Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2 of 2: Eric Weinstein n- WTF Happened in 1971: An INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Birthday Extravaganza 🎉 ! (#182)

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to part two of this special two-part, birthday and Russia Shuna edition of Into the Impossible with Brian Keating and Eric Weinstein. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here I am shilling for people to subscribe to my YouTube channel on my birthday, which happens once a year. But this feels like a moment this one, 50 years old, for some reason. I don't know why. why, maybe it's the shiny new red corvette I just got. No, I didn't do that. But I think about, you know, kind of big picture things. Obviously, it's natural to do so at this time in life. And for me, you know, the kind of looking forward, I guess I don't have the same panic that you do. And maybe I'm just not aware. I mean, I like to think I'm pretty aware of what may happen in the future.

I've been fairly successful in life in terms of, you know, career and so forth. But I look at thinking locally. I asked you this. I'm never going to ask you again because you know the answer to it. But if I ask a normal person, Eric, not someone of your particular caliber, I ask, what's your name of your great-grandfather four times over on your mother's side? Nobody the hell knows who the hell that. They might even know who their, you know, grandparents' father was, but you know it, so I'm not going to ask you. You already told me. But the point being, maybe we get grandkids, if we're lucky. And by the way, a shout out to Melanie Knockin, our mutual friend, you know, she proves you don't need actual biological kids. I don't mean that.

But our memes are, not our memes, but our actual values, we can teleport those right now or establish the teleportation mechanism to the future. And what the hell's wrong with that? You know, in other words, having ideological errors, biological errors, if you can, if you can't, ideological errors, this is the only method of time travel that we know about. And I just wonder, you know, because I worry about you, you know, how much of a crisis is this, this getting off the planet? Because I actually am quite sanguine about it. And perhaps for no other reason then. You're stangling about what? I'm sanguine about humanity's future. I know it. I'm not Stephen Pinker. He and I fought about this as well. He's not in my office, although he will hopefully

come back in a couple weeks on the, or his new book about rationality. Looking forward to that. But, you know, because I think he ignores something deeper. He ignores the fact that the reason that things get better is because they stand on the shoulders of giants that came before. And those could be scientists, those could be, you know, moral thinkers, philosophers, theologians, whatever. And for me, the access to tech, I'm not a Kurtzweilian. I don't believe the singularity is real. I don't have any vitamins to hawk like he does. But nevertheless, if you look at the pace of change and just the adaptability,

that my, you know, three-year-old can, when, you know, when she's talking to me, try to scroll my face, you know, she's used to interact, so she tries to, like, you know, when I'm boring her, like I'm boring many people right now. She'll try to scroll my face. Like, she's grown up as a technical, you know, as a digital native. But what can that unlock? And when we have really robust things, not just looking at how negative it could destroy, you know, certain interactions, certain cultures, but what is the power? If I'd asked you, by the way, in 1996, You know, when the internet was just coming along, you probably sent your first email in 1989, 1990. You know, would you have been an optimist? Would you have been an optimist back then, you know, a 30-year-old Eric? I'm, let me take that. It's not a fair question. If I, more or less, look, I've done some cool stuff. I haven't done anything as cool.

as geometric unity. I put my best shot taking one shot on goal. And people ask what happens if it's just wrong? And the first thing is, do you know how few people get to take one shot on goal? Almost no one has ever tried to take a shot on goal. Garrett Leasey is a guy who actually, I always have to say it, I think he's completely wrong.

He actually has a shot on goal. And I just think it was wide, you know? In order for Garrett to do what he did, he has to be incredibly optimistic. And I really appreciate that about him. And, you know, people say, oh, he didn't do this and he forgot that and there's a sign error and blah, blah, blah. Okay, whatever. He's the man in the arena. The man in the arena said, I think that there are three generations of matter because of triality.

And there's triality implicit in spin eight. And spin eight is inside of semi-spin 16 twice over. over inside of E8, that's where triality comes from. And then you say, what about bosons and fermions? He says, well, that's, you have chirality because you have vial spinners attached to semi-spin 16, so you have 128 dimensional representation, not 256. He's got an answer at a phenomenological level for a bunch of different stuff. I view him is incredibly optimistic.

Now, why am I, am I? pessimistic if I'm trying to do something like that in order to save us. Is Shackleton an optimist or a pessimist, Brian? I think he's an optimist. Okay, so that's my point. So let's fucking get the show on the road. Let's actually fund some stuff and it's more important. People misunderstand this. It's not worth doing physics, for example, unless there's a functioning community. And by a functioning community, I don't mean a bunch of people who can, you know, technically go through something. I mean, you actually have to have ideas. You're talking about ideas. I am super optimistic that we can get off this planet. Not that I know that to be the case,

but if we can do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton, we have a hope. And we're not excited. Like, nobody's excited. I'm excited. I just don't have the same perspective. perspective that we have to get off this planet. Look, Eric, what would happen the day? Let me ask you a call on with that. Because there is a counterfactual aspect to what you're saying. And I have a factual aspect. What do you think would happen the day after we discover whatever life form you want? From

bacteria to Bach, from rocks to rock Monanoff, from a Kardashev scale to the Kardashian scale. Take your pick. What happens the next day? And beware. I have a counter, I have a factual, not a counterfeit. I have a fact. What happens the next day to humanity's vision of the universe in our place? I mean, the life form that isn't carbon-based.

Whatever. It could be carbon. It could be dolphins on Jupiter. Not from these parts. Right. Something that doesn't share a genetic code. Proven gen. Definitely peer-reviewed, as you love to do. You don't accept, you know, the newspaper, unless it's been peer-reviewed, I understand. Peer review. That's what kept the academic

enterprise. Peer review has been there since the beginning of science. I think it was invented by Aristotel. You know, Aristotle, speaking of dolphins, he... Wait, wait. Wait, wait. Hey, I don't want to get a high five. All right. Okay. Next day. The day after. The day after. Great movie. We're going to get bored.

I was there for the moon landing. I saw the first moon landing. It was one of my earliest memories. The thing that we don't talk about is how bored we were when we left. Actually, we discovered aliens. And they have never been refuted. And they were published in a peer-reviewed journal. There was a news conference by Bill Clinton on the White House. house alone. You can see it in the movie Contact. And that is the discovery of microbial respiratory

products from the Allen Land Hills meteorites found in Antarctica, where I maintain my winter home. And that discovery was never refuted, has never been refuted. Upcoming guest Sarah Ruhuehimer is talking about this. What do we think is going to be different? I've heard it said by people like Lee Cronin and others, who's a guest also, Sarah Walker, that once we discover life, it's a going to revolution. And I say, go down to the Pacific Ocean, you know, go down to Santa Monica, scoop up some water. You're going to find trillions of life forms. We exterminated so many species on Earth, let alone humans on Earth. It's always paying attention. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.

We're dead. So why do you care so much about getting off this? Why do you think that's going to be the key that I'm going to be the key that I'm like that. Let's get back to my birthday. Okay. What music came at in 1971? one. I got it in a birthday card for my friend Dave. My Love is Alive by the Gary Parsons Project. I don't know. Tell me, my friend.

Joni Mitchell's Blue came out. Rolling Stone's sticky fingers. A little thing called Led Zeppelin 4. Right? So think about, hey, hey, mama, say the way you move, gonna make you sweat. Gonna make you good. Get the guitar.

Come on. You've got to play me a happy birthday. No, it's drums on that one. Bonham's drums are completely, I don't know what time he's in, but it's crazy. We didn't know about stairway to heaven until 1971. That's right. Okay? And, you know, Bowie was thinking about changes.

We care about so much that was happening around that time. We were vibrant. We were alive. We care in some sense more about that time than we care about our own time. Because we were alive in a different way. And, you know, it's very hard to imagine how different things were. That was the year that a physicist organized a break-in to the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, and told us, effectively, to look up the word co-entel pro, revealing an entire dirty tricks campaign of our intelligence community against American citizens.

physicist from Haberford. We were totally alive in a way that we are not totally alive now. The possibilities of what could be, I don't think, you know, we'd just been to the moon. We didn't know what we would do next. I think that when we actually have the ability to explore the galaxies and to understand our context, there will be a shift in human understanding of ourselves. And I do think that when we actually have discussions with something that was not built around these parts, it will be humbling. I have viewed us as North Sentinel Island.

We may very well be under control of something like India. And I worry a lot about North Sentinel Island and whether or not they have a Fermi paradox. Like, hey, where is everybody? Nobody's allowed to land a North Sentinel Island without permission of the Indian government, and they don't go there anymore. So whatever it is that's going to happen, it's going to be big. And then we're going to have the weird Captain Cook phenomenon. You have to remember that Captain Cook showed up in Hawaii. They thought he was God.

They gave him an unbelievable time with feasts and revelry and pageantry. And then he had such a good time that he came back a short time later. And they said, wait, you're here again. And they killed him. So to kill God on his second trip through because he was taking way too much of the locals, good stuff, we can get bored of absolutely anything. Now, what I'm trying to suggest is try to imagine that you're not thinking about going to the Grand Canyon

or Cappadocia or, you know, seeing Angel Falls on the Tapuys or something like that. But you're actually thinking about billions of different death destinations with a world that is so unimaginably rich that you're just excited that it's not the world being your oyster, but the universe, or in my hopes, the observers, that, I think that's where I am. I've gotten to the point where I don't want to have earthbound conversations anymore. I'm so completely confused. Why do we rat hole, to use the software term, on the same issues day in and day out,

they progress not at all. We just learn to distrust each other and hate each other. We're jealous of each other. I've called this, I've started to call this the degraded state where when you respond to a friend with LOL or, you know, right, no? It's like no verbs or anything. We're just sort of grunting at each other over the internet,

angry that other people seem to be having a better time than we are. We're not doing the work we need to be doing. more or less private enterprise is the only thing that's still really working at the moment. And it's not like government is working. It's not like science is working the way I want it to. What I see over and over again is that the part of the world that's still working is private enterprise, and we may lose that too. I think that I'm actually wildly more optimistic than you are,

and I don't mean to be mean on your birthday. But the thing that I find that you do that's most optimistic is that you're willing to risk for changing things. You know, you're willing to talk about Stephen Meyer on a science podcast when I know that some number of your colleagues will just say, oh, wow, good to know, bye-bye. You know, if anybody says anything like intelligent design. And I know you don't, you're not an anti-scientific person. we've got to save this. And I really think that people like you and me are not doing enough in terms of trying to lead because we don't, even the concept of leadership is somehow tied to Hitler.

Anybody who tries to lead, you'll see people saying, oh, wow, it's Svengall. He's trying to put money in his own pocket. Authoritarian. Ego trip, authoritarian. I'm optimistic that we can do something and I'm pessimistic that we will do something. I think that there's plenty to do. Let me say something else about Silicon Valley. I'm very concerned that my friend Mark Andreessen is quite correct about software eating the world.

What I think Silicon Valley didn't understand is that what we did is we hoovered up a bunch of people who have technical chops. We brought them away from the command line, so they're not actually coding. They call them technologists. They make fabulous amounts of money learning that everything that you build that is of an institutional character can be disintermediated with a program. That set us up to lock up all of the best minds,

not all of them, let me speak hyperbolic, many of the best minds, with much of the world's wealth, eager to solve problems, afraid to build or invest in anything. Because God forbid, what if somebody took money and used it to check into the four seasons and went to a day spa and hung out by the pool? You know, oh my God, that would be wasting taxpayer money or, you know, somebody's like trying to have a good time.

We need, roughly speaking, to make sure that our scientific community has institutions and are insulated. What is the purpose of billions of dollars, if not FU money? I don't grasp this. I don't believe in redistribution of wealth. I do believe in a redistribution of FU. The people who need to say FU need the resources and the insulation to say FU. And that's how we learned how to trust. I had a tweet the other day about you can either have scientists, you can control,

and you can have scientists you can trust. And I very carefully said, choose up to one. You can have scientists that you neither control or trust. I'm not disputing that. But if you control your scientists, then you fundamentally cannot trust them. And we need to risk scientists who are capable of saying no because they're insulated. And if you don't insulate scientists from the market, you will not get a functioning... China's going to figure this out at the same times that we're fetishizing diversity, inclusion, and equity.

And they are going to leap ahead of us where they're going to do what the Soviets did. Like the Soviets had crazy Shariashka prisons where you put very smart people in country club prisons and told them to do work. And the prisons were relatively nice. This is where Leon Therriman, for example, developed the ability to use a window pane as a microphone so that they could listen in on the U.S. embassy by watching the vibrations. You know, those sorts of things. China is going to have to experiment with freedom. And what we're going to do is we're going to experiment with shackling people with loyalty oaths, forcing them to repeat things that make no sense because they want to be seen as good people,

and they don't want doors slammed in their face if they want grants renewed. And I think it's incredibly imperative that either the government or private wealth or a bank heist or something is used to insulate the scientists who we depend on to know what's going on with this virus. what is going on with the physical prospects for going beyond Einstein? Can you please stop lying to me about string theory and tell me where we actually are? You know, you've seen this on your program. Every time you ask a string theorist, well, you know, what's the most important thing in the wrong? Geez, we've got the theory of everything.

It's called string theory. I want this tattooed on my forehead and I want it on my headstone. Come on. Well, I have a new phrase now, Eric, that string theory is perhaps the most important theory ever devised for describing string theory. It's been inordinately successful. And before I conclude, I know you've been so generous and it's my birthday. I shouldn't keep you tearing you. I want to ask about K-Fabe, because I have no idea what the hell that is, let alone what the hell happened in 1971, the year I was born, reminding you, we're talking

Eric Weinstein, proprietor of the portal podcast. People are begging, clamoring for the portal of return, including a special episode with yours truly. which will be one for the vaults, I'm sure. I urge you to follow me on Twitter and on YouTube, where I am Dr. Brian Keating in just about an hour and a half, my interview with Julian Barboor, who's another out-of-the-box thinker, will be on. So I want to talk about KFei, but I want to get your reaction to this quote by one mathematician, David Hilbert, who once said that we could measure the importance of scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.

Do you agree with that statement? I have some calms with it. I don't know. This is big simple stuff. Yeah, it's always very profound. You know, it's like when people quote Feynman to you, you know. If you can't explain it to your grandmother, then you do not understand it. Then he gets the Nobel Prize and said, can you please explain it?

If I can explain it, it wouldn't be worth it. It would be worth a frigate prize. Right. And we always quote the one that gives us that feeling of superiority over our fellow man. We don't quote the one that actually makes it real. No, look, K-Fave has to do with the fact that we have to lie about what we're doing all the time. So, for example, when I was at Harvard in the math department, I read a grant. And maybe I don't mind telling the story because the individual is deceased,

and I think I've spoken reverently about him. But I went up to the great Raoul Bot, who gave us bot periodicity. And I said, I was reading your grant about what you were doing in low dimensions. And it said that your work in low dimensions is important because it might elucidate knot theory. And not theory is extremely important for plasmids and understanding plasmids in biology. And he said, what's a plasmid? I said, it's your grant, sir. He had not written it.

Someone had taken the grant that he had written and put in that it was very important for him to do low-dimensional topology so that we could study looped nucleic acid that might be nodded and therefore invigorate the pharmaceutical industry, something completely crazy like that. That's k-fabe, where the system is lying in order for the system to continue. He wasn't doing anything to elucidate anything about plasmids. What we have is that we have to now tell untruths at an almost continuous rate in order to keep our jobs, in order to not run afoul of Twitter or YouTube, or anything like this. I mean, when you talked about somebody losing a blue check mark or somebody being taken up,

Nobody anymore believes that Twitter doesn't shadow ban. I mean, I can tell instantly that a tweet of mine is being throttled because I have a very good idea after over a decade of how much reach a tweet will have it. If I throw red meat at somebody, I always get clicks on those things unless it's throttled. We don't believe in anything. We don't believe in CNN. We don't believe in our political parties. Our slogans, you know, trust in the press is in an all-time low. Viewership is way off.

in order to actually rebuild trust in society, we've got to start excluding people. And those people very often look like Brian Stedler. They look like Joe Biden. We need to exclude Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi. These people really can't be at our table. And we've also got to take it up that, you know, in science, I don't like picking on people, but somebody just came out with a book where they were going on and on about, you know, how string theory is the theory of everything.

The God equation. I didn't say it. You said it. He's a guest on the show. We fought about that. No, I can take it. But it's not interpersonal. It's like, why do you guys put up with these giant programs that are clearly completely wrong?

And you're very afraid of. individuals like a Joe Rogan coming to a conclusion in speaking, but you have an enormous program that's known to be wrong. By the way, check out the Eco Health Alliance. This is what Fauci was funding the Wuhan Lab through. I don't think, I looked at the number of views on their videos. The number of views on their videos are minuscule. Nobody's watching what this thing is. We're not engaged. We're having these conversations that are incredibly repetitive. People don't have new ideas. If people have new ideas, they're treated, you know, like the end of Coleridge's Kubla Khan. So, you know, we've a circle around him thrice and close your eyes in holy dread for he

honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise. Everybody who actually has an idea is treated like a crazy person. And we've overdone. Particularly from my side of the aisle, the left of center notion of sophistication, is that we're trying to hobble everyone who would step into the arena and say, I have a new idea about how to do something really important. And I think that that's what's depressing, is that we're making life horrible for everyone who's trying, and we're making life very easily, easy for people who are attached to institutions,

whether it's Facebook or Google or Twitter or the Democratic Party, Harvard, Princeton, or the institutions like the Urban Institute. We've got to reverse that. It's very important that individuals who can still think and still speak start to shoulder more of the responsibility for getting us out of the rut. And I think that that's what I'm super optimistic about. And by the way, Brian, you've got five kids, right? What bothers me the most is watching the case.

two generations in front of me clearly not care about their kids and their kids' kids. It's evident in how they speak. I don't understand it. I want a better world for the future, and I want to be open and transparent that there's not likely to be 300 years of future if we don't panic and start trying to say, are we really going to try to upload into Silicon? Are we really going to try to get wise so that there are no more wars ever with new technology? Are we really going to try to get off this planet with rockets? At what point do we get serious and say we need a portfolio of solutions to escape our coming fate? And we need the people who are attracted to those to participate in society. And we need to stop looking at everything they do, scrutinize them, make them

constantly apply for increasing, for resources, citing all of their products. We know how to do science, and it's time we get back to doing science and kick the administrators, the people who think we can't do, the people who believe that somehow science has nothing to do with national interest. It's time to exclude all sorts of voices because we're in an emergency situation. We better restart growth, and more importantly, we've got to diversify so that different people can run different experiments, and we're not in just one giant petri dish the way we found out we are with COVID. 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's seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. 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. Eric, just taking a swig of my Simon's Observatory whiskey brand.

Some of the finest whiskey known. You have a bottle. I believe you have a bottle. Last question. I want to do a little Torah learning. Actually, Brian, it's your birthday. I'd like to ask a question. Okay, go for it. Brian, I think you're exactly right that we've neglected experimental physics. What should we be super excited about that's coming down the pike in experiment? How can we be using the universe as our accelerator if we can't necessarily build machines?

What are some of the precision experiments we don't know to ask about? And can you just please excite us on the theory side of the equation with some of the coolest things that you think are happening currently in experiment? Well, I'm obviously biased, but I'm biased for a reason that I love the biggest questions since I was a kid. a wee lad. I only wanted to answer the biggest question. I was very obsessed with death as a kid and actually I didn't think I would reach the age of 50, maybe even let alone even younger

ages. Now I'm here, I'm like, wow, I'm kind of on parole with the second half. Maybe this is the... Thank you. I'm rounding second base maybe with some life extension that I might be able to enjoy by just lasting long enough,

you know, as they say, most of life is just showing up. So, when I about what excites me the most, it's always been answering this fundamental question. I want to know if I can not prove God exists, but falsify God existence, if that's even possible. So I am an Israeli. I am an Israeli, not by cut nationality, but by virtue of the word Israel, which you know in Hebrew means to struggle, to wrestle. And really, I have to tell you, it tickles me and saddens me when I talk to one of the second most prominent atheist on earth, Lawrence Krauss, and he doesn't know what the word Israel means, and he doesn't know,

and he doesn't know anything about Judaism whatsoever. He just knows he's not it. Okay, fine. Anyway, the word Israel in Hebrew, the language of Judaism, means to wrestle or fight against God. So I told him, I said, Larry, Lawrence, you are one of the foremost Israelites that I'll ever know because you struggle with God all the time. You're always fighting, wrestling, et cetera, et cetera. And in my life, I've wanted to know what can I learn while I have the capacity to learn. To me, that was studying the origin of the universe, because I think everything springs from the origin. Today's my origin day. I'm celebrating 50 laps around the sun on this pale blue dot of a marble, as Carl Sagan called it. So what I want to do is understand how it all began. And I think I can say without maybe hubris that we, my colleagues and I, are on the precipice of not proving God, but may perhaps falsifying the existence of the biblical narrative.

And again, you know that I'm a practicing Jew. I take it seriously. I taught myself Hebrew 20 years ago at age 30 after being raised as a Catholic altar boy. Very strange upbringing, I admit. But I wanted to know because I think this is the most important question of all, and it's not at all clear, settled in my mind. Now, how do we do that? Well, we do that by using experiments that have the capability not to see light, not to see neutrinos, not to see meteorites, the only little bits of scraps that nature. or God, if you will, gives us to scrutinize here with our minds, brains, computers on Earth. And that's the oldest light in the universe called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is slightly older than me, at 13.8 billion years old. And with this radiation, we can imprint upon it the potential imprint of an earlier epoch

called the epic of granification, and perhaps an earlier epoch to that called the inflationary epoch. If that were true, these photons would expose waves of gravity, not neutrinos, not light. Waves of gravity, Eric, would shake up the universe, reverberate it, and imprint upon the CMB that I study, a particular type of polarization. Again, with the plosives. And that signal would, in effect, falsify all these other narratives. And I've come to appreciate in what I call the Asse-era project, which you help me kind of crystallize what I'm doing with that. That's an homage to my hero, Galileo Galilee, way back when in 1623, he wrote the book El Sagittori, which means the assayer.

What is an assayer, Eric? It's a guy with a hunk of rock, and he's told the king has this hunk of rock, another hunk of rock that's gold in color. Scrape it off, tell me if it's real. And if you're wrong, he might cut your head off. In fact, if you're right, he might cut your head off. An assayer has something of no value, but yet his ability lies in determining what he's, has potentially, you know, vast value in terms of gold versus worthless stone. So experimentalists are assayers. We take these theories. In this case, there are five different theories, Eric,

and I'm hopeful someday you and I can work out some of the cosmological implications of your theory and others. But there's at least five different alternative narratives, including one by my friend and your friend Sir Roger Penrose. And that posit, we won't see anything. And so if we did see something, we won't prove God, we won't prove and, but what falsify this narrative that the universe is cyclical, which is an idea as old, at least as the ancient Egyptians, 3,000 years ago. So they have a pretty high H index. These guys, these Egyptians have a very high H index. So to me, that's the most, and concomitant with that, Eric, we also learn about something called cosmic biorefringence, Lorentzine,

invariance violation, and other things that we physicists hold sacrosanct. So to me, that's what keeps me so excited. I think the next discoveries that will move the goal post, move the goal line, are in experimental physics, and in particular experimental astrophysics. So do you find an eerie parallel with Corinthians where it is said first, for now we see through a glass darkly and later face-to-face? Is, in sense, the surface of last gathering in the cosmic microwave background radiation? Weirdly, well predicted by or well described by seeing through a glass dark? Yeah, in my previous book, Losing the Nobel Prize, I talk about it, and I call it the

War of Fog, not the Fog of War, because we're basically presented this very dark, very cloudy image, and yet, it's all we got. And so, in one hand, people, you know, say astronomy is really hard because there's only one star that we know that hosts a planet that has life on it. But we also have time machines. We have telescopes, and these telescopes can take us back in time. So this... I was going to ask you just in terms of going back in time. How confident are you that the language that we have of going forward and back in time,

that effectively we're always thinking about time as one dimension. The properties of one dimension is that only dimension one dimension one has this, ordering property where you can say, so something is to the left of or to the right of something else, earlier or later. Now, of course, that took a small update in the form of space time where we have a bunch of, we have a forward light cone and a backward light cone,

and we have events that are outside the light cone that are harder to describe as to whether they're in our past or our future simultaneity sort of goes by the way, say. But is the language of one-dimensional time, like going backwards and forwards in time, potentially causing our minds not to entertain multiple dimensions of time. Yeah, that is something I've certainly thought about. How do our kind of limitations in our brain pan, how does the fact that our eyes are two-dimensional

surfaces? How does that impact our ability to perceive higher dimensions? Luckily, we have two of them. I think it's fascinating to think about how the lexicon of, reality is describing and also, you know, kind of the Escherian hands drawing that you like to use. We're creating reality. We're describing reality. We're doing it simultaneously. I've become, and this is part of the conversation I have with Julian Barboor that you'll hear in about an hour on my channel, Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube, because he has this notion that

Janus point that the universe is sort of symmetrical and that time is sort of a byproduct. The problem with time, Eric, is that, and I think this is a point made by Professor Baez at Riverside, I think John Carlos Baez. Anyway, he talks about time as sort of a one form. And when we think of our entropy, rather, we talk about entropy. We're used to thinking of it just as a, you know, as this thermodynamic equation, you know, entropy equals as related to heat and to work and free energy. But he says it should be more properly thought of as a one form that doubles up time in a sense.

and the, you know, because you can't, I have not, as you have probably wrestled with as well, gotten a good definition of time. And maybe that's because of the imprisonment in the brain pan of a one-dimensional thinking creature, at least in that perspective. But what if it was geometric, differential geometric, according Tobias and or others? And that's the way we thought about it. Maybe it could be a two-form to use the language that you were just using. I think it's fascinating, but it normally goes hand in hand with entropy.

So you hear people like Frank Wilcheck, who I know you've talked a lot with. And the conversation goes around, what's time? Time is what clocks measure. What do clocks measure changes in time. So it's tautological, it's circular. But maybe that's a byproduct of true reality, or maybe it's something that is just imprinted upon us by this notion that we're kind of limited in space to what contained between our ears.

And so another question arose when you held up the bottle of the Simon's Observatory, whiskey. One of the things that's very interesting is that is that Jim Simons, together with SS Churn, came up with a new term many years ago that is seemingly very happy in dimension three. And it looks like we live in dimension three, but we actually live in dimension four because we have three space, one time dimension. And this thing, If you put in this term, and you vary it to get the equations that govern it, you get an equation that looks linear in the curvature in much the same way that Einstein's equations look linear in the curvature. Yet it's trapped one dimension. It's like four dimensions is pressed up on the window pane looking at the candy store of three dimensions where the Tric Diamond form is found.

What do you make of the possibility that the Churn-Simon's form could be relevant to three dimensions, to four dimensions, and maybe because of its nature, it looks Einsteinian to my eyes. Of course, geometric unity is about this in sometimes, but pulling back and thinking more broadly, do you think that Jim Simons came up with SS Churn with a term that will be related to what goes beyond? to Einstein? Do you think it's relevant to physics, or do you think it's an incredibly frustrating candy store which the child will never gain access to, and that Dimension 3 is dimension three, dimension 4 is never the twain shall meet? Yeah, I think that Chern-Simon's form is one of the most underappreciated, even though it's very much appreciated, and people from the likes of Ed Witten to Stefan Alexander

extol its virtues daily. But the question is... Was a new book, Fear of a Black Universe? That's right. He's last week's guest on The Into the Impossible podcast. So this notion of whether or not we can use this apparatus, for lack of a better word, to perhaps derive. In other words, maybe what Einstein is the limit of is in some abstract sense that you could characterize more accurately than I. Maybe it's the limit, you know, the low energy limit or some limit of Turn Simons. And that would be fascinating.

And ignoring the fact that Jim Simon is almost preternaturally gifted with the ability, not as a salesman, I mean, that has a bad name. But he was the midwife, the broker that really had this ability to link and this special place in this special time, the place and time of my birth on Stony Brook, on Strong Island. Shout out to Stony Brook. We've got some Long Islanders in the chat room. I can tell, Brian, how are you doing, my friend? And the point is that he had this gift to speak to physicist and to mathematicians and to set out on this path, which I think is still yet unresolved. It's been proven in two dimensions, two plus one dimensions. It's been incredibly useful in all sorts of things from, you know, cryptography to quantum systems to, you know, multiple Nobel Prizes related to it.

But my question is, you know, is there a – and I don't like, as you know, I hate to say, sacrifice in the altar of falsifiable, but are there virtues of it that can be tested in the theoretical virtue sense experimentally? And so, as you know, I've been looking at implications of that for the Simon's Observatory, for Picep, for all the other projects, along with my colleagues, and that this comes along for free. In other words, when we search for falsifying God, we might be able to also get as a side benefit that comes along in the happy meal, we might get this this notion that parody, just as it's not respected in an electorate weak force, or in the weak force, maybe it's not respected in the elector weak force. And that has some implications

stemming from Chern-Simons. So to me, this is, and better yet, I've never told you this, but, and I'm telling now to thousands of people right now, but my idea, maybe this has some notion to do with the origin of Times Arrow, because as you know, and maybe the origin of matter, too, because, as you know, bariogenesis is not just a brilliant iris. Irishman that we both know, Barry Ogenesis, but it requires certain violations to take place, Barry on number, obviously, but also CP violation. And the question of the protected symmetry of CPT violation. So what if electromagnetism violates CPT? We don't know if it violates CP, but what if it did, and you can only measure that on cosmic scales, it's too small in effect to occur in the laboratory.

So what if we could measure? And then what if we say, well, that's the only thing that, you know, you have a negative times a negative to make a positive. So maybe time has an asymmetry as well. a discrete symmetry. And so, in other words, maybe Turn Simons will come into play. This is total wild speculation from an experimentalist. Take it with a huge grain of salt. But maybe it has...

You're functioning as a theorist here. I'm a closet theorist. You know that. I'm deeply closet. Mark Kempikowski used to say I'm deeply in the closet, but I'm starting to come out. And part of that, I have to say, people like, why is Keating,

you know, talking to Weinstein, someone? And by the way, we haven't talked about physics in a long time. This is actually very refreshing to me. We talked about aliens over the summer with our friend Michael Shermer. We haven't really talked much about physics. But for me, to be, I think a physicist as an experimentalist, theory is kind of my muse. In other words, it's what's inspiring me. And it's where I want to go.

And it's what I try to guide the students that I'm blessed to mentor with an investigative inquisitive curiosity. And I think that's what keeps me going. You asked me kind of earlier what my origin story was. So yes, that is very deep. deeply involved. And I think it's one of the most exciting things in all of science, not just in physics or astrophysics. Look, I share your hope. It's just that I believe that part of the problem is that both Einstein and Chern-Simon's are downstream of an abstraction. And that the problem is trying to get from Einstein to Chern-Simon's is the wrong thing. You have to go upstream to see the relationship between them. And that we're afraid to do that because that's what Jim didn't do.

Now, I knew Jim before I knew you, strangely. And, you know, the thing that you didn't mention, which we both know, and some people also knows that if you go to a bio lecture that Jim is hosting in his institute, he's usually got this best set of biological questions to say nothing of the math questions, to say nothing of the physics questions. So he's not so much that he can sell things, is that he really has a very fungible intellect across multiple different fields. He's just so analytically strong and uncompromising that it would be great to see him as an accidental physicist. And I think about, I don't know,

have you ever looked at the work of Dan Quillan in mathematics on things like fermionic determinants and determinant line bundles, metrics connections? There's a guy who's a mathematician who made a huge contribution, we never talk about him as a quantum field theorist. Do you think that there are other great examples of accidental physicists who change everything without even realizing that they're doing physics as for the bourgeois gentleman? Yeah, I don't think there's anyone quite like Jim in that he has had success in multiple fields, in multiple levels of each one of these fields, you know, from, you know, kind of ordinary pay grade mathematician to chairman of a department, to starting a university department, to starting a charitable foundation, to running a huge

successful quantitative, to starting that industry in some sense. And then within that, the Simon's Foundation now led, he's retired, so he's out on the golf course as we speak. No, I don't think he plays golf. But, you know, he is now led by David Spurgel, colleague and friend. But this, the legacy that he's cast is one of what he calls, you know, kind of pondering perigranation, and one of which discursive curiosity. And I think, you know, it's impossible not to think that he's always been like this. And yet, I think he's gotten more like, I'll, I had the honor of taking him to the Simon's Observatory Site in 2019 to dig, you know, kind of the first shovel full of dirt to groundbreak. And he was there and I got him to stop smoking for a whole hour.

I told him, I convinced him that that oxygen tank and a cat and a merit cigarette that he smoked almost continuously for 60 years would not make for a very good, you know, it's not good to kill your prime donor. the mountain top that bears his name. But anyway, we were talking, and then we're coming down the mountain, and he's talking about how Abraham Lincoln and was influenced by Euclid, and I'm just like, this is incredible. He could talk about anything. And I think that's really rare, and I view that, and I do feel quite a big burden, because there's another birthday that looms large in three years, and that will be his 85th birthday. And I want to get him for his birthday, not a Nobel Prize, but I do want to get him a return on his investment

and his belief in my colleagues and me leading this project to make a difference, to make a discovery, to make a dent in the multiverse, so to speak. I think that's a lot of pressure that I feel to deliver to him. And I know my chancellor is watching right now, He's a wonderful guy, Pradeep Koshla, thank you very much for all your support. But I really look to Jim. He's the one that, you know, he's the ultimate tenure committee.

Like, I don't need to please anyone else other than to deliver the best scientific results with my colleagues on his birthday in three years. And do you believe that Jim has stepped in and he's done it, I think, at Brookhaven National Lab, and he's done it through, you know, the way Kavli has done, the way you have. The archive. A small number of these scientific mega funders, do you think that the government of the United States should be doing this work and not relying on private philanthropy? And feel free not to answer that question because you are partially funded by the government, partially funded through private philanthropy. I'm very hesitant to push private philanthropy. It's one of the reasons why I don't want to push Elon.

I just don't understand why he doesn't do it. I think it's the government's responsibility, not these people, in part because they take away the ability to patent or protect your intellectual property in these areas, and therefore they have to step in and be equitable to make sure that people that they've taken rights away from are able to function professionally. Do you think that we're going down a wrong path by expecting that private philanthropy will have to fill it? I think private philanthropy has a very important role in that it is much more agile. It can do things that, you know, public funding can't do. And I don't just mean in terms of massive amounts or minimal amounts, but it can give, it can take away

the stigma. As you and I've talked about before, it's kind of concomitant with social media. Imagine a young James Clerk Maxwell, 1864. He comes up with four equations that Oliver Heaviside will someday, you know, incorporate it with his name for all time. And he says, well, how does it work? you know, there's a baby Popper, you know, Carl Popper's grandfather is around. How can you prove it? Oh, well, look very closely into the ether, and there are these little gears and whirlpools and vortices, and they communicate the electroponderable media that produce the four. It would be totally ridiculed. He'd be laughed out of play. And what would happen to society, Eric? We would have been delayed for decades until it realized, well, he can

be wrong about something and be falsified, truly falsified, if that's such a concept. But he can be falsified. And yet, he's ultimately correct. And so I wonder, you know, for private foundations and so forth, when they are funding, you know, kind of high risk, high reward, you know, if you go to the NSF or the DOE and God love them, I have been supported by them, NASA, et cetera, my whole life almost. And by the way, that's why I feel like I have, and maybe you disagree with this, Eric, I think I have a moral obligation to have a YouTube channel. And I think, I don't want to say a moral obligation to other, I feel like I've taken. so much from the government, and I haven't taken as much as some, but I've been blessed to live in this country and to have the megaphone that I have. I want to give back. That's why I have

the YouTube channel. I don't charge any money for it. I put out videos all the time, because I want this best-educated population. Because if we are indeed going to do whatever you want to do, whatever I want to do, to lead to more human flourishing, as it said, I think it's going to require millions of minds to get PhDs and science. And I know how you feel about, you know, kind of importing people from different places. Wait a second. You have to be very clear. I mean, I am somebody who is married to a technical person from overseas.

People never understand this. You can't flood a particular market any more than you can ask a particular passenger on a plane to open the window at their seat because they're going to be differentially affected. And the idea that we're going to open a window right next to science so that we can flood the market in order to decrease wages as the National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation bizarrely intended during the Reagan administration is the unethical thing. It's not a question of we don't benefit from people coming from abroad. No, no, Eric, I was speaking about people from New Jersey, not from overseas.

I appreciate that. But what is it that, Brian, grounds your optimism in science? You and I have both been watching an institutional degradation. Do you believe that we get out of this and that we pull out of a nose dive? Do you think we're in a nose dive or things actually just getting better and I'm wildly confused? What do you think? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? 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.

save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Yeah, I know, I've been thinking about this a lot because one trait I associate with you is a trait that Ryan Holiday, upcoming guest in my podcast, past guests in your podcast, talks about in his new book called Courage is key. And I've been wondering, you know, like, am I surviving, am I thriving in this environment because maybe I lack the courage that someone like you or someone like, you know, another scientist might have. And, you know, the old Yiddish proverb applies. You know, he who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by traffic for both sides.

So the question of, you know, do I take a stand? Do I move in one way or another? Just because I have been, you know, relatively, you know, not forced to kind of comment on these epi-scientific phenomena that I think you're referring to. And I've done, so I said, what can I do? Can I really change social policy? can I really have, you know, an impact and make science, I don't believe science is systemically racist. I think that's a canard. I think that's a trope. I think that there's not a single

scientist I know who says that they're a racist. So by the principle of, you know, excessive symmetry, how can the institution be? Now, you can say, well, they're all liars. But then I say, you know, Eric, when are you going to stop being an anti-Semite? Well, you're not working on anti-Semitism, are you? So what can I do? Well, I can elevate underrepresented voices. And I've done that. I think I've had on more scientists and brilliant thinkers from African-American community than almost any other podcast. And I don't do that, you know, oh, I'm just going to be so benevolent. I love talking to the individuals of any caliber. And it just so happens that I happen to have been blessed to have so many amazing, excellent scientists come on my podcast.

And I talk about, I'm not afraid to talk about race. I think that that's an important thing. And just as you and I've talked about anti-Semitism in the past, I think it's something that's important. Now, the question is, does it become the dominant theme in science? I think that would undo some of our capacity. But I believe that science is so powerful in its potential, as you talked about earlier, that I don't worry about it. I see the young people.

And again, I think that the young people were kind of fighting the wars. Like, no, you wouldn't deny that in 1950s America, it was hard to get a job as a Jew, right? But what happened? Well, people grew up and it was better. and then they weren't beholden to the racist or anti-Semites that were around. I think that we're getting punished now by the leadership generation that you talked about, the 78-year-olds, that were in bed with racist ideas, if not racist. So I think our kids don't even think about it.

Like, you know, my daughter doesn't think about, you know, is this Barbie black or not? Like, she just loves Barbie, and it happens to be. Some of her Barbies are black. Just like, you know, I do think that what's going to happen is, it's just going to become a non-issue. I think right now it's tumultuous. It's the birth pangs of some new phase transition. Hopefully that will be nonviolent and it will be peaceful. But I think we're going to get into a post-racial kind of obsession that I think is dogging science now. Of course, you could say I'm just a white guy and of course it's easy for me to speak about. But again, I'm putting my money

where my mouth is. I'm hosting the most brilliant minds possible. I'm trying to elevate that. We created new institutions within the Simon's Observatory for the National Society of Black Physics students to participate in. These are all good things. That's what I can do as a scientist. I can't do, I can't radically reshape social policy. I have no interest in politics. That's why I have people from the radical left, radical right.

I don't care. I'm not interested in their political ideas. I'm interested in what they think about science, technology, science fiction, etc. Reminds me a little bit of the lore around Isidore Robbie's lab at Columbia back in the day, where whether or not you could get an appointment as an underrepresented group, if you were any good, you had a place to hang out at Columbia and do science. And similar things occurred in the Soviet Union under Landau in physics, under Gelfand in mathematics, where there's traditionally been some core group

that says, nobody cares, let's just talk science. And I like to think that we have a diversity in inclusion program that is based around merit. But we also have to recognize that in particular, if I think about Emmy NERDA, Madam Wu, Uruh, Yura Rubin, and others, there are clear examples where the field has shown that that program doesn't exactly work.

And I'm very up for fixing that rather than coming up with a new program that says decolonize science or something like that and becomes intrinsically crazily political. So I think you're choosing the best bet. Let me just finish out with the last question. So when you're 50 years old, you have to report a new number and that handle changes. It's kind of a big deal. What are you looking forward to in the second half of your life? And again, if you get to 100sfonsig at

1208 to Moses, then you're not even there yet. But assume you're sort of beginning the exploration of the second half of your life. What I was just a wonderful birthday. a celebration for you and your wife. What are you looking forward to that wasn't part of the earlier part of your life? We know how cool it is to strap on a backpack and travel the world to learn to play a new instrument or a language, to embark on a new career. At age 50, what do you think is opening up that wasn't open before that's new, that's different, and that keeps you excited about progressing and growing? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Although I have to correct the record. I've never learned to play an instrument. I can barely play Spotify. But besides that,

you're dead on. I have traveled the world. I've been to six of the seven continents. I have not been to Africa. I've been invited, but hopefully that would come true in the next 50 years. You know, it's kind of cliche. What 50 lessons I've learned, you know, in 50 years. I think there's, you know, there's a kind of breakdown in the Talmud of, which is the second holiest book to Jews after the Torah, the Old Testament, the Bible. And that is, categorizes the decades of a human's life. And it's sort of between 40 and 50, you get this difference between knowledge and wisdom. And I think, right in my earlier youth, I kind of squandered my youth, Eric, not just in the

being the roadie for Led Zeppelin at age zero in the stairway to have in Led Zeppelin 4 tour. But actually, an L.A. woman also came out. One of my audience members is telling me, L.A. woman, by the doors, out, which I know had a huge effect on you as well as me. I love that song. I love it. So the difference to knowledge and wisdom, I focused on way too much on acquiring knowledge as a young person to the extent that I ignored my intellect. I mean, it's hard to say, you know, people, oh, you're so smart, Brian.

You're the chancellor's distinguished professor. I say, I still have to sing the alphabet song to know it comes after V. I mean, it's terrible, Eric. People think I'm smart. It's a joke. But even so, in college, what did I want to do? I wanted to get into a good grad school. Why did you want to get a good grad school?

I want to get a good grad school? You want to get a good grad school? So maybe get an assistant professor, Joe. They didn't get an associate. You get a tenure. You get a Nobel Prize, a chair, whatever. It was always about living in the future. And I heard yesterday over Torah over lunch at one of my rabbi's house.

And he said, you know, basically, when you are obsessed with the past, it makes you depressed. When you're obsessed with the future, it makes you anxious. So, like, can I be obsessed with the present? Can I be happy in the present? And that's part of the reason why I gravitate to you and all the guests I've had on my podcast. Because I neglected my education for just learning as a young person.

And now I want to learn. Now I want to appreciate and assemble this faculty, as I say, of the most brilliant minds in the multiverse who you can listen to in your pajamas and you don't have any student loan debt to pay off at the end. I want to make it all free because that's all I have. I don't have claws. I can't spin a web.

I don't make honey. All I can do is use this intellect that I'm given. So I'm looking forward to some of the reaping, not the grim reaping, but the actual reaping of the seeds that I planted with my biological children, with my close friends and family. and I think it's beyond that. Now for the first time, maybe why I'm so grateful, cognizant that I could change at any minute. But I was reminded of this passage in my bar mitzvah. You know, I never had a bar mitzvah because I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. You read me both.

I wasn't an altar boy. All right. So on my 52nd birthday, two years from today, I will be in Israel, God willing, and I will do my bar mitzvah. Now, this could be as a practicing agnostic Jew. But anyway, I'm going to read my Torah. portion as Jews are want to do. And in my Torah portion, I used to think it was crazy. It said, I have put before you on this day life and blessing and death and curse so that you may choose life and blessing. I'm like, who the hell chooses death? Like, who chooses to be cursed?

But I realized, Eric, maybe I was. Maybe I wasn't choosing to live a full life. So now I'm kind of like, maybe I just touched second base, you know, rounding. I hit the hoth the ball out, but, you know, been blessed by whoever you like, maybe on that second round, you know, half of the rounding of the bases. Maybe I'll appreciate it more. I'll stop and smell the roses a little bit more. Well, I've met your kids, and I've got to tell you, you are an unbelievably involved, loving and caring father.

Takes one to no one. I've been mentoring my own son, and I've got to tell you, it's incredibly inspiring that when you're going through formative years and everything appears to be going into a crazy state to find somebody who's actually functioning as an adult, and an adult male role model is very hard to find. I saw the amount of care and love that you approached your birthday with your wife, Sarah, lovely, lovely human being. And I just want to say that, you know, in terms of doing it right, I really appreciate the

fact that you've also done such a wonderful job with this podcast. And I also just want to say something about courage. I really appreciate when you. demonstrate courage because I know that the system inside of science is based so much around everybody using everything they can to take each other out in a way that we don't like to admit. It's not that everybody does it, but it's certainly an undercurrent in science. And when you take risks talking to people like Julian Barbour, Garrett-Lisi, it fills my heart. And it's really been wonderful to talk physics with you.

And I hope to do more of that in the future, because I think we have things to do that have nothing to do with loop quantum gravity versus string theory versus asymptotic freedom. There are new, I don't think that it's a, it's not a democratic situation where everybody gets to contribute, but we do need to listen to more voices. And I do think that what you've done with your podcast is to let some of the, of those voices out, take them seriously, and I think that your role of the assayer is a really noble one, because in part, you're not looking to use it to ding people. You're using it to try to figure out, well, what's here? It's much more constructive. So I really hope that

the rest of us have a lot to look forward to in your second half. And Coloccovode, well done. And thanks for having me on the program. It's a huge honor to celebrate your 50th do with you. Thank you, Eric. You've been a huge role model to me and to millions around the world. I want to thank you for sharing this day with me, and I hope in 100 years we'll be able to say that we both look pretty good for a bunch of 150-year-olds. For now, asking everybody to please check out Eric on Twitter, Eric R. Weinstein, portal podcast, ericweinstein.org. And I am on Dr. Brian Keating in about an hour, less than an hour, 45 minutes. We're talking with Julian Barboor, a really wide-ranging intellect and other courageous individual and friend of the show. And I just want to thank everybody.

It's natural to look back, look forward. And I've been looking forward to this with my good buddy, Eric, and give my best to your lovely family and my future graduate student, hopefully. Inshallah. Okay. Bye, my brother. Take care. Be well, Brian. Happy birthday, sir. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Part 2 of this special two-part edition of Into the Impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology. is indistinguishable from magic.

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