Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - They’re Going to Destroy Science! Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating Part 2 of 2 (#302b)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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.

Starting point is 00:00:16 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. It's not the inclusion. People who deserve to be in the room, we need to beat down those doors and make sure that there's no extraneous reason that somebody can't get into the room that they deserve to be in via merit. Equity? Are you kidding me? Equity is just this horrible thing. I mean, it's a Trojan horse because it sounds like equality, sounds like fairness.

Starting point is 00:01:00 The key point is equity needs to die. All the professors who are any good, you know, call me up and tell me, I can't. can't stand it. Should I retire? Should I leave? Welcome, everyone, to part two of this two-part episode of Into the Impossible, featuring Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating in a frank discussion, diving deep into philosophical and existential questions in science, faith, belief, and global conflict. In part two, the dynamic duo address anti-Semitism, redesigning academia, threats against American science and technology leadership, and much more.

Starting point is 00:01:43 These are controversial topics addressed with an intellectual rigor you are unlikely to hear anywhere else. Whatever your worldview, if you appreciate having your assumptions challenged, civil dialogue, and honest debate, please pay it forward with a five-star rating and keep in touch with Professor Keating

Starting point is 00:01:59 by joining his email list at brynkeedin.com slash list. And if you have a dot-edu domain, we'll send you a bit of space dust in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Please, let us know what you think of some of the many topics covered in this episode and give us your suggestions in the form of a review like this one. From Tristan Zara.

Starting point is 00:02:22 Great podcast, great guests. Cutting-edge science and passionate articulate explainers abound in this always-stimulating journey through many different sciences and areas of technological and philosophical interest. Brian is sharp and always fair. And now, from our studio, at the University of California, San Diego. Raise yourself for part two of this provocative two-part episode of Into the Impossible with Brian Keating and Eric Weinstein.

Starting point is 00:02:50 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the five-bed doors, please, how? You don't realize the way power and science interact in these institutions. I haven't gotten worse. I mean, I'm just going to quote some statistics that I like. Stanford, speaking of Stanford,

Starting point is 00:03:11 only institution I was ever fired from. Not that I'm bitter about that. Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students and concurrently list 15,750 administrative staff, nearly one to one. In the past, such costly Praetorian bloat, I forget where I got this, maybe Heather McDonald, I have to look up the source for this,

Starting point is 00:03:35 would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Shout to Heather McDonald. But not now. Six-figure salary, diversity, equity, inclusion, commissor, that's why I think it's Heather because she wrote this

Starting point is 00:03:43 wonderful book, the diversity delusion, which has a whole page dedicated to UCSD, by the way. Consequently, problematic standardized test are damned as biased and antithetical to diversity.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Yeah, we have to destroy the structure. What replaces it? So you overthrow Putin and then who do you put in there? Why make something that works worse? Why make it that you're stipulating its work? It's not working, though. You're saying academia.

Starting point is 00:04:11 The research university? Yeah. Or, I mean, there's just a university. Like, we don't have a university and then there's university part two. Are you really? No, no, no. We have something called the AAU, the Association of American Universities. And we had something that used to be called, what, NASLUG, that I forget what it's been renamed to,

Starting point is 00:04:28 which is the National Association of Land Grant colleges. Okay. And these were the prestige research powerhouses as distinguished from the also rands. The degradation. in this class of university is so profound due to deciding that we are going to empower administration over the professor to run these things. Every university that you want to be associated with, the prestige comes from the professors having both a culture and being in charge.

Starting point is 00:05:03 I was speaking to a colleague of ours who will remain nameless. And this person said to me, not knowing that I'd studied this issue, with the National Bureau for Economic Research and the Harvard Economics Department and the Sloan labor and immigration programs, Eric, you have to understand what a provost is. The provost is my boss. And I said, stop right there. I said, the provost is not your boss. You don't have a boss. You are your boss. If a provost is your boss, you have to not be at that university.

Starting point is 00:05:39 You don't have a boss. The whole thing goes out the window. And then I started hearing about a secondary dean who is under the president, not under the control of the provost, who's sort of the academic administrator. And this is a dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Now, I love diversity. As you know, you can tell from my personal life. And I, you know, friends, family, it's pretty much. United Nations. That's what I'm saying. I love languages. I love food. I love travel. So that's an

Starting point is 00:06:11 easy one. It's not the inclusion. People who deserve to be in the room, we need to beat down those doors and make sure that there's no extraneous reason that somebody can't get into the room that they deserve to be in via merit. Equity? Are you kidding me? Equity is just this horrible thing. I mean, It's a Trojan horse because it sounds like equality, sounds like fairness. It sounds like... It could be against it. Right.

Starting point is 00:06:42 And the key point is equity needs to die. I'm looking for my diversity, equity, inclusion, award, which is around here somewhere. Congratulations. Yes. But all the professors who are any good, you know, call me up and tell me, I can't stand it. Should I retire? Should I leave? Should I stop my research?

Starting point is 00:07:01 It is a crisis. I mean, there is a crisis in the academic, you know, kind of, um, just, Emilio, that we do have this. First of all, yes, that the most powerful administrators used to be Provost Dean's academic affairs. Now it is, has moved to a diversity, equity, inclusion office. Anybody focused on equity? We should just ask a question. Do you believe in equity inside of an academic context? It's considered the third leg of the three-legged stool by the president. Please don't do the devil's advocate. This is an incredibly dangerous, how pervasive it is. Look, this gives communism a bad name.

Starting point is 00:07:38 What is the motto of communism? If you had to sum up communism in one aphorism. From each according to his knee means to each according to his needs. From each according to his abilities, right? To each according to his or her needs, right? Okay. This is not even communism. This is saying the more able person may need to be struck down so that the less able person can perform so that we

Starting point is 00:08:08 achieve this outcome. And I'm sorry, you know, Marxism is bad enough. And I'm not talking about a social net, a social safety net. I'm not talking about it here at this university. I'm not, I'm not talking about even socialism. I'm talking about this is, you know, Dr. Seuss, theater geysel, who has a library named after him, wrote an obscure book called On Beyond Zebra, which I believe is now banned. I'm not sure. If you have a copy, it's worth. I do. I know, I know. This is on beyond communism. So it's like, this is communism for people who didn't think the amount of suffering under communism was sufficient. You know, true equity has never been tried even vaguely.

Starting point is 00:08:51 The Soviet Union would have been freaked out to try equity. You know, the old saying as to why Stalin maintained freedom for his theoretical physicist was, well, he was crazy, but he wasn't stupid. This is just dumb. And we need to get rid. of the E in DIE. When and certainly I think there's there's underground, you know, spoken about in hush whispers, because of the fact that we recognize that in the past,

Starting point is 00:09:23 it was more than necessary and it may have overcorrected at this very university. You and I have talked about this before. We had both Jonas Salk, the Salk Institute. It's forbidden to own land here. My house title, it says, I can't sell it to a Jew, Hispanic, or Mexican or a Native American. So that's kind of funny that a Jew owns this house. You're Jewish?

Starting point is 00:09:46 Too Jewish. And Maria Geppert-Mayer could only come here and have our physics department named after her because she was kicked out of Chicago. She couldn't get a permanent position in Argonne. So certainly it was necessary. What was necessary? Equity was never necessary. Not equity, but to have, to have, I would just say affirmative.

Starting point is 00:10:07 action at that point to let in people who were merit to crowd they were they deserve to be here i don't think you could argue jonasalk and maria get barmaire didn't agree earn a position i don't know what conversation we're having i just said that we need inclusion of people who have the merit to be in we have to be vigilant and we have to realize that those people are going to come in every flavor all 31 flavors according to baskin robbins fine the question equity yeah no no equity has been over my dead body So. And by the way, exclusion needs to be practiced.

Starting point is 00:10:42 People who believe in equity need to be excluded from a meritocratic context because you can't afford, you know, I think we saw this in Algeria where you have an election and the electorate decides to get rid of democracy. Well, yeah, Hitler was voted democratically. I know. So you have to have safeguards that say, look, we have a long-term commitment and the threshold for undoing. merit has to be extraordinary and it's nowhere close to being met in fact you know my slogan is uh and bigotry in online anonymous chess well now they've done that with anonymous auditions for for uh most classical orchestras um i want to pivot to a less uh less controversial subject i'm sorry no i'm joking because i'm going to go somewhere more but it's not controversial

Starting point is 00:11:36 I want to say to you that I don't believe that this is a controversy. I believe what happened is that we lost control of a layer that became possessed of cult-like beliefs. And so when you're talking about like the Heaven's Gate cult, I'm sure that I believe many things that the Heaven's Gate people would find controversial. But they're not here right now. Right. Because this is a self-extinguishing behavior. We're not going to do a self-extinguishing behavior. We have got to figure out how to get.

Starting point is 00:12:06 rid of all of this infrastructure that we coaked ourselves up on over the last five years. But maybe it's not possible within the current structure. Are you familiar with something called the IKEA effect? The IKEA effect? The IKEA effect. Are you saying that the people feel differently as to whether they've built something and have put sweat equity into something as to whether it's handed to them? They ascribe more value to something that they've created, right?

Starting point is 00:12:29 So this is something they've created, right? So they've created this structure and these strictures. and it's not, I want to pivot away from this, but to this. And I want to say the following. This, the university system is, has now ingested this, these, these, you know, divisions of diversity, equity, inclusion, vice chancellor. There's an apparatus. There's a structure.

Starting point is 00:12:51 It's detailed. We're not the first person, people to talk about it. We already referred to Heather McDonald. You can go there to see it. What about if the secret and all these things are coming downstream from academia? In other words, the political class, the, the, the, the. the infighting, the lack of fear over Ukraine. The BA.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Right. Okay. So I want to pivot to this brings up my next topic. Maybe we need a different model for the academia, for academia. Maybe we need maybe the nonprofit or the, you know, kind of scholastic for its own sake approach is no longer relevant in the 21st century. After all, it's a thousand years old. I don't want to do this. So what, what, you don't think that there's an opportunity to replace the current academic?

Starting point is 00:13:33 We went crazy. Okay. So we have this like red guard and the red guard took over. I'm not going to pretend. Forget about that then. Is academia in need and overhaul? I mean, we've detailed already. I don't think, I don't think you're understanding where I am.

Starting point is 00:13:47 We can't build a container that can hold money and funds that isn't susceptible to this. So right now, this is a container of water. Okay. Imagine that the sides of this container were coated with poison. And every time that you had water, wanted to put in, you're thinking about the water, but you're not thinking about the container, which poisons everything. So what you are allowed to do and not allowed to do. I mean, I'm all, I understand if you want to get rid of legacy preferences, if you want to get rid of sports preferences,

Starting point is 00:14:18 if you want to tax the university endowments, I mean, there's a million. Whatever, there's millions of things. But we cannot have a world where the only containers that you can build all inherit the same problem. Why did everything go crazy? If you've ever seen an ant mill, you have a bunch of ants that are leaving some sort of a scent trail. And they go around in a circle because all they're doing is following the trail. And the trail has happened, you know, to has a chain. As a chain. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:49 Perubation. Right. And so in that circumstance, you've created an ant mill where every container produces the same effect. So what am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to come up with a, you know. We haven't tried communism. Harvard is supposed to open a campus in Riyadh because it doesn't have the same laws. This is ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:15:12 This is our country. We're being idiotic. Nobody is clamoring for, you know, higher Jewish participation in the NBA. What we need to do is we need to make sure that we are fair. And we need to help people who, I no longer am going to say, underrepresented groups. because in fact that question, well, who's overrepresented? And the answer is, I'm sorry, you know, if, if Japanese Americans, you know, are absolutely the best at algebraic topology or algebraic geometry, so be it. And, you know, if the question is, well, what about certain groups that have been historically disadvantaged?

Starting point is 00:16:00 It's like, how do we get them some advantages early in their career so that we're not messing around with merit at the ends of their career. So we just need, we need to end equity, period, the end. Given that, I think that, you know, the motor homonculus of society and culture, that the academia really is the, you know, the root cortex of almost everything in society, right? I mean, look at Twitter. Well, look at Twitter. Okay.

Starting point is 00:16:26 So Twitter, they were journalists and they were the apex predators on Twitter. They had the most prestige. They had these little blue check marks, et cetera. they all went to journalism school. Okay. No, no, no, I'm saying. They all want to... This is a story about Twitter that I don't accept.

Starting point is 00:16:39 So, but you want to predicated art. Okay, so go ahead. Professors all went to academic, all went to college, right? So look at how much in our culture and these ideas and... I mean, I have a blue check mark and it's not some big deal. You may or may not be there. You may or may not be notable. Notable.

Starting point is 00:16:56 Yes, that's right there. I think you're notable. But the question I have is really, you know, well, if, if you're notable, you know, well, if academia plays such a huge role. And to say that it hasn't changed, I mean, you have this famous quote, you know, if you were teleported back to the 1950s

Starting point is 00:17:11 or from the 1950s into a living room today, the biggest thing that you would notice are... I say 73. 73. You'd notice flatter. The TVs are a little bit flatter. And you can't find the victrolet. Subtract the screens and more or less,

Starting point is 00:17:23 it's only stylistic differences. Okay. So I'll do you 10 centuries more. Go back to the year 1080 in the University of Bologna and in Italy. And there was a guy, and he was scraping on a piece of rock with another piece of rock, and there were a bunch of young people sitting in front of him.

Starting point is 00:17:39 Now, that hasn't changed, right? So if you teleport him here, they'd say, wow, the walls sure are flat. You know, this is a similar kind of thing. We're not in a cave anymore. So why not say that actually the whole thing needs to be rethought, remade in a way to serve the needs of the, you know, the third millennium since this was in both. These things are elitist institutions. Of course.

Starting point is 00:18:00 No, no, no. You say, of course. They're supposed to be elite institutions. You and I buy into it. Okay. We're both Ivy League educated, right? We both put out some freemium on such things. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:14 Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It has nothing to do with the Ivy League. It doesn't have to do. This is a priesthood of a certain kind. It's a guild. Yes.

Starting point is 00:18:36 Right. Yeah. And it's elite the same way Navy SEALs are elite. It's the same way the head of your surgical team is elite. I never heard anyone say, I'm not going to allow my child to have life-saving surgery until we get somebody who's not, who's not elitist. It's like, give me the best effing surgeon you can possibly find. Okay. So what we can't have is we can't have our current elite ruining the concept of elite, the elite looting party, the elite.

Starting point is 00:19:06 elite termites that are eating through the infrastructure. Every time I hear the word, I mean, my simplest phrase is, our elite are not. Period. That is what's true. We need to reestablish the concept of elitism. And it needs to be more like, you know, we brought up in the last, I'm very affected by Jeff Beck's passing for some reason. Jeff Beck was the most elite of electric guitarists.

Starting point is 00:19:34 We're not going to Harrison Bergeron. Jeff Beck into mediocrity to serve some goal. We need an elite system and we have to be open about it and we have to stop lying about, you're not necessarily underrepresented. You're only underrepresented if, you know, you want it so badly you're willing to put in 100 hour weeks. You want it so badly that you're willing to do whatever it takes to teach yourself this. And then you're having a problem because of the color of your skin.

Starting point is 00:20:05 all of us are going to stand shoulder to shoulder to defend the people who deserve to be here because we need to broaden the concept of who can be elite. Now with that said, I just, I'm angry at you guys. You have these positions. Supposedly, you have tenure, and you let this get away from you. Why is it that I'm talking about this from outside? Oh, someone say you have less to lose. You're not going to get your tenure.

Starting point is 00:20:32 Excuse me. I have the same. I have the same, I have fancy degrees and fancy postdocs just like the rest of you. And quite honestly, I don't think you guys understood the threat as early as I did. That certainly could be true. I think that, you know, but you're scared. And we, right, because it's hard to make a man to believe something. China has abused our graduate student labor program because everybody knows that graduate.

Starting point is 00:21:01 I think it's China. I think America admitted. America a labor force go ahead okay you're afraid to say real things and the truth is afraid to say well well sorry I'm afraid to say many things right okay I'm not afraid in the context okay so I'm saying nobody want I was at MIT in a room filled with Chinese postdocs and when I spoke out about the abuse of this for espionage and for information gathering, which is that our labor force is our students, and we don't like to admit to it. And the professors talk about slave labor and joke about working condition.

Starting point is 00:21:45 Using words like coolies. Let's be honest. Oh, science coolies. Yeah. I've never heard that. I have it on tape. Slave labor on tape, laughing. It's reprehensible.

Starting point is 00:21:56 It's reprehensible. But my point is, is that these labs staffed themselves with a cryptic labor program and certainly not all Chinese students are spies no but China is doing exactly what any smart country would do and it is availing itself with the fact that they are sending enormous numbers of people into a very specialized work pipeline and we are getting rid of the advantage that comes from our freedom because they can't do what we can do right because they have a hierarchical system now most of us are scared to say this because it's a one-line argument Oh, sounds like you're having a problem with people who look different from you.

Starting point is 00:22:36 It's like, oh, well, I guess that's the argument. Well, just in the same case, there were quotas back when Feynman and others were Jewish trying to get into. We have tons of people of Chinese origin and extraction. We do. And we have, we have Jews. We have Indians. We have so much going for, I want those people, regardless of the color of their skin or their religious belief structure. Or where they come from, right.

Starting point is 00:23:01 Right. to make use of our freedom-drenched system because I believe what it does is it produces high-variance individuals. And what we're addicted to is low-variance labor. The rest of the world is much better at low-variance, and we create pains in the ass. Well, I think this is a symptom

Starting point is 00:23:18 of what's colloquially called a resource curse. Like we have in Saudi Arabia, where there's tremendous amounts of oil, and that's allowed them to effectively bypass and shortcut any need to, develop advanced physics or technology rocket programs. The smart ones are figuring out how to wean themselves away from oil. Right.

Starting point is 00:23:38 And my point is the cost saving that you imagine from moving your supply chains to your competitors, this whole thing is based on a crazy idea that if we just make ourselves so interdependent, no one will ever declare war. Right. Well, that goes back to Nixon and opening up China. Sure, but how is that working in Ukraine? Right. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:23:58 The old claim is that no country with the McDonald's has ever attacked and another country with a McDonald's. How's that working at? They don't have a McDonald's anymore. No, and again, you know, the other part of it is that we've got to not focus our anger on China. China's doing the right thing by China. Right.

Starting point is 00:24:15 We have to not focus our anger on our Chinese students. They're doing exactly what I do. Most of them are not engaged in this. Most of them are just trying to immigrate. Right. Right. What we have to do is to focus on the portion of the National Academy of Science,

Starting point is 00:24:28 the National Science Foundation that stabbed American labor in the back in starting in 1986. Is it more important to rectify past injustices or? I can't keep doing this. We screwed up and we made permanent changes. We have to undo permanent changes. Stop making it into something about vindictive. It has nothing to do with it.

Starting point is 00:24:49 I'm not saying it's vindictive. I don't think it's as relevant as you think it is now, although I have a full agreement. It was relevant in the 80s and 90s when you were. Everybody look up graphs over time of the number, of foreign PhD students disaggregated by country of origin and you tell me whether we have a problem

Starting point is 00:25:07 and see what the slope is now see if the slope is still as high level it's also the question of the state it's not just the flow the state I mean just anecdotes are not plural of data as they say but I've noticed far fewer I've had phenomenal Chinese individuals everybody has that have been that are now professors in China they're not professors here well some of them are professors here

Starting point is 00:25:25 some of them are I'm just saying anecdotally from my personal laboratory experience and we need a certain we deserve to have We should go after the apps in the world, right. If there are. But very often we've used the best and the brightest argument for hands. I know. I never paid my Chinese graduate student less than I paid my American graduates.

Starting point is 00:25:43 No, but you paid your Chinese and your American graduate students far less by pushing out the supply curve. If supply equals demand at a particular point. I understand. Okay. So then you, but then why make that argument? Well, because I think again, these are. We're going to get into like general equilibrium versus. partial equilibrium.

Starting point is 00:26:01 I'm worried about fighting the past war. This is what I'm trying about. We have a problem. The issue studied by the National Science Foundation in 1986, and you can find this on the web, is that they schemed to destroy the bargaining ability of American STEM workers. And what they did is that they studied supply and demand. They figured how can we get the wage down? And then what they did is to say, okay, if we released that,

Starting point is 00:26:31 it's going to look terrible. So what we're going to do is we're going to subtract off the demand curves. We're only going to leave the supply curves. And we're going to change a competent economic analysis. And we're going to turn it into an incompetent demographic analysis. We're going to stir people up that we're not going to have anybody to take over STEM. We'll pass the Immigration Act of 1990. And then when you morons figure out what we actually did on behalf of scientific employers,

Starting point is 00:26:57 it'll all be too late. And my claim is, I don't understand. Why can't we revisit this, Brian? Why are you going to dissipate the righteous anger whose purpose is not vindictive? The purpose is to say, we need American scientific employers crying for mercy at the bargaining table. We need to have new PhDs being offered $250,000 in STEM. Look, we just had a strike in the whole University of California, including my students, on strike, landing higher above average wages and so forth.

Starting point is 00:27:33 Their wages of physics graduate students were already one to two sigma above what a biology graduate student would earn or chemistry graduate student would earn because we are forced by market forces to effectively pay. No, you're not. But no, by physics. This is in my, maybe unique to astrophysics and cosmology. I don't think it is because when I look for a postdoc, I have to advertise at the rate of a Hubble fellow, which is not an insubstantial amount of money.

Starting point is 00:27:57 What this is is a terrible. argument, right? The argument is, well, you know, people are getting $80,000 a year or something. And I don't know what the current rates. Yeah, it could be for postdocs is over. But my point is if Wall Street is paying way over that and the skill set is fungible, I would like to see physicists getting 85% of a Wall Street salary with a 15% premium. Good luck. I mean, me too. Sorry.

Starting point is 00:28:32 No, no. Look. Good luck. Eric, if my kid here at UC San Diego, if she gets into UC San Diego or gets into Princeton or gets into Harvard, she will pay full freight. If I were a Princeton professor or a Caltech professor, if my child gets into UC San Diego, Harvard or University of Florida, I will pay nothing for my kids. In other words, there's more than just compensation.

Starting point is 00:28:56 There is, there are market. I chose this because it had a lot of advantages over other institutions, private institutions that I had a faculty offer at for a variety of reasons. But the playing field is not equal, even at the, even at the discretion level. We need to destroy the current system because it has been adulterated. It was adulterated under the Mansfield Amendment. It was under in the Eilberg Amendment in 1976, the Bidol Amendment in 1980, the shortage studies of 1986 through 90, the Immigration Act of 1990. We are up against a series of changes that have killed our university system, which are deliberately self-inflicted change.

Starting point is 00:29:35 So why not tear that down and construct a new structure? Tear that down because I'm the only one talking about this, Brian. And so when you take the only person talking about this. Oh, there are in University of Austin, Texas. It's a new model. I'm not saying, you know, pro or common. Nobody else is willing to be a xenophilic restrictionist because saying you're a restrictionist is a one-line argument. Oh, sounds like you don't like people who look different from you.

Starting point is 00:30:00 You're Asian-hating Asian- Exactly. So, Brian, so my question is, why are you playing devil's advocate when you understand exactly what I'm not playing devil's out? I'm saying exactly in concert with what you're saying. And the best way is not to try to, you know, keep injecting morphine into the patient, hoping they're going to start kicking a lot. Be more courageous. It is very clearly detailed. You want to look at the Mansfield Amendment, the Isleberg Amendment, by Dole. The shortage studies, bad demography, secret good economics, and the Immigration Act of 1990, among other things.

Starting point is 00:30:31 And you need to repeal these things if you want the magic back. And we also have to look at getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion in its simplistic form so that we can get the diversity and inclusion that we actually need by getting rid of the equity and making sure that we can also exclude people who don't deserve to be in the room. Thanks. Today you tweeted out. you'd like to get updates on the third, fourth, fifth object shot down over Alaska, Yukon Lake Huron, these are balloons or some unidentified objects. You asked about the origin of COVID. Are we going to get new information on eco-health, New York, NYC, interference?

Starting point is 00:31:04 The origin of the source of the Epstein trading fortune, paper mass mandate of efficacy, money supply changes on CPI, vaccine assessment. You get one of those. No. No, no, I want to ask. I'm an American, I want, I want information. You want all of them. I don't want to play inside of these nonsense frameworks.

Starting point is 00:31:23 I'm just trying to diagnose. What is key? What is, what one thing? I mean, you're one man. You're just a man. No. You're just a man. No, I have a very large following.

Starting point is 00:31:31 People follow me because I'm willing not to be a pussy about it. We deserve all of these things. This is normal behavior. We expect to know because we have to make a decision every four years, who is a president. We have to make a decision about senators on a more frequent basis. And the answer is we cannot do our jobs as an informed electorate having our news media owned by billionaires who are absolutely filled with the letter of journalism and empty of its spirit. What about Twitter where you have a large following? We will link to your Twitter profile.

Starting point is 00:32:02 Yes, because what we know from the Twitter files is that there are government agencies that are pushing to slow the spread of what they call malinformation. Malinformation is just information that is dangerous to. a narrative. So you have statecraft where you have to do things and then explain what you're doing. We mis-explain what we're doing almost every day. We starve people for information. Smart people say, I don't get it. I don't understand. And then we say, okay, we need to pre-bunk agents of mal-information. In other words, we need to destroy the reputation of non-state actors, individuals, citizens, who are going to spread malinformation, which is information. This is dystopia. And what I'm trying to say is, we don't need devil's advocacy what we need is for you not agree with me on this stuff

Starting point is 00:32:51 ryan angels god's advocates i of course i agree with you on this so we agree i think that but i want to give myself a little bit of an out of no not an out no i'm saying i am on the ground i am actively in the academy right and i am seeing things i also think the studies that you mentioned by the way 1986 and nineteen ninety nine i'm no mathematician but uh those aren't you know two thousand twenty three i I think some things with regard to low importation of lower, of massive amounts of foreign individuals who may be better at physics than, say, an American student, whatever that means, that is not as prevalent as it was when those studies were written.

Starting point is 00:33:33 Okay? I'm telling you from encountering both as a professor, I don't get a mandate. I don't have market forces. I can't pay one student from China less than a student from, as you say. The whole thing has to go, right? Okay, so that, but I do want to say that there. Brian, I'm not going to let you. There's no out.

Starting point is 00:33:51 If you understand supply curves, if you understand partially equilibrium, generally equilibrium, if you understand all of this stuff, this was a targeted program to destroy us. Our leaders, the National Science Foundation, tried lower wages. Why? Eric Block. That would just benefit the professors that you're trying to subvert. Own it all. Pay off your home.

Starting point is 00:34:13 Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamaba's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all, only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly.

Starting point is 00:34:38 Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Two things cannot be Simon Stanley and see true. They can't be doing it for the benefit financial or otherwise of the academicians. You have a class of people who are in a chair. Those class of people, there was not going to be a new allocation of money. They were about to see their entire pyramid structure collapse. Which structure are we talking about?

Starting point is 00:35:03 This is simple. I'm a simple man. No, no. We're going to do mathematics for a reason. Okay, fine. Mathematics has the math genealogy project. I want everybody to go and look up Norman Steenrod at the University of North Dakota. in the Math Genealogy Project.

Starting point is 00:35:16 You'll see something like 23 students, and they all but one at the very end in 1972, survived to adulthood and reproduce. So if you imagine that Norman Steenrod could create a Norman Steenrod, he would create 23 Normanstein rods. And then you'd have 23 to higher and higher powers, and that system is going to explode. That's what was about to happen in the early 1970s.

Starting point is 00:35:41 This is Derek DeSola Price. And the workaround is to preserve the culture and the style to which certain professors had become accustomed without fixing and addressing the system. Okay, so whoever was already in needed a steady supply of students who would not survive to adulthood and this became the hunger games around 1973, 1971, something in there. Okay. That structure is lumbering forward into today, which it makes no sense. What we figured out is that we could sell visas, which have high high value but are not fungible. How valuable is a visa to an American citizen? Not at all.

Starting point is 00:36:23 What's more? That pushes out the supply curve. So what you did is you sold immigration in order for one cohort to live in this preposterous Dionysian style, which is not supportable. And what needed to happen is that there needed to be a reckoning. We probably needed to go to a youth social education model. where you have a queen in a colony who reproduces. And most of the people work.

Starting point is 00:36:51 They don't, sorry, most of the bees or the ants in Hymenoptera work. So what we needed is most of us not to be fertile. And we avoided that. And we avoided the need for more money. And we avoided the need to pay market salaries because we were going from a period where we were educating sub 10% of the population at post-secondary level to approximately 50%, which was a one-time thing. And by the way, I'm just bored of this because I've been at this since the early 1990s, late 80s.

Starting point is 00:37:24 And academic missions do not understand their own economics. How many graduate students have you had? That have graduated? Yeah, PhD students. 15. Okay. So I want you to think of yourself as a Mormon. You've had 15 graduate students.

Starting point is 00:37:42 your colleagues maybe want 15 graduate students. Where are these people going to go? This is 15 over 19 years, Eric. This isn't 15 at once. You don't even have that many children, Brian. I'm working on it. I know, I know, I know. Hi, honey.

Starting point is 00:37:59 That's Valentine's. Right, but what I'm trying to get at is, at what point do I, I'm trying to explain an exponential to people who do exponentials for a living. Right, there's a replacement value. This is, this is, Just straight up, Upton Sinclair trying to explain people to people your idea. It's, oh, it's 15 over 19 years.

Starting point is 00:38:19 Madness. Madness. I think we're going to have to agree to agree. Okay. Last question before we go out for our Valentine's Day repast. Celebratory. Celebrating our wives. Since the last time we met, Elon has taken over Twitter.

Starting point is 00:38:38 Yeah. Has that made you more optimistic, less. optimistic that any of these interesting questions very valued points are going to be answered um there's a huge spike right now in anti-semitism on Twitter and what you realize is that when people start talking in terms of well you know there's so many different communities we have to understand different community norms many of us got inert to the issue of bigotry because of the abuse the crying wolf that the woke engaged in for five years or 10 years or I don't know where we are.

Starting point is 00:39:18 Those are communities. There is a stormfront community, right? 4chan communities. 4chan communities. And these communities are super dangerous. And we have a choice as to how we want to constrain them. We can either do it at the level of rules or we can do it at the level of culture. Now, I'm emphatic about which I want.

Starting point is 00:39:40 I want the anti-Semites to have the right to speak. And I want the anti-black bigots and the misogynists to have the right to speak. And I want to make that right, not a right that we see used almost at all. And in order to do that, you have to have an extremely strong culture of free speech and that recognizes that free speech is not the right of society to commit suicide by engaging in its absolutely worst behaviors. The problem that I see is that many people find this entertaining. Oh, did you see that thing that happened?

Starting point is 00:40:18 Oh, my God, he said this, and she said that, and you're thinking, do you realize how dangerous this is, that your enjoyment, your entertainment? So Elon has a particular belief structure that I really dislike, which is that the most entertaining thing is what the world will do, attention to. And my feeling about this is you want to know what's entertaining? Conspiracy theories about ethnic groups. Don't get a lot of clicks and likes. Absolutely. People find it interesting. They want to discuss it. And my issue is, I don't want to go back on the First Amendment. I want to extend the First Amendment not only through our society. I wanted to extend it

Starting point is 00:41:01 worldwide. But people don't recognize that that goes hand in glove with having a strong enough culture to resist these things. We're not interested. To not use them. So I don't know what to do in a world in which we're going to decide that it's super entertaining. You know, a guy who's been very nice to me personally is this guy, Michael Malice. I don't know what his real name is. But Jay Leno, I think, got scalded because a car blew up on him and his face. was, you know, like burns on his face. And he tweeted out, wow, Leno hasn't been hot like this in years. And I thought, wow.

Starting point is 00:41:49 I just, I didn't have a, I mean, I'm not necessarily a big Jay Leno fan, but that's a soul. It's a cruelty, right. That's a, yeah, yeah. And the idea is this has become normal for us. So, yay, Elon getting rid of the spaghetti. code which says not yee Elon but yay Elon well we can talk about about yay too but um we are in a problem we don't have a solution to and i used to talk about this with jack dorsey and i said i don't think the twitter has a solution um it is not the case that the most entertaining thing happening

Starting point is 00:42:26 is a good idea it's a terrible idea you want to know it's entertaining cruelty people love it oh yeah and one of the things that people love about cruelty is that they love finding a thin social, socially positive excuse for their cruelty. I'm not actually being cruel. Right, I'm watching. I'm stopping a badness that you don't recognize. You can go on Twitter right now.

Starting point is 00:42:51 My child can look at a murder. Could see, during- No, but I'm saying something else. But somebody- It's also awful for a society. Somebody is saying, I'm gonna publish this person's address because they are a menace to society,

Starting point is 00:43:06 and the person is not a member. to society. So they come up with a threadbare excuse because what they want to engage in as cruelty. To backfill the narrative that allows them to be cool. Yeah. And I think that what we have to recognize is we seem to enjoy cruelty and destruction as entertainment because the phone is desensitizing us. And I, you know, a lot of it came out of the multiplayer gaming community where people know that first person shooters are not real. And so it's like it's like, it's like, like, ha! I just splattered your brains all over that wall. Pink missed anybody? Right. But then if you looked at the Christchurch killings, it looks exactly like a first-person shooter

Starting point is 00:43:49 being live-streamed. And my claim is that we've blurred these distinctions. So I think that the previous Twitter was an abomination. And I don't know how Elon is going to try to solve this, but if I had one plea, it would be Elon Trump and Kanye. have all figured out the drunken boxing, intellectual drunken boxing, is a good strategy for a while. Because nobody knows what you're going to do. It's super entertaining. But then it goes off the rails. And, you know, my feeling is that Elon is the smartest of them.

Starting point is 00:44:25 And I hope that he'll have a change of heart and reconsideration because I actually believe that somewhere in him, he wants the best for the planet. But I'm just going to tell you right now is you can listen to an entire. conversation about communities and bringing people together. Trust and safety. And you don't realize that the KKK is a community. And there's not much of it. But you do not want to let a few cells replicate it at an incredible rate and then figure it out later. Well, we always end on a happy note here.

Starting point is 00:44:56 Can we? I want to wish you. Wait, wait. Oh, let's talk about something great. Something in science that excites you. What excites you? I'm really hoping, for example, that artificial intelligence. tells us something about the wiring diagram for the mind of the C. Elegans nematode.

Starting point is 00:45:16 We have a complete adjacency matrix. We have optogenetics and we have green fluorescent protein that we can attach so we can actually watch the worm think. Developed here. Yeah. It's about 300 or so neurons. I would love it if the same techniques that were put into protein folding or go or chess were put onto the worm and we found that the machines could figure out how thought actually occurs in a relatively, you know, the simplest of systems. Simplest complex system. Simplest system that has locomotion reproduction and ingestion of food and digestion. I think that that is a great example of something that I think will succumb before we actually

Starting point is 00:46:05 have artificial general intelligence. And I really hope that, and this is like perverse, I hope we have a near miss with very little casualty or loss of life in Ukraine. And everyone sits bolt upright and said, oh my God, this is not safe to be on this planet. What do we do now? What we need is to galvanize a Manhattan project to allow non-scientific people and scientific people alike to decide whether they want to stay here with G. Putin, Biden. Trump. Yeah, Trump, Nasrullah, Kamani.

Starting point is 00:46:44 Because I don't want to be anywhere near any of these people. I would take my chances in the cosmos. Not all of these experiments can work. But this thing is about to go critical. And I don't know whether it's going to be 50 years, 150 years, or five years. But I'm really hoping that what we see is a renaissance in terms of technically capable people, shouldering the responsibility of recognizing that we're waiting for the bread to rise and that this place is a womb, and it's time to be born. We started the, you know, Pitocin in 1952, 53, and it's now time to go.

Starting point is 00:47:23 Fitting for February 14th, which is the date in which Carl Sagan commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the farthest object made by mankind, sent back in the early 1970s. to do a grand tour of the universe. And on that fateful day in 1990 and Valentine's Day, exactly a 33 years ago, he commanded it to point at the earth and called it the famous pale blue dot. Do you remember the... It was just when he was beyond the orbit of Uranus.

Starting point is 00:47:51 And do you remember the story about the golden record? The story, Eric, I had on the subject of the golden record, who I'd love to have you host on the portal, God willing, you will, inshallah initiate it again. And Drurian. In Anne Aruion was a guest. Years ago, I remember Saturday Night Live's weekend update saying that we sent this record with all of these different, you know, Bantu haulers and calls. World music.

Starting point is 00:48:18 The Box B minor Mast and Chuck Berry and that we got a faint echo from the farthest reaches of space which said send more Chuck Berry. On that happy note. Thank you, my friend. Thank you, sir. Great to see you. Great to be in person. Stay tuned for more great episodes. If you'd like to see an episode where Eric,

Starting point is 00:48:36 outlines what he would do if he ran Weinstein University. Go to the back catalog. We'll put a link in somewhere for you to find our most frequent and requested guest. Thank you so much for joining us on the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you for having it. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to Part 2 of this existential episode of Into the Impossible. Check out for some other episodes with Eric Weinstein.

Starting point is 00:49:06 One of our most popular thought-provoking guests. And don't forget, if you have a lot of the show-provoking guests. already, listen to Part 1. Keep in touch by signing up for Professor Keating's email list at Briankeeting.com slash list, and if you've got a dot-edu domain, we'll send you a particle from the belly of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Remember, always be curious.

Starting point is 00:49:41 Thanks for listening to this existential episode of Into the Impossible. Check out some other episodes with Eric Weinstein, one of our most popular and always thought-provoking guests. Keep in touch by signing up for Professor Keating's email list at briankeetting.com slash list. And if you have a dot-ed-u domain, we'll send you a particle from the belly of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Remember, always be curious. You can't reason with the sun.

Starting point is 00:50:19 Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omni-Shade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - They’re Going to Destroy Science! Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating Part 2 of 2 (#302b)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.