are induced to lie in order to survive. And whenever you tell somebody, hey, we're going to put you under total transparency, we're going

Starting point is 00:49:32 to starve you for resources, we're going to make you reapply, re-justify yourself constantly, what is somebody supposed to say, hey, the field hasn't moved in 50 years, it's incredibly hard, I want to diverge from what are thought to be the smartest people in the world and what they believe because I think they're all crazy? That's what you have. to do to be a physicist now and function in theory. And so in general, I would trust very, very wealthy physicists in theory in particular, and there just aren't very many of them. And the reason is because physics like music is a fatal attraction. Why the theory? I mean, obviously I'm battling the Upton-Sinclair urge to advocate for

Starting point is 00:50:16 something on whom, on which my paycheck depends. I'm an experimental physicist. And to be an experimental physicist, one needs to know an awful lot of theory, just not have the ability to do theory. But we've revolutionized the universe in a practical sense. All the things you mentioned from the transistor, the laser, they got telecommunications, those all came from experiment. In fact, some of them came from particle physics or radio astronomy. So... Okay, great. So let's talk about the experiment that you want to do that revolutionizes. I have nothing against experiment-leading theory, but you have to appreciate. Sabina is quite correct about some things and wrong about others, for example.

Starting point is 00:50:56 She's quite correct that the current crop of physicists is widely suffused with crazy ideas that have been very destructive of the culture of theoretical physics. On the other hand, I don't see the experiment that somebody's itching to do on a tabletop that is likely to change everything. everything. So if there is a precision experiment, we don't always have to go higher and higher energies. We can go to higher and higher precision or we can do something super clever that nobody thought to do. But I don't see, the great puzzle of where we are in physics right now is that the system almost closes prematurely. And so with the Higgs field, but for dark energy and dark matter, you could make an argument, maybe this is all there is. Maybe there isn't anything more than three generations of fermions and a bunch of bosons and it's kind of a mess and it's kind of beautiful and that's what it is and why do you think there's more to be had

Starting point is 00:51:57 That is the great danger about what befell us and to be blunt. I don't think you guys have the money the skills the energy levels or the precision or the idea about what experiment to do unless like let's say this muon Anomaly turns out to be right or something like it to lead us out of this valley and in particular I'm not scared by experimentalists trying to do theory as well. I would like to see more unified minds that aren't either soldering something in a tunnel in Switzerland or at a whiteboard. I'd like to see who's doing both. But I think it's a little bit oversimplified. I mean, again, all the things you're talking about, getting off the planet, you know, Werner von Braun didn't look into the rocket equation and Newton. Oh, let me devise or Goddard, 100.

Starting point is 00:52:48 80, 30 years earlier. These are tinkers. These are innovators. These are inventors. These are explorers. And I know you didn't come to, you know, have a battle royal about the, you know, Coke versus Pepsi, experiment versus theory. I think a healthy environment has both. And some of the best physicists you've already mentioned. We all agree on that. That's not what we're disputing.

Starting point is 00:53:08 What I'm trying to say is is much more repugnant and horrible and awful than that, which is where are we going to? to find the Feynman's, the Dirac's, the Einstein's, and the Yangs. And OK, you have a great experimentalist. But the power of the human mind to think this thing through, nothing more than a whiteboard, it's incredibly unfortunate that we have a group

Starting point is 00:53:41 of graying physicists. Almost no, you know, look, under 70, nobody's made contact. from fundamental theory with experiment essentially. That's an insane situation. So it's very hard for me to continue to point and say, hey, the system really works.

Starting point is 00:54:00 But you know what? The system really works. The problem is the transparency. Nobody wants to say this. Who's got a slush fund? We need slush funds where you can just dip into a drawer and say, yeah, I'm paying you for three years. Well, why should Elon do that or Jim Simons? Why shouldn't it be the government?

Starting point is 00:54:17 Why don't we have, you know, more agitation on behalf of the lipstick equivalent of our budget going to NASA and, you know, how many the dancing videos on TikTok can one have? Sorry, I'm not sure with the question. Should our government be doing it? I think the government's the only... Yeah, of course. You're saying where there is no, you know, man, step in. The government is in a contract that it's welching on, right? And the idea that it is not a signed contract where we didn't.

Starting point is 00:54:48 go to a lawyer and say, hey, I love you so much, let's get a lawyer and paper the pre-nups so that we can get it on. This is craziness. We had an agreement. The government welched, and we're not allowed to patent things. Like, for example, I thought about the fact that many of my academic colleagues think nothing of the idea that they should be able to put anybody's name on whatever it is that they want. So you do the work, somebody else's name, Hey, it's just the Matthew effect. It's just the Matilda effect. It's nothing personal.

Starting point is 00:55:22 Oh, you know, nobody, you can't work on your own theory. Well, science progresses funeral by funeral. We've got all of these ways of excusing the fact that the system fell apart. We call it the Matthew effect, the Matilda effect, and funeral by funeral, for example. We discourage people at every possible stage. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Correlation does not imply causation. all of our thinking

Starting point is 00:55:48 that is meant to keep us honest and safe so that we don't think that we've achieved something like we haven't as in string theory that kind of thinking has now been repurposed to try to terrify anybody from moving and from doing things

Starting point is 00:56:10 imagine that Dirac told you that he'd taken a square root of the Klein-Gordon equation and the only thing is that the numerical coefficients weirdly anti-commuted. So he was looking for numbers like 7 and 3, where 3 times 7 was equal to negative 7 times 3. And you'd say, well, that's stupid. But then you don't realize, oh, they're matrices, not numbers. And in two years or three months or four hours, he's going to realize it's matrices. Well, now what we're doing is we're shutting everyone down.

Starting point is 00:56:42 We're making everybody talk about their work. We're taking people's names off of their own work, handing it to somebody else. We're making them apply for grants repeatedly. We're scrutinizing each other's stuff. It's just so dumb. We need a culture where we're in control of our own ship and everyone else can get the hell out. And we know how to make that work. That's why you have leaders of the field like an Oppenheimer.

Starting point is 00:57:07 And sometimes those leaders would disagree with each other as Teller and Oppenheimer did. Let's say, okay. But effectively, we need the bureaucrats, the hell out of our subject. We need the educators out of our subjects. We need lower-level people who tend to think about everything in cut and dry terms out of the subjects. We need to reinvigorate these subjects with imagination, with resources, and of course it should be the government, and of course they should either honor their understanding of the agreement,

Starting point is 00:57:40 or let us patent the semiconductor, the World Wide Web, the electromagnetic spectrum, and we'll just charge them a royalty, and we'll fund it that way. And physicists will be flying around in their Gulf streams, and everybody else can be on a Greyhound bus, however you want to do it. And then they'll have portraits hanging in their offices in their $1,000 eames chairs, and then it'll all get taken away, and we won't have toys to play with it. Well, that's a reference to the SSC, where we angered certain members of Congress, in particular Sherwin-Bowlert, I believe,

Starting point is 00:58:14 by physicists saying, we want nice things in our offices. We want to be part of the world that we're powering. And I've changed my mind on that. I used to think physicists were arrogant pricks who wanted to put portraits in their office and pretend that they were Titans of Industry or something like that.

Starting point is 00:58:33 My new view is they're arrogant pricks who deserve to put portraits in their offices. Because someone has to, and why not us? No, I mean, I agree there should be prestige, but as I said, I think we have an awful lot of prestige, some earned, some not. And I think that, you know, there is sort of an overestimate in your opinion of, you know, what the, both on the negative and on the positive. You know, how dire the situation. I think we have incredibly inventive young physicist in both theory and experiment. And I think there is certainly a lack of funding and resources.

Starting point is 00:59:06 But then again, you get people like your friend Elon. I know he's not your friend, but you did tweet with it. never spoken with. I'm sure you could arrange that in about 20 minutes. I don't think so. I think he may want to avoid it and I want to be sure that if he wants to, there's no reason to avoid it, right? He's a physics guy.

Starting point is 00:59:23 He wants to get off this planet. Went to your alma mater. Pardon me? He was a physicist at your alma mater. True. But my point is for whatever reason, he knows I'm out here. He's liked my tweets. We've interacted slightly on Twitter. People don't

Starting point is 00:59:40 Understand that when somebody doesn't want to do something, you don't know why he doesn't want to do something. I don't want to put him in a bad spot. Of course. Do I disagree with the way in which he's allocated his portfolio of options on how to get off the planet? I don't understand it. I really, really, nothing confuses me more than why Elon hasn't bet on physics and why he's betting on rockets. On the other hand, what do I know? I mean, maybe it's an arrangement with the government that I can't see.

Starting point is 01:00:12 Maybe it's this, maybe it's that. Maybe it doesn't want to talk for a good reason. I'm not going to have a nonsense conversation with him where I just talk about rockets and occupy Mars. If I talk to him, I would want to talk to him, and it could be privately, about tell me how you see. I want to listen more than I want to speak. How do you see the crisis in theoretical physics? And why are you so unmotivated to get involved with it? I mean, you saw what happened just over the summer with people claiming that perhaps the aliens visiting us are just bored billionaires from another space-faring civilization.

Starting point is 01:00:47 I can't take these conversations anymore. This is just, it's like we've learned, I think it was around the time I saw people saying number go up. Or Orange Man Bad. Right. But those mean tweets. It's like, this is not, I don't even understand what kind of interaction. No, I'm just saying where is the upside for him? He's got people criticizing Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, my colleague up at UC Berkeley.

Starting point is 01:01:15 You know, his wealth increased. By the way, how can an economist, a professor of economy who was like with their treasury secretaries, how can he know that he didn't get like $6 billion worth of cash, you know, because Tesla went up? It's the stock went up or Bezos. There are the vilification of these people who are putting it all betting. Maybe they're not doing it your way. Why are you and I discussing Robert Reich? I just don't understand this.

Starting point is 01:01:37 Like, okay, some old guy from the Clinton administration, who the hell cares? And, you know, the thing, you know, Glenn Greenwald was just talking about CNN's numbers of plummet. There's some point at which we just have to say, why do we even talk to the people who constantly are jealous? Why do we talk to the people who are maximally confused? Okay, so we can find some professors somewhere who tells us that the rules of arithmetic are the product of, you know, Scottish imperialism, whatever. That person needs their own room, their own conference, they need to just go away from people who are trying to get work done. And we can't keep wasting our time because Robert Reich is confused about the money supply and how stock markets fluctuate. Is he there when he says, wow, I hope you guys are having a better day than Elon.

Starting point is 01:02:37 He lost $4 billion to that. Well, yes, the stock is swinging around. But look at monetary aggregates M1 through M3. When you print more dollars, when you create more money, every equity is priced as an exchange rate. It's an exchange between the equity and the fiat currency that functions as the numerare. the unit of account. So if you print a ton of money, what are you doing to that exchange rate? You're devaluing and diluting the holders of the dollar, and you're privileging those who hold equities. And this is what the Bitcoin people get right, you know, which is, hey, it's a bet

Starting point is 01:03:20 against the competency of our system. We bet that the Federal Reserve and central bankers are going to have to print their way out of a system that makes no sense. And when, they do, we're going to have a token that we don't see as being printable easily. So there'll be 21 million tokens in all and we'll just count on the fact that you have to print in order to lie. And that's what we're doing. So, you know, yes, but I don't want to talk. I don't, here's the thing, Brian.

Starting point is 01:03:55 I want to spend our time differently. So we're both over 50. try not to have the crazy people drive our conversation, the bitter people, the unethical people. We need to actually drive our own conversations and we need to stop talking to them. Thanks for listening to Part 1 of this special Rosh Hashanah Birthday Deep Dive Edition of Into the Impossible with Brian Keating and Eric Weinstein. Part 2 gets even better. Send Brian a birthday present by going to. to Brian Keating.com and subscribing to his mailing list.

Starting point is 01:04:40 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website

Starting point is 01:05:15 and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 1 of 2: Eric Weinstein n- WTF Happened in 1971: An INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Birthday Extravaganza 🎉! (#181)

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