Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - State of the Universe with Eric Weinstein: Part 1 of 2 - Elon Musk and Roe vs. Wade (#227)

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Eric Weinstein and I go for a wide-ranging quarterly catch-up on all sorts of goings-on in our Universe. We'll chat about Elon Musk and Twitter, censorship and control, abortion and leaks, a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox on intelligent aliens, Galileo Galilei, and more! Topics Include: Does Elon Musk have Buyer’s Remorse over Twitter? Roe vs Wade and the immorality of leaks Trust in science is at an all-time low. What can we do? Advice to Elon Musk RESOURCES MENTIONED: Previous Videos with Eric Eric Weinstein: UFOs, Portal Podcast Reboot, & 2022 Predictions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMS02ueFso0 Eric Weinstein: What is WRONG With The World?!: https://youtu.be/CzbElaoMfjk Get GALILEO’S DIALOGUE ON TWO WORLD SYSTEMS Audiobook https://briankeating.com/dialogue Translated by Stillman Drake. With a Foreward by Albert Einstein. Salviati narrated by Carlo Rovelli, and Sagredo narrated by Brian Keating. Simplicio narrated by Lucio Piccirillo Albert Einstein’s Foreward read by Frank Wilczek Translator’s preface read by Sylvester James Gates Galileo’s Dedication read by Fabiola Gianotti.” My PragerU Book Club episode about the Dialogue Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Paywall jumper https://12ft.io/ Fermi Paradox Please join my mailing list for twice-monthly updates on the most important discoveries in science and technology; click here 👉 briankeating.com/list Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everyone to an exciting episode of The Into the Impossible podcast with yours truly Dr. Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics of the University of California, San Diego, and Associate Director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, where we routinely interview some of the most brilliant, dynamic, creative, thoughtful individuals in the universe. And this episode is no exception. This conversation broken into two parts, ranging over two hours with my good friend, Dr. Eric Weinstein, an impresario of the impossible. Today's episode, Part 1, takes us on an exploration as to whether or not Elon Musk may or may not have Byers' remorse

for taking on the Twitter bird under his roost. We also talk about the notion of leaks in a democratic government and what the implications might be for the recent leak of a Supreme Court preliminary decision about Roe versus Wade. And we also talk about why trust in science and other academic issues are sort of reaching on all-time low in many regards and discuss why that is and how we might be able to rectify it in part one. Stay tuned for part two. We talk a little bit about Eric's project, geometric unity, other approaches, and we explore the newest project in my universe, which is Galileo Galilei's dialogue. I encourage you all to check out this lovely. legubrious conversation with my good friend Eric.

And stay tuned for part two coming out tomorrow. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bad door's please, hell. All right. We are live on YouTube. Dr. Brian Keating, Dr. Eric Weinstein. How are you, my friend? I miss you very much.

And I, sir. Good to be with you. Is it Cinco de Mayo? Yes. Felice Cinco de Mayo. It always comes on the 5th of May. Every freaking year. It's like clock.

I've decided to celebrate and be festive. Oh, you've got five glasses of tequila like me? No, I've got the Mexican hat potential on the bottom of my mug. Well played, sir. Buenos dees to you, my friend. Well, we're going to get in right off the bat. We're going to talk about the most exciting subjects in your universe. My audience has missed you as much as I have.

And we want to make sure that we kind of give the people what they're interested in. And that today involves a whole host of issues. We're going to talk about aliens and a possible new solution to the Fermi paradox. We're going to talk about your new and ever evolving in a good way theories and feelings about cryptocurrencies, inflation and so forth. And then we're going to talk about some less controversial subjects like abortions, like abortion, Supreme Court leaks, and wherever the day takes it. So how exciting.

Yes, and I was pleased to see recently a man by the name of Musk has kind of taken a new stance for which he's taking extreme attacks and hostility. And I wondered, Eric, you know, if he might have a little bit of buyer's remorse right now. Do you feel like this prize, you know, everyone's always the richest man in the world? That's true. He has five times this amount. That's true. But, you know, if I, if I, you know, took away your family car, you would feel it. You know, I would feel it. And so I feel like this is a tremendous amount of money. And I want to take you back to, we started pandemic podcasting together two years ago exactly. So, you know, congratulations on our anniversary.

But in the, in between there was this thing called Clubhouse. I don't know if you remember this thing called Clubhouse. And that was the hottest ticket in the world. Everybody wanted it and get on it. I haven't used it in months. I don't know about you. Like I said, I don't know. You might be on there, but I'm not on there. Do you think he might be having buyer's remorse? He think he might look back and say this was the clubhouse of 2022 eventually, and I shouldn't have given up a quarter of my net worth. If there is buyers remorse, my guess is that it hasn't set in yet, because I believe that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve Twitter. And, You know, Elon, I don't know Elon at all.

I know tons of people who know him. My impression of him from afar is very confused. He does seem to be in many ways the world's most forward-thinking person, at least at the level of forward-thinking, what can we actually do? So I'm pretty impressed with him intellectually as a public intellectual. then there are layers. Then there's the idea that he has to be chaotic. So he is very Trump-like in many ways in terms of how he uses Twitter

and how he attempts not to be constrained because there are going to be SEC rules and lots of lawyers and PR people telling you can't say this, you can't do that. And he's decided that he wants to be free. And so there's this paradox, sort of a laugher curve. When you have no money and when you have lots of money, you tend to be in a weird way less free than people with intermediate levels. And so in a strange way, I sort of see him as a very rich person choosing to put a lot of his wealth at risk so that he can be free.

And that too is very forward thinking. Now, what I know about Twitter is that current Twitter has all sorts of obviously soluble problems in terms of you can just fire a bunch of people and you can make rules about algorithmic, transparency and the like. And then when you get to the end of plucking all the low-hanging fruit, then you've got the problem of the underlying technology allows any person to post something instantly.

And, you know, what we've seen is we've seen first-person shooters looking like they come out of a video game in the Christchurch Mosque Massacre. That was, I think, streamed live on Facebook. So the problem is us. It's not Twitter. It's not the technology. It's the technology hooked up lots of people, many of whom have mental health issues,

many of whom are incredibly chaotic talking to each other without common background, without an ability to know who's going to post what, when. So in that world, I don't think there's a solution. So, you know, the great danger. is that he's bought something and he's got the first 17 fixes lined up. And I don't think the problem is going to occur then. I think the problem is going to occur once you fixed all of those things, what are you left with? And, you know, one of the things he signaled, Brian, is that he believes that removing anonymity

will be a large portion of the solution. And I do think it will do a lot to solve the problem. problems on Twitter. But there are a hardcore of people who are happy to be known, who are incredibly abusive and think it's funny. And then there's a very large market for abuse. And I think people haven't really realized that. Abuse tends to be one of the most important products that the internet knows how to distribute. And because you can't sign up for abuse, you can't say, hey, I want to see who's abusing who today. I mean, feeling like I should abuse somebody else.

I'm not feeling so good about myself. When you do that, you realize you can't be honest, that you're really up for going to the Coliseum to see people get hurt. You're really starting to say, oh, no, no, no, I'm here for the comedy. It's just comedy. It's just fun. It's just laughs.

Or I think this makes the world a better place. I'm calling people out who are ghoulish and horrible. Well, no, you're really just up for abuse. and you don't have many ideas and your life is empty and that's what you're doing. Well, okay, that problem of all sorts of people selling this one product that has an enormous audience for it is going to plague Twitter. So I think that there is buyers remorse, but I think Elon can go make more money. What he's trying to do is he's trying to say we have to have some property that isn't in control under the, how do I say this?

You have to have some major property that isn't under the control of whatever this wrong, woke thing is. And, you know, you have Fox and you have, I don't know, Newsmax. But these are not major, you know, even the Blaze or the Daily Wire or Daily Caller, any, any of these things, I think, they're not like MSNBC, New York Times, NPR. And the fact that all of these sort of formally, formerly, um, respectable properties gone completely insane, uh, haven't broken rank, buying one and saying, hey, we're not going to change the, the, the logo and we're not going to change the mast, uh, the mast head completely.

But what we are going to do is we are going to stop making it possible to be ridiculous in this coordinated assault on reality. Now, that's why everybody on the, and it's not the left, Brian. It's like the, it's some sort of a partnership between the establishment left and their revolutionary army that they deploy to try to undo everything that gets in the path of what I would call the rent-seeking elite who are in control of the Democrats. Party. That thing, he's taking that on. And I think you have to look at it. He's not taking it on necessarily from being a conservative. He's taking it on from saying, I can't live under these people one second longer. 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 and 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, and I think looking back at the history of these platforms, I mean, we see Facebook kind of falling out of favor and we saw the massive contributions in the previous election by Zuckerberg,

which didn't curry him any favor with the people that obviously he was advocating for. So I wonder, you know, in this, and I wonder if you saw any of the interviews that Zuckerberg's been on this, you know, kind of world tour lately on Lex's show and on another podcast, Tim Ferriss. And no one's really asking them, you know, these really tough questions. So I wonder, you know, is it really true that we look to these, We look to these people as if they're so lucky to have the resources to buy this.

It seems to me like a nightmare hellscape to wake up in the morning and have a New York Times hit piece like Elon faces today with his South African childhood brought into play as if he had choices to where he was born. Jeez. Why do you just call everything white supremacist? You know, just get it over with. Everybody's a Nazi. Everybody's a waste. Why? They just waste our time.

because the New York Times used to be an important newspaper and still capable of doing things, we all have to have a discussion framed by them. And my feeling is, okay, let's just take some random person, you know, let's take, just give me a generic Republican. Marco Rubio. Okay, Marco Rubio. Is there any truth to the fact that he was connected to the Cuban, Cuban mafia?

Okay, now we're going to discuss Marco Rubio being connected to the Cuban mafia for no reason other than the fact that somebody was able to put that question in a sentence at the top of an article. So my feeling is we could also, why does Marco Rubio seemingly target America's children? Oh, is he targeting America's children? Like, we just changed from the Cuban mafia to some different story. I think we've got to just start with the idea of shut up. Like, if you don't have much, hush.

That's where I feel like, you know, this takeover of Twitter, he took over something, which is built by people that had an ideological bent against him and have a very clear perspective on what they want to promote and what they don't want to promote and highlight versus not. And I feel like, again, I feel like it's like a boo. I do feel like at some point, even I or you, you know, would wake up and just say, you know, like there's so much richness in the world. Like, who cares to have these battles with people that only get points, the more polarized that they speak, the more they try to punch up and take down Eric Weinstein.

I get, I get like those dungeon. Remember that Dungeons and Dragons, you know, hit points? If I take Eric's car, you know, I get your hit points. Well, you've got 690,000 people that follow. Oh, I've only got to. Who gives a freaking crap? I mean all these people do remarkably well and without it and and I feel like he's catering to this tribe of maybe a hundred thousand semi-woke you know if you want to call it that journalists people

in the Beltway and the corridor in the Northeast and then the West Coast and why do you want to spend so much of your I mean again it's a fifth right Brian right I don't know what you're asking about the key issue is we've got to buy one of these things there has to be a university that's actually a university a news service that's actually a news service, a place, a public square that's a public square. Like we've lost everything essentially. And then there's these false equivalent. Oh, no, no, no, Fox.

And it's like, look, Fox, I still treat as right wing propaganda. The major issue is that left-leaning properties went insane as opposed to merely biased. And, you know, like there's one of these things with, um, hey, we're, Remember we told you that Ivermectin was horse dewormer and that you shouldn't take it? Well, it turns out that if we lose Roe v. Wade, a horse ulcer medication can be used to induce off-label spontaneous abortions in humans.

So just go to your vet, you're covered. And I'm thinking, okay, I really appreciate that. What you're really doing is telling me that you have the right to contradict yourselves and the rest of us are all hypocrites for simply trying to get through a day, but you have an absolute right to say whatever you want, whenever you want.

That, it's a game. And I have to admit, I have caught people chuckling. Like, hey, did you see what I just put out today? That'll bend their minds because it contradicts what I said three weeks ago. You're just thinking, okay, I get it. Everybody's joyriding. Right.

Yeah. Right. You get those adrenaline bumps. And then speaking of that, you know, this thing, I don't know if the deal is actually done or what it is, but, you know, obviously a lot of it was leaked ahead of time and so forth. And you have this like, it's like the fifth estate now. So you have the fourth estate, which is media.

And then there's like this leakage class, you know, the people beyond the curtain that will leak the story that eventually does get pipeline directly into the mainstream veins of the fourth estate of journalism. And what do you make of this? I mean, people are celebrating as heroes this leak, you know, to the, from the Supreme Court. decision, which, as I understand it, could put people's lives in danger. I don't want to be too specific, but this thing is not settled law yet, and regardless of

how you feel about it, and I can hear opinions on both sides. Before I actually, before I get to that, Eric, about two years ago on the portal, you did this wonderful kind of verbal essay, and everybody's asking when the portal is going to come back. I hope it'll be soon. No questions asked about that today. But you did a wonderful verbal essay. say in which you talked about the trouble with ambiguity, and you talked about superpositions and how inharmonious they are for the human mind, and the human mind hates ambiguity and

loves resolution, even if the resolution's wrong. And you talk about abortion, you talked about gun control. I wonder, could you recapitulate that discussion? It was in the context of, you know, kind of a Schrödinger state of a baby being real versus not. Have you changed your opinions? And can you first recap, can you recount that that wonderful kind of analogy that you used. Well, yeah, of course, I should listen to the portal and find out what I, what I said thought. You know, my usual take on. You're starting to bring your own words on you. You remember Charles Barkley said he was, he was taken out of context in his own autobiography. So we're not in better company. Well, you know, the famous description of one of my favorite classical

music pieces, Sansaq second piano concerto, is that it begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach. Conception, you know, it begins when you're talking about terminating a pregnancy, it sort of begins with spermicide and ends in infanticide. And anything that has that property of being on a continuum that connects something incredibly trivial to something unthinkable. But naturally, you know, through the intermediate value theorem, there's got to be some point where that thing becomes a meaningful life. And the political expediency has said, we're going to turn this into an intellectual football, right? And so one side is going to pretend that something is a baby, the instant, the sperm nudges close to the egg. And somebody else is going to pretend that it's just the mother's body four seconds before delivery. Okay, well, there's a black hole that I don't want to get into.

too, because what they're really saying is we know that we've got to make this wrong statement in order to get where we need to go. And if you won't make the wrong statement with us, you're Hitler. It's like, okay, so add Hitler to white supremacist. It's just, look, Brian, this is all so dumb. It's so enervating. I mean, the real issue is we should go back to reading Griswold, you know, before Roe, where we get the penumbra argument.

I think it's advanced by William O. Douglas. in the Warren Court. And we should ask ourselves, how sophisticated is that decision? And then the issue with Roe, of course, is that for its time, there was no plan B back in that day. The world was a very different place. There are arguments in all different directions. I don't want to get into any of that,

because the issue, suffice it to say, I behave pretty much as a pro-choice person early on in the preface. And I've, you know, protested in the streets in order to make sure that women have safe legal access to disposing of their pregnancies early on. And I'm pretty pro-baby's rights right before, you know, somebody's about to give birth. And that, that can't go to anybody's party. Yeah, I mean, I remember my dad of a blessed memory. He used to joke, you know, on my 33rd birthday.

He said, I believe in abortion up until the 99th trimester. And, you know, but now it's not a joke. I mean, you have people that, that are effectively saying, you know, such things as, you know, a pregnant person. Of course, we have to be respectful. It's amazing how we went from, we can't define what a woman is with regard to the Supreme Court. Right. Immediately. I value your time and my time.

And we can get into, like, trans. what are they thinking? Or do you know what someone's always been accused of next? And my feeling is this is my only time on this planet. And I have an esteemed physicist colleague, a worldly guy. I don't want to talk about any of the ridiculously stupid stuff that everybody wants us to talk about. All right. Well, thanks for joining the Into the Impossible podcast.

It's been a pleasure. And please visit Brian. Like, comment and subscribe. Okay. Women get pregnant and give birth. And we should call some number of biological men, women, I think, because there is a programming issue, but this has gotten out of hand. And I'm not going to sort it out with you on this particular program.

And we haven't lost our mind, and I'm not going to throw biology out the window because, you know, Renee Richards is, you know, is upset. We have to be compassionate and deal with everybody in our society. We should be kind. and we can't lose our minds at the same time and we failed and we failed to have these discussions we failed to talk about the real the reality of pregnancy we won't sit down with carnegie stages and embryonic development and say when does the neural tube and the neural crest form and what is the richness of neural activity and all these kind of things that matter to me instead we're

going to try to talk to each other pro life no pro choice no pro life let's let somebody else do it all right well let's pivot to another existential crisis well no no oh okay i want to get to the leak all right yes i want to talk about the league okay let's go back to that yeah um i think it's important i just had a conversation with somebody i've known a very long time was a lawyer last night and the lawyer said you know it's wrong to leak and i probably would have considered it I said, why? Oh, because I think it's so important that women have access to reproductive rights that even the unthinkable should be done.

Okay? I appreciated the candor. I think that's insane. I mean, I think that what's really becoming very clear is that very few of us trust democracy, trust the court, trust our scientists. The level of loss of trust has led to a large number of us unwilling to carry the culture of the United States that animates the Constitution and its other governing documents. I think this is something I don't know how to communicate.

If you don't carry the culture of the United States, which is that you're willing to believe a fiction that nine druids can discern the meaning of the constitution and legal conflict, which is, I'm going to say it right here. It's a fiction. But I agree to that fiction. I agree to the fiction that a majority of the electoral college or one day maybe the electorate has the wisdom, the best wisdom available to choose the president, blah, blah, blah. I think many of us have decided that we don't feel like carrying the culture. And without the culture, it's a piece of parchment with ink. There's nothing more.

If you can't animate the document, if you're unwilling to pretend to believe in the things that are necessary to keep the experiment running, because it's like, no, with Merrick Garland, that's out the window, no, with bork, you know, it's ridiculous. No, no, no, you don't understand.

The activism on the Warren Court destroyed the... Okay, look, I know. all of the right-wing complaints about the left and the judiciary, and I know all of the complaints in reverse. And there's two separate stories, and I'm like, I feel like I'm the middle child. It's like, you idiots are going to lose us everything. Oh, you want to pack the court. Oh, you want to do this. You want to. Okay. No, filibuster, right. We're not going to survive this, you morons. And, you know, my feeling about this is my desire to watch Joe Biden, Donald Trump, all of these these people are not going to be around for that long.

My kids have a lot of runtime left. I just worry that what we haven't realized is that a giant chunk of both parties have gone revolutionary. They don't believe in the country anymore. How does it bode for the remainder of the union of these states then? I think we don't realize what we're doing.

You know, I have this memory of being on a school bus when I was a little kid and figuring out that if I could get the kids to sway back and forth in unison, we could actually have a large effect in aggregate. And we started swaying the bus, and the bus was really rocking at some incredible level just from all of these kids going back and forth,

and once they figured out that this was real, they got more and more enthusiastic. And it felt like we were pretty close to being in danger of actually getting the bus to do something it wasn't supposed to do. Now, I feel like that's what we're doing, is that we have this idea that the bus represents like adulthood. There's nothing you can do to take down the United States of America. It's some super stable superpower. You can mouth off. It's not true.

We are now in danger of disassembling this beautiful experiment because we're bored. and we're like mischievous and we want to have fun so maybe we'll riot the streets this summer summer's coming up always a good idea to have mostly peaceful gatherings and we can call each other names and bring some guns and then we can discuss who shot whom i think you ever you've you've got like more kids than i can remember you'd probably have the same number as the last time we spoke but i'm not even positive of that yeah none none No abortions. You know this line in Maurice Sendix where the wild things are?

He says, let the wild rumpus start. Start. Yeah. I think that this is the wild rumpus. Yeah, exactly. Which, you know, I think brings, you know, since we've talked last in late December, we did record about a month ago. We may release that at some point.

But we've had this, obviously this existential crisis looming in the eastern Europe. And I wonder, you know, if we can kind of think about that. That rumpus governed by the same clan of people you just talked about with the addition of somebody who brings the average age of the discussants down slightly to, you know, closer to 70 of Vladimir Putin, who I understand he's not well. I believe he is undergoing some surgery. So I don't know if people are going to send thoughts and prayers to that particular individual. But, you know, now things are getting serious. And I remember not too long ago, you advocated for something. And I was like, he can't be serious.

My God, he can't be serious. And that was for a demonstration event of the awesomeness, of the release, of the binding energy between nucleons. And that was a call to, you know, a demonstration of the fearful power of the wildest rumpus of all, which is nuclear or thermonuclear weapons. And you advocated for non-radioactive, but still thermonuclear detonation, so to speak, of the kind that we could witness, obviously not on catastrophic scale. But I wonder what was – at first I was shocked. I thought, Eric's being a provocative tour. What's the thinking behind that? What would that do for humanity to see such a thing?

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Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. We've lost our fear of the sun. We can create what the sun does on Earth, and we're not afraid of it anymore. Look, I can't easily talk about Ukraine at the moment because I am so isolated from the rest of you all. I if I start talking about this it becomes very clear that they're really we're distracting ourselves with everything else and so I understand that we've decided to distract ourselves to not take this seriously to trifle with Armageddon and

have fun with it we've got a handsome Jewish guy who loves his wife with one of the great lines of all time you know what the line is I need ammunition not a ride. Right? And so it's like, oh my God, nobody's, nobody's ever done anything that masculine, and I'm kind of excited. It's like, okay, so now we're going to have a planet

that is coked up on the testosterone, testosterone of Ukraine's head of state. And we're going to trifle with Armageddon as if this is fun or okay. Or, hey, let's redo the early part. of the 20th century before we had the nuclear weapon. And my assessment is that it is more likely that you are all sane and that I am insane because of the odds, but I think it's the reverse.

I think when I called for a return to above ground nuclear testing, I saw that the Cold War wasn't over. And I saw a world of people whose brains have been restructured by their phone. Like, I'll just give you something from Miami. I was in Miami. Was it a wonderful dinner? Very successful guy picked up the tab. But when the topic came up, he said, you know, the thing about all-out nuclear war is I'm not really worried about all-out nuclear war.

I'm worried about reestablishing credibility in the markets afterwards. And I thought, got it. We're not, I'm not in the same conversation. So I think that to be, to be blunt about it, I've gone crazy and I'm telling you how important above-ground nuclear testing with radiation. You know, a lot of the radiation, the permanent radiation comes from the, I guess, the fission reaction that is turned into the fusion reaction, thanks to the geometry of Tuller and Ulam. And I think that it is a question of self-preservation. I think you cannot have that. this many people completely, I've gone crazy.

I believe that we are trifling with Armageddon. And if we get onto this topic, I will just sound like the most unbalanced person you've heard. Well, I don't think so. And here's the reason why. If we look at the writings of our mutual friend David Kaiser, the Germensionhausen professor at MIT, of science, technology studies, a good friend, truly a wonderful individual. He wrote a book about the quantum legacy, I think it's called. And it's about kind of twin nuclei in your language, but more not the biological nuclei,

but sort of the contemporaneous development of nuclear weapons, of space travel, and of the interest in aliens and events like Roswell and so forth, that that wasn't coincidental, that they were all sort of synergistically related, And it wasn't purely serendipitous. And his claim, I think, is now being taken up as one of the possible explanations of Fermi's paradox. So I'm going to ask you first to define Fermi's paradox. And then I'm going to read this paper, which is behind a paywall. But I'm going to give value to my audience.

So on this channel, we do nothing if not give value. And this is going to be a website, which you will thank me for in your dreams. And it gets you over paywalls. I will reveal that in just a minute. So stay tuned for that. That's what we call foreshadowing in the business area. First of all, what is the Fermi paradox? Is it significant?

Does it rise to the level of the twin paradox, of Xenos paradox, or is it merely a stepping stone into a bigger series of questions? Fermi paradox, please. Well, I would rather hear it from an astrophysicist. Fine, there happens to be one right here. So Fermi did a calculation, even back in the 50s, of how many stars there were, how likely it was to have life and other planets, sort of precursor to what's called the Drake equation.

And he came up with his estimate based on the very large number of stars known in the Milky Way galaxy, even at that point, not taking into account galaxies outside of the Milky Way. And he said the overwhelming odds are that there are other civilizations, other aliens. And so he asked one of these questions after the calculations that he was famous for, the so-called Fermi calculations. He said, where are they? You know, if the odds are, there's tremendous numbers of these civilizations of advanced extraterrestrial technology, capable species, not slime mold.

You know, oh, by the way, Eric, you know, I wanted to ask this of my friends on Twitter, but I'm too scared to ask it. So I'll ask it of you. If we found an embryo, like a human fetus, you know, let's say it's three months development, gestation, and it's on the planet, you know, procyon B, you know, Trappist one, What do you think the community of astronomers would do? I mean, would they say, ah, it's nothing? You know, let's abort it.

I mean, is that an interesting litmus test to you of how we would react if we saw a fetus? Whatever age you want to say, 10 days, 20 days, it has a heartbeat. It's just sitting there on some planet and some exosolar planet. Is that relevant to the conversation of abortion at all? I don't even know. It's like a Boltzman brain, but it's a Boltzman fetus. It's a bait. Okay.

Whatever you're smoking, you've not sent me any of it. I did see an enormous mushroom the other day that on your channel. And this is an exciting new direction for middle-aged. Never lick the mushroom. Never lick the mushroom. Look, we seem to be very afraid to believe. And, you know, let me just get over the hump. I don't believe we're the only life in the year.

universe. I don't know how common or how rare it is. I don't know whether or not there are ways of evading. I don't know whether Einstein's restrictions pass through to all successor theories to relativity. You know, Einstein may have done something to Newton, but he didn't do everything to Newton's conservation laws, if you know, properly understood. So we, we, we have done, we We don't know what the source of our apparent aloneness is. But a parent may be doing a fair amount of heavy lifting. And what I've offered up is the Fermi paradox that I know. The only Fermi paradox that I know is the one on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman

chain because the islanders are effectively Indians, but they don't know that they're Indians. may not even know that India exists or that India claims North Sentinel Island or that it won't let anyone land there. And my other claim is that I believe that a good chunk of humanity has stumbled into a very appealing wrong idea. So first I want to talk about the appeal of the wrong idea. The wrong idea is the more we find out, the more we realize how little we understand. There's something like really comforting about this, you know, and imagine that you apply this generally. Like, you know, the longer I'm in love, the more I realize how little I understand about the human heart. Oh, that's beautiful. But then you apply it to real things.

Like, the longer I study continental exploration, the more I realize that every new landmass we find on Earth is just an indication of how many landmasses we have yet to find. That's like the dumbest thing you could possibly say, but it has the same basic feeling. Well, I think we're almost at the end. I think we are afraid to say something, which has always been false in the past. Now, the thing is, we're almost at the end of the rules of physics. When somebody says that, everyone says, yeah, Lord Kelvin said that. They thought that that was true and they had the proton and the electron.

and then they found the neutron. Okay, well. Yes, and it was always true that powered human flight was never going to happen because it had never happened until it happened. And it was the same thing, you know, there was this landmass off of Siberia that I think was discovered in the 20th century,

which is the last major landmass to be found. Nobody's worried about the idea that there are uncharted desert aisles on Earth because we have the satellite data. We're about at the end of physics, I think. Now, that could be wrong. The easiest way for it to be wrong is that we would be at the end of this chapter, but it would be a book with many chapters and you have to finish this chapter to know that there

are chapters to follow. What if, for the moment, I take the contrarian position and say, no, no, no, I think this is about to wrap up. And the really weird thing is that it's taken from 1945 until the present for us to get close. That's the blink of an eye in cosmic time. But my belief is, is that if anything is monitoring us, and if I'm not wrong, right before you have the full power of the laws of physics, you let off a nuke, and then you go from fission to fusion. And so the concern that I have is, first of all, that the Fermi paradox on North

Sentinel Island is the same as the Fermi paradox we have here on earth, where we are the North Sentinelese and we're trying to guess that India exists. So my question to you is, first of all, is there some sort of a thing that doesn't want us contact, that is shielding us, the way India shields North Sentinel Island? And is it the case that whatever it is, you know, while we think, oh, well, geez, Sam Harris, my friend said whoever is out there must be millions of years more advanced they would view us as aphids nonsense there is probably a level of sophistication where it kind of taps out and you know you can build bigger and bigger computers but you're not going to discover more

land masses on earth and I don't know that you're going to discover more laws of physics. I'm concerned, quite honestly, that we've lost our fear of the cosmos, just the way we've lost our fear of nukes. We've become relatively certain that nothing ever happens here, that we won't be visited, that there's no, there's nothing else other than us. And I'm worried that what we did is we alerted whatever is out there, hey, we're just about at the end and we're We haven't worked out our stuff and we're going to be able to get off this rock if you are able to get off this rock. I mean, to come visit this rock rather. So if things can visit us, we can leave.

Now, it may be that all the planets are rushing away from each other because of the expansion of the metric of space like splices in the universe. But if the next theory has the power. to get us really far really easily, and far might be in many dimensions, not all of them spatial, I would be very worried that whatever is watching us knows how close we are.

So, I mean, we have to admit the Mastodon in the room is that we have no evidence. There's life elsewhere. I stole that from Sir Roger Penrose. That they're, you know, and we hear this, Lee Cronin, and my friend,

Sarah Walker, they were just on Lex, and they're talking very, very specifically about the traits and characteristics of these aliens and what they're going to be like and how you can calculate exactly how much structure went into them and how you could detect them and thermology. And it's all very interesting and it's rooted in sound chemical and physical reasoning. But there's still this huge, you know, lacuna, which is that there's zero evidence. And in fact, I want to try something out on you, an argument that I have, which is a, which is a, you know, which will sound dirty, but it's not, and you know it's not. And it's called panspermia. Pan-spermia, okay? Now, it sounds dirty, but it involves the exchange of material between planets

in our solar system and other solar systems, perhaps. And you talked to Avi Loeb, our mutual friend, not too long ago in Miami also. Well, he was down there with you. And he talked about the almost definite, you know, definite. admission by the U.S. government that an extraterrestrial meteorite had landed from another solar system in the somewhere in the ocean on Earth. And that was obtained. And I love Avi. I'm, you know, like you, you know, kind of helping him out on his Project Galileo. So we're both, you know, kind of Avi maximalists to use mixed metaphors. But Avi, you know, claims this is there. And it's

based on trajectory data, highly controversial. People, you know, can't reproduce it. But at any rate, It, if true, highlights the fact that materials, such as this meteorite, and I've given you several of these, and you tried to snort one once. Anyway, these are meteorites. They come from Argentina. They're delivered by gravity and the U.S. Postal Service. They're hard iron, silicon, and cobalt. They're highly magnetic.

And they came and they smashed into Earth. Now, there are meteorites that I will never give to you because they cost as much as my first, you, you know, two cars put together, I have, and it came from the planet Mars. So I have a chunk of Mars in my lab, and that chunk of Mars was proven by gas chromatography and other tools to originate from Mars. Okay. Now, how did it get here? Same way.

Blasted off of Mars by a Martian meteorite, kicked around the solar system for a few millionaires landed on Earth in Northwest Africa. Now, the same process happens in reverse. Life carrying molecules could be embedded on rocks and, you know, a chunk of a little bit of, a whale gets kicked out into space and then eventually lands on Mars, right? But we have no evidence of that. We have no evidence of that happening over billions of years. Now, this could, this could, this has been happening as long as life has been on Earth, which Lee and others tell me is four billion years. So you have four billion years of opportunity to have panspermic transfers of

a life that we know exist on Earth going to other parts of our solar system. And there's zero evidence not, you know, I'm not asking for terraformed, you know, plateaus on Venus. Just saying there's no evidence. Now, absence of evidence isn't proof of absence, but shouldn't at some point people start to take the lack of, you know, any sort of data or what, and have you, as troubling in a Bayesian sense, that you can't put a prior that is so certain, close to 100%, Lee tells me, that he believes aliens are inevitable, and you sound like you believe it as well. So I want to ask you, what level, what would it take you to believe that aliens don't exist? Alien life, forget about intelligent, just life does not exist.

the universe? Anywhere else in the universe? What would I mean, what would I have to ask? What piece of evidence would you have to have to know that's impossible, that, you know, it's impossible for life to be elsewhere than Earth? Impossible? Oh, there's, or vanishingly, vanishingly small. In other words, the people that say it's guaranteed, like Avi and Lee, and maybe you, I don't

know, say it's all but guaranteed. The Fermi, you know, kind of suggestion is all but guaranteed. So what series of piece of evidence would decrease? that to as close to zero as you can imagine. You can't rule it out, obviously. Oh, you're going to hate this answer. We would get to the next level in physics. We would find out that it does give us the ability to buzz the cosmos. We would send out an enormous number of probes. And we would change our base. We would tutor our basian prior by exploring all of the most earth-like exoplanets we could find, which are now cheap to visit because of,

new discoveries that were not available to us when we were stuck with Einstein's effective theory or quantum field theory. That is what it would take. Right now, I can't see almost anything. Really? I mean, I can't get you beyond C, but I can get you to see. I can get you the speed of light, right? We can have a discussion about the simulation hypothesis and that we can have avatars cruising

about the universe. We don't see any evidence of that either. as in contrast to my guest David Chalmers' claim. You know, so, I mean, we could travel at the speed of light. Isn't that good enough? 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 seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. 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. Do we really have to go beyond the speed of light before you believe that they don't exist? You know, Brian, I don't know how to think about this.

There's a suite of problems that is different than any problem we've ever solved in science. One of them would be the beginning. How did life begin? That would be an example of the class of problems I want to talk about. Or another one of these would be how do you get consciousness? to evolve from the material world. Another of these would be contact or the ability to prove. Where did the origin of the universe, what is the origin of the universe?

What is behind the surface of last scattering? Why do men and women take so much such different times when going to the restroom? You know, there are various things. What? There's some things man is not meant to know, literally. Exactly. That's what I was trying to say with the surface of last scattering. I believe that we haven't solved any of these problems ever.

The hardest things that we know how to do, look, the hardest thing that I know is quantum field theory. And quantum field three. Have you tried wordle? No. I've not tried wordle. Quantum field theory is unbelievably difficult to learn. And it has gotten harder and easier. Now I have the entire standard model in stylized form that animates.

This is the classical input that when quantized gives us our understanding of the world. And it's incredibly simple. The idea that this fits on a mug is, and you and I can go line by line symbol by symbol and say what everything is. Grand drinkification. We have only solved problems in the shallow end of science. We have never solved a problem outside of the shallow end of science. And so when people start to talk about like free will, I just think, wow, you've gone

from, you know, wearing floaties in the shallow end with your parents holding. you up to wanting to surf shark-infested waters off the coast of Portugal with monster waves and sharp rocks or who knows what. It's like it's a totally different level of science to figure out life's origin or consciousness or the beginning of the universe. We haven't gotten to any of these yet. And I think what we're very good at is we're very good at extremely hard, simple problems. So we're all interested in these questions, but my interest isn't in the recreational version of these.

I know that if you and I did nothing else other than talk about free will for a year, we would get nowhere. The conversation would be recreational. We'd have no choice. We'd have no choice to get nowhere. I think we could have many different possible conversations. None of them will get anywhere. So I'm always curious as to why people say, I believe in free will, I don't.

Okay, so you're going to do that thing. We need to do things that might work. And the things that might work have to do with, like, you know, my friend Rima Khan is about to have her SETI meeting in San Francisco. You know, we can listen for things. We can try to work on the laws of physics. I cannot believe we are still. still focused on rockets. But very rich people seem to like rockets. If they have any idea

of the danger we're in here on Earth, I think it's a completely bizarre feature of wealth and brilliance that brilliant, smart people choose rockets, don't know why. We got to do something. And we've never solved any of these problems. And I don't think we're going to get to these problems by pretending. I mean, I always want when somebody talks to, me about what life will be like to bring up cephalopods. I look at a cuttlefish and I look at how intelligent a cuttlefish is, maybe not as smart as an octopus, but a cuttlefish is such an alien creature. It's so far away from us on the phylogenetic tree that it proves that you can't really easily anticipate what smart looks like.

And it's probably the reason that the heptopods were used in that movie. What is it, a rival? Yeah. And I think that the next physical theory is going to blow our minds. I think we've sat so long pretending to have our minds blown by entanglement and Schrodinger's cat and, you know, the fact that you get thinner and heavier, you know, in relativity theory, whatever. Terrible paradox. Not mind. That that's not really the mind-blowing stuff. What's about to come, I think is going to rewrite our knowledge of ourselves just the way DNA did.

So pitch me, I'm Elon, you know, I can take $44 billion and put it towards Twitter. I can scrap it and put or even, you know, make it $43 billion. What do you tell him? What should he do? What would you do? He knows. I mean, what would I do? I mean, he's a physics major.

He would say you Penn. I mean, more than the physics major. He's evidenced, I think, continuing interest in physics. But he has hijacked the conversation of getting off the planet, which should be a conversation about many, many, many, many, many different experiments rather than the moon and Mars, and getting off with physics to being a conversation about rockets. So anytime you talk about diversifying existential risk to humans,

someone will now say, oh, don't worry, bro. Elon's going to get us to Mars with those awesome, awesome rockets. It's just like, I don't understand this. So I can't pitch Elon. So would you go, I mean, but again, to push back with respect, as you know, I always do. And I cheerfully recognize that I may have a huge blind spots myself. But it seems to me as if you're going back to 1491 and you're telling, you know, Queen is Morelda or whoever. Don't fund this guy, Chris, Chris C.

Don't, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's just... Wait, wait. That doesn't make sense. We should do rockets. Okay. We shouldn't obsess about rockets. Right.

Not rockets only in the portfolio. But again, let me just finish my tortured analogy because it took me like half an hour to make it up in the shower this morning. But, you know, are you telling her, we should really fund this guy, you know, Yitzach Newton, or, you know, to get these laws that will actually take us to the moon. You know, let's just assess. skip ahead. Boats, forget about these

barks and boats. Let's galleons. Let's skip ahead. I don't know that that would actually get us where we want to go, right?

Because you're saying, you know, your priors are going to be informed by the either an no-go theorem that says we can't go beyond Einstein.

In which case, what would you say? There are no aliens? If we couldn't go beyond Einstein. Yeah, if we're trapped in four. There's no, like,

this is another problem, which is that Einstein hijacked the conversation so that now every time we talk it's like, no, dude, we have time dilation, we have wormholes. It's like,

we have Alcubieri drives. Blasting him with my laser. There, I'm blinding him. Oh, no, I thought you were making him a crypto enthusiast

with laser eyes. That's right. Einstein with laser eyes. I told him. Okay. Don't try. Okay. So,

um, I don't, think Elon shouldn't do rockets. I think rockets is a profitable business and I think getting people excited about the future has to do with going back to the last moment when we actually, as a country, you know, we didn't want to say let's develop ICBMs that are really efficient in hitting Beijing and Moscow. We said, we choose to go to the moon. And okay, so, you know, true enough. So go to the moon. But Stop with the terraforming and Mars is the light of human civilization. I just, you have to actually want to save us from ourselves right now and talk about it in order

to realize how completely crazy Elon has made everyone who listens to him. Because at the moment, if you had Einstein and you had Elon, people would be gravitating to Elon. He's charismatic. He's made. He's nailed in a world which is not comfortable with masculine traits. He's highly chaotic. He's very entertaining.

And people have this idea like, yo, dude, he's the richest man of the world, bro. And that's the currency of our time. So my feeling about this is everyone Elon reaches with the story of terraforming Mars with rockets and all this kind of stuff, thinks that's the plan. and I just think it's it's completely crazy to get everything right and then go rockets, terraform and Mars right at the end. And it's just like, dude, I just read this entire, you know, war and peace length novel.

And then in the last page, you just do something completely bizarre. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm dumb. Maybe I don't, I don't understand it. I don't think it's Ferdinandism. I think that they you know we needed to fund universities that studied natural philosophy and mathematics and physics and we needed to explore the world because we didn't know what was here and we should go to Mars and we should go to the moon and we should have I if somebody said

our rocket allocation is stupid we should take it to zero I would be fighting tooth and nail to make sure that rockets are budgeted for okay the emphasis on rockets is psychotic it's it's like you're looking at a portfolio of a very very rich person that's only in one municipal bond or something you're like make make this make sense yeah he is uh but then of course he is you know more diversified neurologically than almost anybody uh we can just saying that he doesn't have the right to hijack the rock the the we need to spread out and diversify because we're going to get ourselves killed on one planet with a shared atmosphere. It's completely unreasonable for him.

It's wonderful. I mean, I just, I have a very clear idea that he's one of the smartest, most forward-thinking people, and he's got a rocket company, and he's talking in some sense his book. Right.

And he knows, look, I don't know him, but I almost, I almost feel like I can guarantee you he knows better. And so, you know, I don't want to speculate on,

what his strategy is, but he knows better than to bet everything on Mars, terraforming, and the moon with rockets. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Okay, well, that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this episode and the two-part series with Dr. Eric Weinstein. We covered so much ground, everything from aliens to abortion, from Zelensky to zoology, really a wide-ranging cornucopia of of really delightful topics. I love talking to Eric, and he's agreed to come back regularly. So show some love.

Leave a review. People have been leaving just some of those heartwarming reviews. We have over 500 worldwide, almost 400 just in the U.S. alone, including one I saw just recently from someone who goes by the name of Nighthawk on Apple Podcasts where you can leave your own review of The Into the Impossible podcast, just right below where you might be listening to it. Or if you're on Spotify, you can just leave a star ranking.

I hope you'll give me a small constellation, an asterism, four stars or greater, maybe even five stars. So I've earned your trust, if not your money back. Anyway, Nighthawk says this is an educational journey, a very entertaining podcast. Dr. Keating is brilliant, homplushing, and presents the principles of physics in a very attainable way. The guests on this podcast range to the greatest minds of our time. I highly recommend it. And that was review number 502 worldwide.

Won't you add yours to if you're able to, either on Spotify, Audubal or Written Review on Apple Podcast? Don't forget to sign up for a monthly mailing list called Magic Mailing List, because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For now, signing off yours truly, stay tuned for interviews with Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Powers, an upcoming interview with Pulitzer Prize winner, Ed Young, and conversation with Philip Goff, with Gareth, and many, many of the most brilliant luminaries in our multiverse. Brian Keating, signing off and thanking you for going into the impossible.

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