Modern Wisdom - #747 - Eric Weinstein - Why Does The Modern World Make No Sense?

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, former managing director of Thiel Capital and a podcaster. It's a rough time to be a human. The massive increase in information we have access to has made understanding the world harder, not easier. Whether it's higher education, culture, physics, or pretty much anything else, life can be very confusing. Expect to learn what Eric thinks about the most recent furore coming out of Harvard, why the world of physics has made no progress in decades, why Jeffrey Epstein was interested in Stephen Hawking, how much truth there is in the recent flurry of stories about inter-dimensional extraterrestrials, Eric's predictions for the 2024 election and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get $500 discount on Fountain Life at https://fountainlife.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Eric Weinstein. He's a mathematician, economist, former managing director at Teal Capital, and a podcaster. It's a rough time to be a human. The massive increase in information we have access to has made understanding the world harder, not easier. Whether it's higher education, culture, physics, or pretty much anything else, life can be very confusing. Expect to learn what Eric thinks about the most recent furor coming out of Harvard, why the world of physics has made no progress in decades, why Jeffrey Epstein was interested in Stephen Hawking, how much truth there is in the recent flurry of stories about interdimensional extraterrestrials, Eric's predictions for the 2024 election, and much more. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed and the next couple of predictions for the 2024 election and much more. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Eric Weinstein. You got your PhD from Harvard. How do you feel given the most recent fallout?

These opening questions are incredible. It's amazing. It's amazing that it came to this. And as a person I know studying at Harvard said, I wonder if we are the last generation who will continue to see Harvard as this shining city on a hill. And that's, you know, that's somebody who's there now. I think it's a disgrace and we can't talk about it, which is the fascinating part that we are effectively losing our society because we're afraid to say certain

things because we're being made afraid to say certain things. What do you mean? Well, okay, so as a Harvard alum, you get the Harvard magazine. And this thing is incredible because it's just always Harvard people promoting other Harvard people in this sort of PR. The napotism magazine. Yeah, PR Fest.

And I think I remember that the article introducing Claudine Gay was entitled A Scholar's Scholar. And I knew from the get go that this was not going to go well. Because, you know, I don't think people understand what Harvard is and how it functions and why it's different. what Harvard is and how it functions and why it's different. Harvard is really the fusion of two separate institutions. One is about brilliance and one is about power. And so you can think about this as the sharpest minds and the sharp mind crowd gets tons of resources because the sharp elbow crowd makes sure that power is used to perpetuate Harvard's place of privilege. And the sharp mind crowd contributes prestige to the sharp elbow crowd.

And so by virtue of the fact that you can't deconflate the sharp minds and the sharp elbows, Harvard continues to have this very special place. Now, what is this special place? Why isn't it just a university like any other? I think sort of two or three principal reasons. One of which is that Harvard is sort of an extension of the US government. The government department, which is sort of Harvard's version of polysci is kind of an

extension of the State Department at times. The economics department ends up setting economic policy in many ways for the United States. And above all, there is this concept that in every field, there's usually one institution that sets the narrative. So for example, in journalism, the New York Times is different than all other newspapers and news organs because of its focus on what we sometimes hear of as narrative driven journalism. Now, people now talk a lot more about narrative, but 15 years ago, I don't think this was common knowledge that the editorial room at the New York Times is a place where people thought about what the long arcs of stories were. And you figured out what the arc of the story was before the facts came in. So for example, Hillary is inevitable was a long arc in narrative-driven journalism.

It wasn't true. But all the information that came in when Hillary was running against Donald Trump was fed through this prism of the inevitability of Hillary Clinton. In the same way Harvard practices narrative-driven academics. It tells you what is happening, what the grand arcs are, and those just like the 2016 election are very often untrue. And so that's a way in which Harvard serves power. It brings people in who are brilliant

and then it takes the ones of those who are willing to play ball with the engines of power. And it enters into the storytelling mode in which Harvard sets the tone for everyone. So when you lose Harvard, it's very important and very different. The last thing that I would say that really distinguishes Harvard is that Harvard, there's the open part of Harvard, the classrooms, and there's the closed part of Harvard that you can't see at all. And it's sort of a system of star chambers.

And I don't think people who have not tangled with Harvard would comprehend how much of what Harvard gets done, it gets done behind closed doors because it can't be done in the open. Well, like, what do you mean? I'll give you a crazy example. Uh, I was not allowed to attend my own thesis defense. Now you're not an academic by training.

If you tell this to an academic, they don't even understand what you're saying. They think that you're making a joke or you must not have understood something or maybe you were sick that day and you had to zoom in or who knows what. But I don't mean that at all. I mean, when I tried to get my PhD, the Harvard Math Department instituted a rule that said you could not attend your own thesis defense. You could not determine who would present your thesis, your dissertation. So basically what happened is if you had an advisor, which almost everyone did, your advisor presented your thesis behind closed doors. Nobody's ever heard of this in the history of academics.

Is this how Claudine Gay got away with it? No, I don't know. Claudine Gay was taken down for two different reasons. One reason she was taking down was for not having crisper statements about the uniformity of application of rules of codes of contact when it came to Jewish students. So, it's one thing whether you have a free speech policy, or maybe you have a code of conduct where you say say we can't tolerate certain kinds of speech, whatever that is, there's certainly a question about the differential application of that on behalf of different groups. So that was one of the ways that she got into trouble.

The other way she got into trouble was the vulnerability of plagiarism and a weak academic record. And, you know, let me just say this early and everyone will come to it late. Plagiarism is the tip of the iceberg of attribution bullying, where, effectively, you have these people who determine who did what in the narrative driven storytelling that is academic and What? What papers get cited which papers don't? What discoveries are named for certain people is determined largely by a tiny number of institutions Harvard preeminent among them and so Harvard just plays games, morning, noon, and night,

with writing stories that put Harvard at the center and particular individuals at the top, whether or not those individuals have earned it or not. And what's hard for me is most people are now thinking, OK, Harvard is just full of it. But it isn't. It's half full of it and half the best place on earth to do anything important. And that tension is what's not recognized.

Now, power has to take a backseat to academics and to discovery and to brilliance if this game is to be maintained. You can't constantly just exercise power and tell stories. So in my history with this university, I've tried to figure out why does it behave so differently than every other institution of research. Is DEI the boogeyman that everyone is worried about? Is DEI the boogeyman that everyone is worried about? You know, I'm... This is so hard to even get into it.

Our university is one World War II in large measure. I mean, if you need codes broken, if you need new weapons developed, you're supposed to have SEAL Team 6 of the human mind that you can call on. And that's supposed to be MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Harvard. It's a very small number of super prestigious universities. Part of the problem is, if you think about, I don't even have to say this exact, if you think about a university as akin to an exotic car, a lot of people buy a McLaren or a Lamborghini or Ferrari because they like the styling status.

But the soul of all of those cars is racing, right? And the people who buy the cars for the racing sometimes are really annoyed by the fact that the cars are status symbols. And that's what a research university is to me. I'm interested in the racing and other people are interested because it's sort of what you do to show that you got a $2 million bonus from your investment banking job. If you don't race it, I don't know what you're doing there and I'd prefer that you'd leave. The purpose of a university is not teaching. Purpose of a great university is training and research.

And we can't afford to lose that. I don't think people have any idea how important it is to be able to call on your own nation's top academics when you need the truth, you need something done, you need help. And so whatever it is that is denaturing our universities that's turning this into a nightclub where the whole trick is to get past the bouncer for the cool kids has to be stopped. Pete Sautner What does it say that the ex-president of Harvard is someone whose academic bona fides were found out to be plagiarized largely? Pete Sautner I'm trying to say the balance between the sharp elbows and the sharp minds is wildly off.

And why is it nobody wants to say what everybody is thinking, which is this person is not fit to be the president of Harvard University? And why is that? Because they're going to get called a name. the president of Harvard University. And why is that? Because they're gonna get called a name. This was made all about race. Oh, you can't tolerate scholarship of this quality from a black female? I wasn't even questioning this before,

but now you're saying a scholar is scholar, and me thinks that does protest too much. We'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. You're a denicine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system. This is the best way to start the day. And I've done it for over three years now. It's got a science backedbacked electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, which helps to curb cravings, improve brain function, and regulate your appetite. Best of all, there is a no BS, no questions asked refund policy. So if you're not sure,

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There was a quote from Howard Jacobson that said I hope Claudine gay marks the start of people who know nothing losing their jobs Look We need to bring back exclusion We're talking way too much about inclusion. Inclusion and exclusion are two halves of a normal process. Claudine Gay needed to be excluded from that office, not included.

Now, if you told me that Condoleezza Rice was the president of Harvard, she's black, she's female, and I don't agree with her politically. But I don't think many people would have a qualification issue with Condoleezza Rice or let's say James Gates as a black man, a distinguished physicist. This has to do with people coming from weaker subjects, particularly activist subjects, subjects that didn't exist before the late 60s, early 70s, when all of these things were created. You know, to an extent, when you had, I don't know if you recall the pictures of, what is

it, Willard's Straight Hall at Cornell with the black students emerging with weapons. There was a revolutionary fervor at the end of the 60s, early 70s, and you have people creating women's studies, black studies, African-American studies. These departments were basically born of activism more than scholarship. I'm not saying no scholarship gets done there, but scholarship and activism are essentially fused. And many of us think activism is great. Just don't do it next to our physics and math and computer science and music departments.

If what you're really there to do is to ignore certain things and accentuate others and not search for the truth That's not an Ignoble pursuit. It's just that's not what scholarship is scholarship is about understanding things and getting them right and We've gone down a terrible turn, but you know just consider I Think your listeners might enjoy googling the string, cook something up to ease him out. That was a phrase that was used internally in documents within Harvard when a Kenyan was ejected from the Harvard

Economics Department back in the 60s. And what had really happened is that this guy had passed all of his exams. He was fully qualified, was working on his dissertation to become a Harvard PhD in economics. And the university, I think, decided that it didn't like an African man sleeping with white women in America. And it got rid of him, even though he was in good standing. The only reason we know about that is that it turned out to be Barack Obama Sr. So Harvard conspired 100% with the state department to destroy the career of Barack Obama senior. And that's how Harvard worked. In the star chambers, it cooks. What does it do?

It cooks things up. It cooks up stories. It cooks up attribution. It gives people credit for things that they didn't do first. It takes credit away from other people. I was there in the mid-90s when it destroyed my wife's career through something, a star chamber called the Harvard Jobs Market Meeting. And all the economists go into a closed room.

They lock the door, and they say, who's got a good student? And my wife was the student of a Nobel award winner in economics. And she had done something which was to bring an entirely new kind of mathematics into economic theory to replace something called the marginal revolution, a new form of differential calculus called gauge theory. And a guy named Dale Jorgensen who recently died said, no. So even though a Nobel level economist was promoting her and saying this is great stuff, she should go anywhere in the country, a woman of color from the developing world. Um, an old white guy just said, no. And you know, in a second, uh, she, her position in the world is reordered in the pile. And why were they doing this?

Because they wanted to fix the CPI. And I don't mean fix as in cure it. I mean fix as in fixing a baseball game Because the CPI is used to transfer wealth what's CPI the consumer price index and the reason it's important is that mostly what the government does after its military is Entitlements social security payments Medicare payments and those are indexed to inflation. And the way in which it takes in money is through taxes and those tax brackets are indexed to inflation.

So it's very funny, everybody focuses on like central banking and the Fed, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains a statistic that transfers billions and billions of dollars. And if the CPI is overstated, it pays out a lot of money and takes in very little money. And if you can get it to be understated, then you get to take in much more money. You don't have to pay old and sick people. And that's what the Harvard Department was doing.

There's a single figure that mediates everything to get squeezed through. How funny. And so what we were doing as a collaboration was showing the right mathematical framework to calculate the CPI. But that would have allowed less fuckery. It would have allowed less, yeah, to use the technical terms. So, but the point being that the Harvard Jobs Market meeting inside of the Harvard Economics Department is a star chamber the way the immigration status of Obama's father was a star chamber as was the way in which my PhD was over and over again.

Harvard closes its doors and it makes stuff up. This sounds unsalvageable. No, no, no, no, no. It sounds like we've got the people leading it have gotten in through some combination of diversity, equity, inclusion, nepotism, game playing, harsh elbows. Seems like the people that-

They just hired a guy named Daniel S. Freed, who's one of the greatest mathematicians alive in my area. Dan and I might disagree about string theory. We can have scholarly disagreements, just had lunch with him in Austin, Texas. That guy's a scholar through and through. I can disagree with him. I can fight with him. I can have my differences. I would support him 100% as a scholar to take over, you know, as a provost or dean if they were interested. There's no shortage of absolutely fantastic people at Harvard. But is that unable and willing to play the political games

that are required unless they're prepared to file their elbows down to a sharp point? Well, this is what Bill Ackman is doing that's so confusing. I have the feeling, I don't know this guy at all. Don't have positive, negative feelings. I thought you would have the feeling, I don't know this guy at all. Don't have positive, negative feeling. I thought you would have crossed paths with him at some point. You would think.

There are various people who I don't cross paths with for whatever reason. I don't even think we follow each other. Maybe I follow him, but I don't think he follows me. I think that the problem is, is that a lot of these people don't know how the research game works. They think about this in terms of the Harvard Business School, the law school, the undergraduate

alumni network. They don't see the part of Harvard that actually produces the mystique, you know, the analog of the racing for the exotic car. And I worry that the right thing to do right now is to appoint a curmudgeonly research-oriented person in a super rigorous field. It doesn't even have to be STEM. Like, music is an incredibly rigorous field. But what we need right now is rigor.

We don't need another person from the social sciences at this moment. We need somebody to reestablish that Harvard is an intolerant place, that it has the highest possible standards. It's unabashedly elitist. It's unabashedly American. And it cannot live with DEI. DEI is a parasitization of our best hopes and dreams. And we have to recognize that DEI has to be

destroyed so that goals like diversity and getting the right people into the room are not sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity and lack of ethics. It's interesting that at places like Yale, they had made some changes to the ways that grades and diversity account for admissions, but they didn't get rid of legacy admissions, which kind of tells you everything that you need to know about what's being protected. No, I don't think it does.

Is this not another way to ensure that the people, just to ensure that power is held in the people who already have it? But very soon this thing isn't going to be worth very much. I don't think that people can. I think this is the same as looking at why Marvel are going downhill. Yeah. Say more. There are a lot of movies coming out at the moment.

I think the most recent Star Wars director openly said, I enjoy making movies that make men feel uncomfortable. To John Stuart. Star Wars. Yeah. Maybe one of the most male dominated audience movies that I can think of. Yes, it's self-destructive. So what I'm trying to say is that you can say,

oh, we're going to keep things open for legacy admissions, right? But very soon, you're not going to want to be associated with. I mean, already Yale has mismanaged its research university for years. It made a very bad decision not to go hard on sciences and STEM and focused, in my opinion, too much on softer fields. So what happens when Harvard is no longer that prestigious?

If people start laughing at Harvard, what good is it going to be that you can get your kid in? I don't disagree, but I think people are so out of touch. The people who are in power are unable or unwilling to see just how quickly the stock price is plummeting. I don't think that they're able to see this. Thinking about it, especially using the Marvel example again, or some of the things that are coming out of Disney. You have a quantifiable figure. What was the opening weekend at the box office? You know exactly where this is.

There are fewer places to hide when it comes to that. Here's the number. What did it cost? What did you make? Opening weekend. And you have projections and you have you have targets presumably that you want to hit. If that number doesn't cause people to think, maybe we don't need another narrative about an all female cast that is better than the men without overcoming any challenges. Sure, but what you're not looking at is, you know, if you look at Mike Hopkins' work on the

Conver-, the Corvairian variant in the mathematics department, that's like opening, opening weekend statistics. Man, great stuff happens at Harvard. Make no mistake about Harvard is an amazing and horrible place. And we're going to all now focus on how dumb it is and how horrible it is. And like, then you're not seeing the tragedy. You're not seeing. Look, I didn't have an advisor. I was one of the only people you'll ever meet with a PhD that had no advisor. But

the guy who saved me was named Raoul Bot. Raoul Bot discovered something that's so important called bot periodicity that if I could convey it to you, your mind would be, you'd think DMT was for children. It has to do with the fact that there are only four systems of numbers that have particular property and one of those sets of numbers spins a merry-go-round with the other three with an eight-fold sort of a symmetry. Who knew that this thing was even possible? It's just, it's an incredible fact about the world. I associate him with Harvard.

That's unfudgable. There's no, there's no one in the world who can tell me that bought periodicity wasn't one of the most important things that happened in the 20th century. And to have a person like that, you know, just feet from John Tate, I could go on and on about all the real things that happened in Harvard. What we need right now, look, I would love to run for president of Harvard. If Claudine Gay can be president of Harvard, so can I. And what we need is somebody who's been wronged by Harvard. You need somebody who has not been on this kind of escalator to power who's constantly

shown love by the system. There are all sorts of people that represent what I call Black Sheep Harvard. You've got White Sheep Harvard and Black Sheep Harvard. And Black Sheep Harvard is no less important, but it's the people who are not loved by the system, who don't know when to shut up. The people who will take a stand

and who will zig when everyone else zags. Why would that be useful? Because we've got to purge the university of the things that don't work and it's going to be ugly. It's going to be unpleasant. It's going to be a civil war on the faculty. I was learning about an idea, the Abilene Paradox. One of my favorite ideas from last year.

The Abilene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group's members because each member assumes the others approve of it. That explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together. Kind of like the Emperor's New Clothes. An acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend. You attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there.

At a business meeting, someone suggests an idea that he thinks the others will like, recruiting a trans influencer is the face of the brand. Each member has misgivings about this, but assumes the others will consider them transphobic if they speak out. So everyone approves of the idea despite no one liking it. Yabalene paradox. Yeah. Um, I liking it. Abilene paradox. Yeah. I like it.

It has a lot to do with Timor-Karan's theory of preference falsification. I think that that's not exactly how it happens. How so? Most of the way these things work is that you're afraid to speak. Let's predict what's going to be said when this debuts. Sour grapes, grifter charlatan, Eric doesn't like women, Eric doesn't like black people. Oh, such snobbery. What has he ever done?

We know what every action brings about in terms of its response. And that's kind of why we don't speak up. It's just not worth it. These horrible people that follow you around looking for you to say anything like, I don't know, I don't know if she's qualified. Did he say it? We got our knives out? That thing has to be driven out of the university.

We can't have these people. It's not just from the university though, right? No, no, but I'm saying the universities are special because if everyone is going to take power later, passes through them, you can't afford to lose them. You can't afford to lose your news media. You can't afford to lose your universities. You can't afford to lose them. You can't afford to lose your news media. You can't afford to lose your universities. You can't afford to lose your political parties.

I'm three for three at the moment. That's right. Yeah. But look, it's worth fighting for. So, you know, they'll call me a bunch of names. They'll try to deface my Wikipedia entry. That's what they'll do. What do you make of the most release of Epstein documents?

You tell me. Oh, man. I mean, surprising to see Stephen Hawking on there in some ways, but... Why? I wouldn't know what Jeffrey Epstein would want with Stephen Hawking. What are you assuming is so terrible about Stephen Hawking being in these documents? I didn't say that it was terrible. Okay. Like that answer, that's interesting.

I'm surprised that Jeffrey Epstein would have an interest in Stephen Hawking beyond him being somebody that is well-known, influential, powerful, and potentially leverageable, which is... That makes me think, what... He took an interest in physics, and I don't know why, and you do. At least you have an idea about why he took an interest in physics, Jeffrey. But I don't know why. I don't know why Jeffrey Epstein was interested in physics. Well, what would you guess?

There's some special mathematics there that allows him to or the people that he is associated with to better be able to predict things, to be able to use it in some sort of a way around financial markets around new technology that's emerging, to just be able to predict things, to be able to use it in some sort of a way around financial markets, around new technology that's emerging, to just be able to see the direction that the future of technology is moving in, perhaps. You know more about this than me, Juan. Well, I, look, I'd go back to this conference that he held. I'd go back to this conference that he held. I think it's 2006 or 2004 called Confronting Gravity.

So he holds a conference. I don't think he holds it on this island, on his island. I think he holds it on St. Thomas maybe. And this is entirely consonant with an earlier meeting that he had with me where he wanted to know about what I was doing with mathematical physics. And I have to say, look, why gravity? Gravity is in some sense about the fabric of space time. And if there are things about the fabric of space time that you can unlock that are not

contained in general relativity, nor in the standard model, how much power do you think is in that? You saw what the neutron did to unlock the strong force. You can take out a city with a little bit of physics. I'm going to turn this around, Chris, because we had a great dynamic the last time, and I want to see you play with ideas, too. Tell me what you imagine might be the power beyond the standard model in general relativity. If we can already destroy all of humanity, albeit with some complications, you have to

engineer a bomb, what do you think might be on the other side of the next great discoveries? Well, I mean, this gets into sci-fi and speculation around the probably fits the next Marvel series. They should use this as the tagline. I would guess things to do with being able to move across space. Okay. Wormholes time. If there are other higher dimensions, if that allows you to access, if the multiverse theory holds, if that allows you to access different universes and to move between them?

It might be limitless power. It could be limitless power in the form of energy, could be limitless power in the form of travel. What if it allows you to control neutrinos in a new way? I mean, like people don't think about neutrinos. It's very hard to send a particle through planet Earth unscathed, but neutrinos do it. So in some sense, if you were a sovereign nation, wouldn't you be focused on physics? Here's the thing that I just don't understand. I'll be totally honest about it. Who isn't

interested in this stuff? You have to be crazy to do what we're doing with physics. We're running physics into the ground. Physics is, you'll go to a Marvel movie about some guy trying to collect rings or stones to get infinite power over the universe. That's physics. That's not stones. When you see somebody talking about limitless power, think physics. Don't think money. Think physics. Physics is the source of infinite power. And is Jeffrey Epstein sufficiently versed in physics to know that he needs to be at the forefront of this? No.

But this is what we dealt with last time. So kids, if you haven't seen last time's episode, I don't think it was Jeffrey Epstein. I don't understand why we're so focused on this man. Why aren't we focused on whatever created him? Like, this is really weird. We can't think. Take half of all the time you spend thinking about Jeffrey Epstein, talking about Jeffrey Epstein, everybody talking about it. And spend half of that time saying,

what do we think about whoever was behind Jeffrey Epstein? Whatever was behind Jeffrey Epstein is what I think cared about gravity, cared about space time, cared about physics. And you get to use this supposed financier as a wedge to be able to start to break this open? Well, this is the thing. If I'm looking, you know, there's a picture of Lisa Randall at this conference. Nobody's worried about the sexual depravity of Lisa Randall.

This is stupid. Lisa Randall is an amazing physicist. He was interested in physics. Jeffrey Epstein, whatever he represented, cared about physics. Does that make you more or less nervous? Well, you have to appreciate, I have no idea why my country, the United States of America, doesn't care about physics anymore. It canceled the SSC in 1993. SSC?

Superconducting supercollider. It's bet the farm on string theory, which has completely not worked out. We're now in 2024, this is the 40th year anniversary of the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation, which basically handed the keys to the liquor cabinet of physics over to the string theorists. They've been drunk on these stories about the first super string revolution, the second super string revolution, all these things that they're going to do, the theory of everything. They just had a panel discussion at the World Science Festival with Brian Green moderating between

David Gross, Edward Whitten, and Andy Stravenger. And this thing is delusional. Why? I don't know. I mean, physicists, I know are calling me up and saying, you're right, Eric. I can't believe how crazy this is because they're pretending that they didn't flush 40 years down the tubes driving physics into a ditch. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. The reason that you started a business is not to learn how to build a website or to code or to do inventory management.

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Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Can you explain in an accessible way what the problem is with string theory? Sure, it doesn't work. We can go a tiny bit more that level of advancement

a little bit further. Explain it to me as if I'm two. Yeah, or a high IQ golden retriever. The problem with string theory is its sociology, not its equations. The sociology of a string theorist. Do you mind if I play you a recording? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The following clip is from a podcast which probably has the highest IQ guests of any

podcast on planet Earth called The Universe Speaks in Numbers. Nobody listens to this podcast. But this is Edward Whitten and he is talking about, he's being asked about string theory by Graham Farmello What do you see the status of that framework beyond the established framework of physics by which I mean quantum field theory at the quantum level and classical general relativity at the macroscopic scale. So where we've made progress it's been at the string-slides-m3 framework. For a lot of interesting things you've been discovered I say that there's

a lot of interesting things we don't understand at all. But you've never been tempted down the other routes of other options for- A lot of you have been driven by other routes of other options for gravity. Those are just words. There aren't any other roots. There are no other roots. There are just words. That is the world's leading theoretical physicist opining about string to, can you imagine anything less scientific coming out of the mouth of Edward Whitten?

And by the way, this is the world's scariest individual to go up against and I've had it. I've just absolutely had it. Can you imagine being a scientist and saying there are no other roots when asked, are you tempted by other roots? They're only words, no other roots. I don't even know how to respond to that. What's the difference between dogmatism and conviction?

You tell me. A fifth of Jack Daniel. Ah. The guy sounds like he's convinced. Why are you so sure that he shouldn't be? I'm convinced the geometric unity is correct. And I am open to being wrong. I am open to ethical colleagues talking to me about their misgivings. This is an unethical position to hold. What's wrong with strength theory?

I'm going to say the same thing again. First of all, if you ask me technically what's wrong with it, I would say to you that let's say the explanation for three generations of matter based on an index of six on a Kalabiyao manifold at every point in space and time is not the right explanation. You're not going to be able to handle that. I understand that. So we can't have that conversation. The problem is you have a group of people who don't feel that they have to listen to anything else. And if anything else happens, then they say, well,

we'll just call that string theory. And you're thinking, so heads you win and tails I lose. And that's science. These people need remedial ethical training in science. I'm convinced of my own theories. I have to be open-minded that I'm wrong. Their theories have had all of the money, all of the minds, all of the years, the conferences, everything, the praise, the PR articles, you name it, for 40 years straight, and it's done what? It's destroyed physics. You can't have this ethos.

Look, there's no one more accomplished in quantum field theory than Edward Whitten. He doesn't belong in the lead position in a science. He's doing math, fine. But you can't be a leading physicist and say, there are no other routes. There are no, your dog doesn't hunt. We're not allowed to see other dogs. I don't understand.

Your dog's been dead in the backyard for years and you're still talking about how, you know, you're going to go take it hiking. So there's been in 40 years, basically no progress in string theory, no meaningful, no useful? Well, internal to string theory. But functionally outside of that. Yeah. I mean, in, that's 40 years of string theory.

In 50 years, the standard model of particle theory hasn't moved. There are no young people who have ever walked on the moon, and there are no young theoretical physicists who have contributed to our picture of the universe in a way that's been confirmed. If it's the case that the underpinnings of string theory aren't accurate, if it's also the case that for such a long time there hasn't been any progress that's been made, why are so many people continuing to cling to this? They're afraid of that man. That one guy?

Oh yeah. He's the tyrant that's pulling the strings. No, no, no, no. He's the string theorist. No, no, no, no. Everybody who's gone up against this guy, in essence, has lost. He's terrifying.

When you say go up against, what do you mean? You'll bring up a point. You might have an argument with him and he'll solve the problem you've been working on for two years in an hour if it takes him that long. You have to understand how vertical human achievement can be and this guy is at the very top of the human mind. I mean, he's just... He's utterly amazing and he's completely scientifically outside of his ethical boundaries with statements like this.

You can't do that to science. Even Edward Whitten is not so great of a mathematician that he's allowed to take out theoretical physics. And if you ask me about my own theory, in terms of what has happened to me, talk, try to talk about it for 40 years, more or less, the field says, well, what does Ed think? What does Ed say? What was Ed's feedback? Because everyone was afraid of him. You have to understand how dominant a single individual can be in order to understand this

effect. There was a great string theorist named Joe Polchinski. Joe once said to me, Eric, you talk a lot about string theory, but I'm not sure it exists. Sometimes I think we're just running subroutines for Ed. That's how dominant this person is. It's that even one of the top figures in the string theory movement, a guy who basically introduced brain theory above strings, his point was we don't even quite know what we're doing. Ed just tells us to do things. And it's time for Ed Whitton to actually face the other theories that are out there and stop drawing off about how

it's only just words outside. It's almost hysterically funny. Will that ever happen? Do you think that Ed- Where does he- Hey, Ed, if you're out there, you wanna have a chat? Love to. What happened? Why? Because it's a spell. Because he's casting a spell. Because if he actually had to face a real critic, somebody who has some knowledge of what the

history of string theory was, he would have to take into account all sorts of things he doesn't have to take into account when he appears on a stage of colleague. He has a right not to face unethical people. He has a right not to face people who are badly informed or not trained in the subject. That's fine. But I don't see these people as having gone up against their technical critics. Feynman was a huge critic of string theory. Sheldon Glashow, who won a Nobel Prize for symmetry breaking, was a critic of string theory. There are string theorists who have defected like Dan Friedan. There's no shortage of very competent people who have said, what the hell is going on? Why are we doing this?

This is madness. I've never heard Edwitt and face one of these people. When I think about somebody like Brian Green. Sure. He doesn't strike me as the sort of guy that needs to bow at the feet of this person. Brian Greene's got a successful career, he's booked, he's hosting these events on and so forth. Is everybody dancing to the tune of some super smart tyrannical string theorist leader?

It's not tyrannical. Look, I don't know how to say this, right? Because I'm obviously a critic. I revere this person. This is very painful for me to say, you know? If you ask me of all the people's minds on planet earth that I revere, the wonder that is Ed Whitton's brain is beyond almost anything I can communicate, at least when you have a Beethoven, or an art Tatum, or a Picasso, or a Modigliano, you can see what it is that they're doing.

This guy has done so much for us, and he's done so much to take science out of physics. And it's almost impossible to talk about the profound nature of his contribution and the enormity of the destruction he's caused. It's like he gave us everything, he took away everything. Because you see, quantum field theory under Ed Whitten, with help from particularly Michael, Atiya, and Graham Siegel, was revealed to be just math. We thought quantum field theory was about the physical universe, but it's much more general than that.

And Ed Whitten is largely responsible for showing us what quantum field theory really is. But in so doing, he also divorced it from mathematics. And so what Ed Whitten did is he effectively showed us that what we thought was the physical universe was just like calculus, just a framework. But keep in mind that my view of it is if the universe is traversable, the only way to get there is through the study of physics. And these guys are guarding the exit.

To me, a previous generation threw a lit match into a room filled with kerosene. This is the generation that's blocking the exit. Teller and Ulam gave us the hydrogen bomb. It's a geometer and a particle theorist. And I would expect that Ed Whitten was taking responsibility for trying to figure out whether the cosmos is traversable and whether we can leave Earth, is there any way we can get access to more energy? Is there any way that we can reveal space-time to not be fundamental so that maybe we can do something that would be confused with going faster than light. Maybe we can reach the stars through methods that we can't understand using what we have.

Why is Ed Whitton guarding the exit? Ed, there are other theories. There have been theories for 40 years. I met you in your office in 1984, 85 in Princeton on a snowy day. And you threw me out of your office for what reason? Because I started talking to you about the fact that I didn't think you were right about three generations for particle theory. And you claimed that collusacline theory couldn't work because of chirality considerations. You were wrong. You have one claim as to why they're three generations. I have another. Do you want to meet? Let's talk. Nothing will happen. They don't show up.

How long can the world of physics be captured by an idea that no meaningful progress is made inside of before more people say it's time to look at something else? That's an interesting question. The problem is that there isn't going to be much of physics left when this group dies. It just retired, I believe, from the Institute for Advanced Study because it has a capped age of 70 and he was born in 1951. No, there isn't much physics left. People have forgotten what the original problems are. He swapped out one set of problems that we all agreed on. Why is nature left right asymmetric? Why are there three copies of matter rather than only one? Why the particular set of symmetries that generate the strong weak and electromagnetic forces, all of these problems that are all about the physical world in which we live.

And he swapped them out for different problems like how do we quantize gravity as if that's definitely what we have to do. Those were sort of mathematical analytic problems rather than physical problems. And so as a result, two generations of physicists have been brainwashed into not caring about the physical world and they're totally devoted to various abstract areas of mathematics. How long can the legacy of that continue for? Well, how do you rebuild theoretical physics when almost nobody's doing theoretical physics? And I don't mean, look, there's some technical wiggle words

that if I don't say them, my colleagues will go crazy. But in the field of fundamental physics beyond general relativity and the standard model, there isn't much of a field left. You go on a random day to the archive where people post papers. And the papers aren't really about charmed quarks or muons or realistic models of the universe. They're about weird esoteric topics in mathematics.

And that has everything to do with a transition between 1983 through 86, 87, where the field lost its mind. Rediscovering the problems of physics can't be as hard as discovering the problems of physics. If you're not paid to work on physics, the way they've got us is by their, they've got their hands wrapped around our wallets. We can't afford to do physics. It says if there's a force that says if you want to work

on the world's most important problem, we're going to make you poor, we're going to discredit you. It's almost like there's a force field trying to get us not to unlock this power. And I've been very curious about why that is. And nobody, like with all the rich people in the world, nobody is funding the stuff at the level that it needs to be funded. This is the most important funding priority on Planet Earth. Because otherwise you're all sharing one atmosphere with a bunch of idiots and really powerful toys. Unless we can somehow channel the technology of interdimensional space beings. Please never say those words.

Hey, look, the interdimensional space. Interdimensional space beings. David Grush didn't say extraterrestrial, you said interdimensional. Yes, but Eric and David talk and this is not fair to David Grush didn't say extraterrestrial, you said interdimensional. Yes, but Eric and David talk and this is not fair to David Grush. David Grush knows that he's a physics BA, he knows he's not a PhD, he's repeating things that have been said to him. He had the presence of mind to try to give an example of what interdimensional might mean in a used holography.

And so as a result, everyone's making, oh, David Grush says, holographic interdimensional beings. This is absurd. And it's not fair to David Grush. I'm telling you, I mean, we can call David up right now. And I promise you, he's not going to back this madness and stupidity. So what's going on with this most recent update about aliens? Which one? Well, I saw this frustration that lawmakers had because they were getting compartmentalized if you don't ask precisely the right person, precisely the right question, and precisely the right way.

You're not allowed to get an answer, you don't get an answer. But you couldn't even... Look, if you don't know what a Ramonian manifold is, if you don't know what a determinant line bundle is, there's no way you can ask intelligent questions about alien visitation. How did they get here? There are no scientists. There are no relevant scientists in this story. Does anybody find that at all odd? Even this the situation with David Grush is fantastic. He goes into a hearing. He says a bunch of completely bad shit crazy stuff, right? Can we agree on that?

All right. And then weeks later some representatives go into a skiff and they say, well, it certainly seems like it confirms some of what Gresh has been telling us. And you're thinking, okay, so you've separated the confirmation, which you did abstractly because it was inside of a skiff, but you can only talk to people who've emerged from the skiff who were willing to say vague things and the crazy claims. Now what is this really all about? Nobody knows.

Now what I've been saying for about four years is there's way more to this story than I had understood. I thought UFOs were total nonsense. I thought this was a waste of time. And I was wrong. I was just wrong. Why? What do you mean? In what ways were you wrong? Why are you now convinced in a way that you weren't previously?

Well, I didn't know Yeah, I'm not convinced that UFOs like shiny metal craft are real at all What I didn't know is that there almost certainly are large programs inside the federal government that are denied, that are labeled UFO, don't tell anyone. Now, whether those programs contain anything about non-human intelligence or aliens or spacecraft or anything like that is anyone's guess because I haven't seen anything.

However, the programs almost certainly exist. What gives you that impression? Talking to four million people who tell stunningly similar stories. In other words, there is a weirdness. And the weirdness is tremendous circumstantial evidence that these programs exist, have existed for a long time and have involved extraordinary in particular physicists way back in the day. And on the other hand, that there is no credible proof that there are craft or aliens or anything like that. How do you square that circle?

How would you? I can't. Look, the coordination problem of all of these people is immense. There's that, but secrets have been kept much more effectively than people imagine. Say more. I don't want to.

No. No. No, but I mean, there are organizations that you cannot Google. There are organizations that have clubhouses and members that you cannot Google. So I know that secrets are durable. What we don't know is what these secrets are about. See, let's create a decision tree, which is there are little green men, shiny spacecrafts and all this kind of cool stuff, and there aren't. Okay.

If there aren't, what's the best explanation for why there's so much energy and activity and so many claims around this? And I would guess, and then again, this is a, this is a guess and not a particularly good one, that there was a clearinghouse program for everything under the sun. If we needed to retrieve somebody else's plane behind enemy lines, we had a UFO cover story. If we were trying out new aerospace equipment, we had a UFO cover story. If we were trying to get our rivals to misspend their precious treasure on weaponry and strategic countermeasures. We had a UFO cover story. Um, if we were up to no good, we had a UFO cover story.

Whatever all these things are, imagine there was a kitchen sink approach and that's what UFOs are all about. It's about a black SAP special access program as waved and bigoted as it could SAP special access program as waved and bigoted as it could possibly be that basically was a one size fits all story for all It's an in the extraterrestrial scapegoat. Yeah, an extraterrestrial scapegoat program. Okay. Now, whatever that is, if you imagine that that leg of the decision tree is real, it's all very funny because now you're like, all these people have taken it seriously, but it was the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians were supposed to take it seriously.

Like, it's on the UFO thing, you know, it's like people are going to blow this beautiful cover story that we've created for everything. That's one possibility. Another possibility is that we're on the other leg of the decision tree. And that we have no programming for it, and so everything about it seems impossible. What you said about physics. Physics is science fiction. The physics that you just learned is almost always about

science fiction. What if you have multiple time dimensions and people can circle around in time, and if you find out about them, they can circle back to the point where you didn't know. You have a neuralizer built into the successor to space. Is that real? I don't know. All I know is that physics will always blow your mind. It will always do something that seems impossible and that's why it's the coolest subject around. Now, I don't know what's going on, but I can tell you that the circumstantial evidence that there's been a program that has been that there's been a program that has been long running and involved very high level people. It's almost impossible to imagine that this is fake. There's a 1971 Australian document from the Australian Intelligence Service that has been declassified and made public, which clears up all sorts of

mysteries about what was going on with physics in the 1950s and 60s and it names names. It says that Freeman Dyson, John Archibald, Wheeler, Pascal Jordan, the Nazi, all of these people were working on anti-gravity. The only reason to be working on anti-gravity was that there was reason to think that something had gone beyond Einsteinian relativity. In other words, mostly we learn about physics from colliding. It's like breaking rocks together.

You're going to smash two rocks and then maybe you'll see a little spark and you'll study that, except we do it with protons. This would be like some different thing where there was a more advanced species and you're looking at its machinery to try to figure out, well, what science does it know that you don't. How much truth do you think is in that they've seen rumors on the internet of leaps forward in technology throughout the mid 1900s that people suggested was due to reverse engineering of something that had been discovered. Do you think that the technology movements that we made through the 1900s were self-created? I'm not clever enough to solve the UFO puzzle.

There's almost no topic where I can't generate multiple explanations. This is the only topic I've ever met where I can't generate a single explanation for what the hell's going on. Nothing I can think up makes sense. Nothing I can think up makes sense. Look, I'm very focused on this because if there are aliens here,

I might be the only guy who knows how they're here. How so? I don't think it's practical to traverse the cosmos using general relativity in the standard model. You can use time dilation, you can hope for wormholes, you can imagine generation ships. There's a whole bunch of stupid stuff that people talk about when they talk about interdimensional travel and all this kind of nonsense. Why? Because they can see the night sky and they can't get there. So you think, okay, in terms of the science that I've seen Carl Sagan discussing or on Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson,

how would I get to a distant planet using the science I know? And then you have to sort of do it with masking tape and you know chicken wire, whatever, whatever that is doesn't really appeal to me. They're not here if they're here using standard physics. Now, I've tried to make a list of everyone on earth who has a distinct theory of physics. Julian Barbour has a theory or Steven Wolfram has a theory or Peter Wojt has a theory. So I go through all of these other theories and to the best of my knowledge, nobody else does that. Like we've stopped talking to each other, we've stopped thinking about this. So in the world of theories about how something might be here, there are very few theories of the universe.

And why is that? It's because the constraints are so profound. There's no room to move, to imagine, to let, you know, human creativity take over. We're in a straight jacket that is so tight, nobody can think. And we're there because our theories are so good. The standard model and general relativity are astounding theories, but they're also a straight jacket.

So I'm very interested in, you know, if you're Obama, you just reach out, grab it and kill it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm very interested in this topic specifically because the universe is either traversal or it isn't. And if it is, it's not surprising that anyone's here. And if it isn't, we die here in short order. So it's a hugely consequential question. But there are almost no theories. I can't imagine. Like, look, Chris, in part, I'm almost reluctant to do podcasts anymore because I don't understand why we're behaving the way we're behaving.

What do you mean when you say we? No one on planet Earth is behaving rationally with respect to physics and UFOs. You have a claim that is being heard at the highest levels in Congress that we've lost control of our airspace. You either clear this thing up in an afternoon or you call in SEAL Team 6. Yeah, that's a really good point. How is it that we've got such an outlandish claim which is being accepted, not necessarily accepted, which is being received without the justified fanfare. It's like either this is completely crazy and needs to be thrown out, or this is absolutely wild and we need to do something about it. Why is it, why is it the case?

That's a really great point. Why is it the case that this has made either, it hasn't made more fanfare in terms of people mobilizing governments and such, or hasn't made way more criticism in terms of it being thrown out. I don't know. Why does the diffuse proposal from the EcoHealth Alliance not get properly adjudicated scientifically? I don't know what that is. The EcoHealth Alliance is this group run by a zoologist who got $50 million from the Defense Department to help a lab in China work on coronavirus and

making them more humanized. I mean, like, we should be able to adjudicate, did we start COVID? But we can't. All of these very simple things we don't adjudicate. Look, Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that the consumer price index is based on a cost of living measure. I claim that's not true. In order for that to be true, you have to take in consumer preference data and you claim that you don't work with consumer preference data. I'm either right or I'm wrong.

It's usually consequential in terms of billions. I claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is completely lying that it's working on a cost of living framework. And that the academic responsible for it, a guy named Irwin Dyewort, his theory of superlative index numbers is hogwash. Doesn't work. It's based on homothetic preferences. That takes an afternoon to adjudicate. I claim that there is no labor shortage of scientists and engineers despite claims that

it's been going on since the 50s because large market economies don't have labor shortages. That's a feature of centrally planned economies. There is no possible way. That's a four minute discussion. We are just lying. Lying, lying, lying is the substrate of our society. We're lying about physics, we're lying about economics, we're lying about finance, we're lying about coronavirus and biological research, we're lying about

monetary aggregates. How many different hills are you waging a war on? There's only one. It's called managed reality. This is all managed reality. What's that? You know, I have this image of a tanker that is flipped over on a freeway and there's a body scattered and people are bleeding and the tanker's on fire and there's a cop, maybe a special forces guy with an automatic weapon.

It says, nothing to see here, folks. Move along. You're like, nothing to see here folks, move along. You're like, nothing to see. There's like a severed hand on the pavement and you've got a tanker and it says, you know, danger flammable hazard and it's, is it about to blow and tell me what's going on? Like nothing to see here folks.

Well, the nothing to see here folks is managed reality. We all know what that is. Policeman is actually saying act as if there is nothing to see here and move along. It's an instruction to pretend. So we are being given instructions right now to pretend on everything. Pretend that you don't understand the CPI, Eric. Oh, okay.

Pretend that you don't understand immigration and labor markets, Eric, okay? Pretend that you don't understand the CPI, Eric. Oh, okay. Pretend that you don't understand immigration and labor markets, Eric, okay? Pretend that you don't understand physics. Pretend that you don't understand plagiarism. Pretend that you don't understand biology and gender. Well, it's one hill. Well, it's one hill. It's enforced pretending by a class of people that thinks that it is in a position to tell us all how to think at this level.

Now I don't disagree that that policeman has a right to say, move along folks, nothing to see. There's a very clear reason why that person is saying that. But when you start to say that to your experts, to the hazmat team who's telling you, don't put out an electrical fire with water. When you are telling nothing to see to the mother who sees her child on the pavement.

When you're constantly telling everybody who has a stake in something, and particularly everybody who has expertise in something, you're a Charlotte and you're a grifter, you're a fake, you're a fraud, you're like, shut up. Just shut up. There's one hill. Are you the only person on that hill though? Because as you've said here, there's a bunch of different,

the CPI stuff to do with physics, the stuff to do with the state's travel. I appreciate what you're saying. It's funnily on you. There are lots of people on the hill. The problem is that you have to visit all of these fields to know it's in that field too. You know, I was complaining about narrative driven journalism before people were talking about narrative at the same level that if you go back to my written output or

speaking output, you'll find that in 2011, I was talking about professional wrestling and kayfabe as the model for underlying reality that this is what's going on in our society. It's because I visited all these different fields. I've been an immigration expert, spent the middle of the 1990s in Washington, trying to understand why we passed the Immigration Act of 1990. I've been a finance guy, had the first paper that I know of on mortgage-backed securities and the danger they posed to the financial system from 2001-2002. Rose rang the alarm on the Chinese using our universities as a espionage program. I said that Hillary was not inevitable and that Trump was in much better position to win because of Timor-Coron's theory of preference falsification. I said this thing about physics, you're all out of your mind.

I switched my field from physics to mathematics because I could see what was going to happen. I think that what you're trying to ask me is, are you the only person who's visited all of these fields to see the pattern? And why are you at the center of all of these stories? Well, narcissism. Now, this is the personal and uncomfortable part. I think I didn't understand that my principle means of trying to figure out where I'm supposed to allocate my efforts is wrong. I just detect that something doesn't make any sense.

Like, very, you know, autism is not necessarily a bad thing. I just detect that something doesn't make any sense. Autism is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a competitive advantage in the right dose. There's a sweet spot. There's a sweet spot of autism. I think I'm beyond the sweet spot. I think that what happens is that I become convinced that somebody is wrong and I start

trying to tell them about the fact that they're wrong. And, you know, as the joke goes, I thought I would be greeted as liberators. Um, but in fact, you're actually causing a huge problem. So you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they're sitting duck. Obviously, what they're doing is completely ridiculous. But if I say that and everybody's agreed to keep their mouth shut about it, it's not like they don't know what I'm saying. It's not like they don't know that I'm right. It's that we've all agreed to act as if I'm insane.

What I keep doing is I keep using the same stupid algorithm saying, Hey, that thing about UFOs doesn't make sense. Or we could clear this up in an afternoon or, Hey guys, what if we roll up our sleeves and just fix the problem? Many problems are owned. A problem that's owned, you know, does the person who rebuilds homes want fewer homes to burn down? A person who rebuilds homes want fewer homes to burn down. No, their business is building homes after they burn down. Does an arms maker want a more peaceful world?

Does a healthcare system want nutrition to decrease the number of patients who walk through their doors? All of these are owned problems. And my problem is I keep trying to solve somebody's owned problem. That's why I keep ending up in all these places. Can I teach you about Milgram questions? Tell me about Milgram questions. This is Stanley Milgram. An idea from Jay Sanolak. So what makes a woman attractive from Jay Sanolak. So what makes a woman attractive is a Milgram question. In other words, the social penalty for an unflattering answer is much higher than the reward for telling the truth.

Because of this, we simply can't trust the answers we receive, even if they're coming from friends. The best known trick question is, when did you stop beating your wife? Any conventional answer to the question confirms its assumption to escape the trap, you need to call out the question. This type of question isn't that common in practice, it's really just a rhetorical gimmick. The most important and most common type of trick question sounds more like, do you love big brother? It's a question where an unacceptable answer, regardless of whether it's true or false, will be punished and the

punishment is greater than the reward for the true answer. I'm going to recall these Milgram questions after the famous psychology experiment where electric shocks were administered for wrong answers. There's an associated idea called the chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive. That's closer to the ash experiment. Yeah.

Thus, limits on speech become limits on sincerity. It's an interesting problem. Tell me about why you brought it up and what do you find interesting about it? It is one way that explains how a group of people from the outside can look coordinated, but it's actually a common trend, a common motivation working below the surface that motivates them all to behave in a way that appears coordinated from the outside. From the inside, it just looks like perhaps cowardice, perhaps compliance. So, yeah, I've been very interested in these sorts of issues. I try to tell people why the truth can't work.

When people are always confused by this, I say, okay, tell me I have mildly bad breath. And some people will say, you have mildly bad breath. And I say, well, you just told me that my breath is so horrendous that you were willing to cross a social chasm that essentially no one ever crosses to tell me that I have mildly bad breath. So obviously my breath must be as bad as a sewer.

Then they say, would you like a stick of gum? And I say, sure. I'd show no cognition that you've actually told me about. You know, you can't transmit that piece of information easily. It's very akin to this. Yes, now our society hinges on these things. On the other hand, there are ways of getting at these questions through language. So for example, you're not allowed to say that you like cleavage, but you are allowed to say that was an incredibly dramatic neckline, right?

And so why is it that one phrase is penalized? It's because there's a Russell conjugation that works, a Russell conjugation that doesn't. He sweats, sheep aspires, they glow. Right. And so in such circumstances, the key question is how you are allowed to discuss the truth as well as whether you are allowed to discuss the truth. Many times there's a penalty for not being skilled. The skilled person is allowed to say something.

Deftly. Of the appropriate nuance with the appropriate social graces. Yeah, and then the question becomes, why can't you say certain things? And, you know, this is in part, I believe in these social norms, but I believe that it is necessary to create spaces in which you can actually talk about the truth. And increasingly, what we're doing, and this is why inclusion is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard in my life, is you put somebody to create a low trust environment in every high trust environments discussion group.

So diversity is good so far as it goes. Inclusion is good so far as it goes. Inclusion is good so far as it goes. Equity is a disaster, we can't even discuss it. But the reason that inclusion has become terrible is that we're trying to create a low-trust environment in all previous high-trust environments. And that thing means that we can't actually have any serious discussions.

Like if you have knowledge about why venereal disease is spreading, it may require that people tell you that they're having sex with animals. That's a, you can't have somebody who's going to giggle. You can't have somebody who's going to shame. You have to have a completely dry as dust conversation about how venereal diseases can leap from nonhumans to humans. And we need experts and we need closed doors not to become star chambers.

You mentioned before about being able to have an insight into what was happening in 2016. Yeah. What do you think happens in 2024? I don't know. I don't know. You know, I met with Robert Kennedy Jr. not too long ago, and he was nice enough to have my wife and I to his house. It was very clear that he's trying to harken back to a previous remembered America through his family and he's willing to die for it.

There's no question that he's willing to die to seek the presidency. I think that Americans are going to have to come to grips with the fact that our two political parties, either one of them could win if they wanted. But the problem is, is that they want to win as a trough. So in other words, imagine that what America wants is no more trough. You don't want to win playing to that aspect of America, if it means getting rid of the trough, because the trough was your entire reason for running a political party. What you mean when you say trough? Assume that your party gets into power.

Now you get to hire all of your friends into government positions, then they get revolving door contracts with whoever they were regulating or dealing with. So effectively, everybody's going to pig out and help themselves. Okay, we got Democrats into Congress now, they can trade their personal accounts and pass legislation and do far better than the market. You know, whatever it is. Imagine what Americans want is like, hey, stop the corruption. I don't trust why we're in Ukraine the way we're in Ukraine because I don't trust why Hunter Biden is being given a cushy salary from a Ukrainian company.

Well, what you're telling, what the, what the population is telling the two political parties is end the troughs. And the political parties are saying, okay, what else do you want? We can't give you that because that's the whole point of why we do what we do. We're not public spirited. We're not thinking about America. We're not thinking about the future. We're not thinking about America. We're not thinking about the future. We're not thinking about the good of the world or the environment or any of the

stupid stuff that we are forced to talk about every four years. We're talking about swimming pools. We're talking about, um, third wives, fourth homes, you know, you're getting in the way of that. So tell us what else you want that doesn't interfere with the trough. And Americans are pretty clear. It's like, get rid of the, get rid of the goddamn troughs. You're slop, you know, you're slopping each other.

You're pigs at a trough. And now the idea is that since you're not doing anything, I want my ethnic group to be at the trough too. It's like, this has nothing to do with anything. We have to clear these people out. They're just bad people. Well, way too close to the 2024 election for anybody to be cleared out now. Really?

I mean, what's gonna happen between now and November? I don't know. I mean, how old is Joe Biden? I don't know. Okay, what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November? Including death. So he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or

above that. So I don't think you know whether he's even gonna make it to November. 81. Yeah. He's even going to make it to November. 81. Yeah. You have no idea what it's a million years between now and November. I don't know whether Donald Trump is going to be, you know, facing jail time. I don't know whether there's going to be an insurrection by MAGA people. That who feel that the Department of Justice is going after a candidate for political reasons.

I don't know if people are gonna look at Kamala Harris as the likely commander in chief. Why are you laughing? Kamala Harris is like, she's become a meme of a meme of a meme. She's become a meme of a meme of a meme. It's so absent from public life as far as I can see. That it's hilarious. Do you not think it's hilarious? Oh, it's hysterically funny.

You're talking about Kamala Harris being in charge of the world's greatest nuclear superpower. It's a screen. You're talking about Joe Biden being in charge of it, or Donald Trump. Well, Trump will be older than Biden on this next reelection than Biden was when he first entered office. Well, yeah, Biden began at 29 in the Senate in 72 This whole thing is

Chris let me just be more forthcoming people wonder know why I've somewhat retreated from public life I have no clue how to talk about this stuff This whole thing is so incredibly stupid. Nobody has ever done this in the United States from public life. I have no clue how to talk about this stuff. This whole thing is so incredibly stupid. Nobody has ever done this in the United States. We had an election in 1980 because Ronald Reagan was 69 years old, age was central. We've never been in this territory before.

Does that not mean that you should spend more time trying to grapple with ideas if you're not sure about them? What does that mean? That if your concern is, you mentioned, people have asked why you've stepped back from having more public conversations. One of the reasons is that a lot of the topics that you try to grapple with don't seem to make sense that much anymore. Is that not the time when you're supposed to grapple harder don't seem to make sense that much anymore. Is that not the time when you're supposed

to grapple harder with them? If somebody says to you, Eric, previous election, are you supportive of the hillside strangler or Ted Bundy, go. Well, I don't know if Charles Manson might run as a third party candidate, so it's too early to say. This is all so pathetically crazily stupid. What am I supposed to do? Just say get off my lawn every four seconds? I don't know how to react anymore.

There's no part of this world at the moment that looks same to me. And, you know, I've done the requisite work, which is if that's the way it feels to you, then you should look at your own sanity. Okay, let's entertain the idea that I've lost my mind. It's like, no, no, this is all completely one problem of managed reality. One of the things that I am concerned about toward the back end of this year is whether

or not whoever wins is going to be accepted in even remotely a peaceful way. It doesn't mean the same thing as it used to. Look, there's some mystique and some majesty necessary to make these things work. You have to believe that the Supreme Court is a bunch of incredibly smart legal money. You have to believe that the president of the United States is an exalted being who has power to make decisions on the behalf of the country. You can't afford Nancy Pelosi's husband trading up a storm like this. Everything's become Instagram stories behind the scenes of the Kardashians.

Nobody trusts experts exist. When your kid needs a life-saving surgery, you're going to find out that all you're drawing off on Twitter about screw the experts doesn't mean anything to you. Save my child. We need experts. We need institutions. We need experts. We need institutions. We need lies. We need fictions. We need stories. We need adult level, public spirited fictionalizations of the truth. I'm not claiming we don't. But now you've got

this different class of people who says, okay, you don't want the truth. We need to have stories. Let's just make up stuff and put stuff in our pockets. How much of it is coordination? How much of it is cowardice? Well, I would rephrase that a little differently, maybe. I would say nobody smart has gotten anything to work like this in a long time. The reason we have Donald Trump versus Joe Biden is that everybody failed. I failed. I've been podcasting, reaching millions. I've been teaching people about all sorts of things. One of the things I find very funny is that if you look at the negativity that follows you around, there are these very conserved things that, one of them is Eric goes on forever and says nothing.

If you look at the sheer density of information I've dropped on podcasts, I'll put that up against anybody, you know? But it's like we want Eric to disappear. We want Eric not to say things. Who do you think is behind that? Don't know. You stopped your podcast.

Yeah. I was a fan of that podcast. That first episode that you did with Peter, I thought was fantastic. I can't tell you how many people every day, where's the portal? Bring the portal back. What does it take to bring the portal back?

You tempted? Mick Jagger said something about Brian Jones that has just haunted me. And he said, fame doesn't sit comfortably on anyone's shoulders, but there are shoulders upon which it appears not to sit at all. And I thought, okay, if there's one guy who's good at being famous, it must be Mick Jagger.

And for him to say, it doesn't sit comfortably on any shoulders. If you just parse it, you think, oh, he's telling us something. It looks like I'm good at being famous, but it's not easy and it's not something that's comfortable. And then he makes the second point about Brian Jones, and he says, there appear to be shoulders upon which it does not sit at all. And I think I don't like the fact that you can't turn it off. It's a one way street for a very long time.

Hmm. It's a one-way street for a very long time. That's right. And you know, there's a point where you're wandering through Istanbul and somebody yells out, Eric Weinstein and you're like, there's no way to get away from this. And you didn't like that? Wonderful guy. Most everybody I meet is fantastic. I like lots of, lots of being well known, but the toothpaste hasn't, I've hoped that the toothpaste would sort of go back in the tube. I could do a little bit of podcasting here and there and it just doesn't work. So you don't want to, are you at the moment and not prepared to bring the portal back?

No, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it because I can't get back to Look I have fantasies about not being well now and I don't and I think it's too late Deeper into the breach look but also nobody wants to listen to this, you know remember what you're saying before Milgram questions. Hmm. I don't know. Let's play with it because I think it's a fun idea. Hmm. You ever heard somebody say something, oh, the paparazzi. Yeah. But actually, I believe it. I wouldn't want to live with paparazzi. The problem is that nobody's gonna hear it for what it is. If I really dislike somebody,

I want them to become famous. See how they do. I came up with this idea. I put it in my newsletter last week, a Titanic problem. You'd also call it a champagne problem. Okay. Titanic problem is You'd also call it a champagne problem. Okay. Titanic problem is an issue that everyone says you're in such a privileged position to deal with. This is an extra special type of tragedy, a tragedy that unfolds while everyone

cheers. Like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin with everyone telling you you're so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time. And the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can't help but agree. But also you're feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment. And you're not sure why it's from Adam Maseriani. I, uh, I didn't know you had that up your sleeve. That's really good. Yeah.

And yeah, I think, look, I like my ideas being well known. There's tons of being well known. That's fun. But in the aggregate, it's like somebody tells you you can have an orgasm every three minutes, but you can't turn it off. There's some people who have that. I know, it's a neurological disorder,

except it's 30 seconds, right? And you can quickly see that you wouldn't sign up for that. And so, fame is like that, is that do you really want to never know who sees you when you go out? see that you wouldn't sign up for that. So famous like that. Do you really want to never know who sees you when you go out in public? I've been fascinated by the price that people pay to be someone that most of the world admires. Elon was recently on Lex's show and he said, my mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me.

They may think they would want to be me, but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand. I love that. I love that. A friend of mine said to me, very dear friend,

said, Eric, I'm always jealous of where you end up But then I think about it and I'm real I realize I'm never jealous of how you get there Right like at some level Well, the easiest thing is somebody who's ripped At some level, the easiest thing is somebody who's ripped. Wow, that must be awesome. Well, did you just figure in how much work that took?

Um, you know, I have this guy that I think the world of, um, Ryan Williams, who was a scooter kid who then did BMX and does these crazy tricks, three seconds in air, what he can do is amazing. And I worry about him. He's comp me tickets to Nitro Circus, which I very much enjoy. I don't see anybody I know there because it's a different slice of the world. I think I don't understand why we all don't go to Nitro Circus. My monster truck, I'm all in. We all don't go to nitro circuits. My monster truck, I'm all in. But I look at how many times he fell doing this trick where he got the bike to rotate

in an opposite direction. And he and the bike did opposite circles before they came back together. And I said, that's your Mona Lisa. And they started putting out a reel of like how many times he didn't succeed at that trick. Hundreds of bailouts. Yeah. There's no way in the world you could get me to do that.

I want to do the trick. I want to know what it feels like. But he's one of the world champion fallers. Right. And so in large measure, um, I'm divided. I like having my ideas well known 95, 98% of the audience figures out how to be respectful and reasonable. And there's just this hardcore 2%.

There's a article by Tim Ferriss called 13 reasons not to get famous. Is that right? One of my favorite articles. It's over 10 years old. So Tim Ferriss, if you think about his trajectory, it's really interesting. He sort of gets thrust into fame with the four-hour work week and has this sort of very unique angle on life where he's so intensely curious about the way that you do something. So you would mention that you have a gratitude practice and you wouldn't just say, oh, what time do you do it on the morning? It would be what pen do you use? What notepad do you use? Which prompts are you using? Do you have a timer? Are you doing this in the sunlight? Are you doing

this indoors, outdoors? What sort of a seat is it? All of these things, right? He's very, very interested in the particulars. Then he gets this TV show, and he's part of this TV show where he tries to sort of hack his way very quickly through lots of different things. Do you know that he managed to make himself into a Thai boxing champion?

No. So Tim read the rulebook of a particular subset of K1, Thai boxing, kickboxing, something like that. And he found out that if your opponent goes out of the ring three times in any bout, you win by default. So he just sprinted across the ring, grabbed his opponent through him out of the ring three times and became a champion by doing that consistently. They then carved that back out of the rules and got rid of it. But he just had this. This hacker mentality.

Yes. Yeah. Hacker mentality. It was life hacking. And then he talks about what actually happens when you reach the size of audience that most people aspire to have and that there are strange externalities. There was a guy that camped outside of his house, managed to work out where his house was maybe

from metadata and photos of some kind, and had camped outside of his house for a while. Adamant that Tim was sending him secret messages in his podcast saying that he wanted to be with it. Exactly. He had to start checking into hotels under pseudonyms. He no longer posted photos of where he was going when he was going on trips

because people were reverse engineering it. And he uses this example that million to one odds happen eight times a day in New York City. Because if you have any sufficiently large data set, the law of large numbers, suggests that within the catchment area of 100, how many people does Rogan reach Puyo? You know, individuals, a billion, individual people maybe?

But he's surrounded by security. Of course. So, you know, in part, one of the things that I'm trying to think about is you have to become rich enough to make use of the tools. And then you have to decide, okay, I'm going to go behind walls. And that's not what I ever wanted. I wanted to be able to go to Starbucks, not tell anyone, work on stuff that I care about. And, you know, there was something about being contacted by killers.

It was a Colorado killer, I think, who killed five people in tattoo parlors who was trying to get in touch with me. Why? Don't know, because I'm a lightning rod for crazy people. What do you think it is? Is it something to do with the ideas of? Well, let's see. Almost everything is fake.

We have to get off of this planet. The alien story has much more to it than you could imagine. Take Jeffrey Epstein is a construct of somebody. Take, you know, we're going to go through all of these. The world is an incredibly interesting place and we're pretending that it's incredibly boring. And I have the stupidity to say, hey, can we go back to reality and claiming that we should go back to reality in a world which is suffused with delusion means that...

that I think we also don't understand how many people are driven crazy by small amounts of sanity. You know, if you imagine the Robert De Niro character in Taxi Driver, you imagine David Byrne of Talking Heads doing Psycho Killer, right? of talking heads doing psycho killer. It's somebody who's seeing through the world, and they're creating their own illusions, but they're not aware that they're creating their own illusions. They just see that the world is fake and filled with sludge and sewage. and filled with sludge and sewage. You don't wanna meet the taxi driver character. Yeah, this idea, the champagne problem or the Titanic problem of almost everybody has less wealth

and less fame than they want, which means that anybody who complains about the externalities that come with wealth or fame, the total addressable market for sympathy is basically zero. The total addressable market for envy is very high. Who is going to say when lots of people aren't as well-known or aren't as wealthy or are suffering in one way or another that you seem to have somehow figured out, it's very difficult to garner sympathy for

seemingly crying from your gilded counsel. Again, it's not about, it's not about fame. Think about it in terms of privacy and insulation. Everybody wants privacy when they want privacy. Right. If we had a toilet here and said, feel free to use it. Nobody's using it, but there was no walls. You would not think that that was being offered to you, uh, seriously.

Um, that's, that's the way that you explain what this is. It's a complete absence of privacy. The something similar, but it's about music. So you might be interested. Uh, I must have brought this up 10 times so fascinating loose capaldi the scottish singer did a documentary for netflix that. It does this first album he's singing songs that he made when he was a teenager the same songs get recorded and released. And he has just the most phenomenal success, billions of streams worldwide tour. He then has to write a second album. COVID happens. Yeah. And he starts to develop a Tourette's twitch like this because of the

pressure that he feels. Some of it very rightly coming from the world, but some of it being Internally generated as well. Yeah, you know, he can move at his own pace and there's this it's interesting watching him go through it because you think Yes, there is all of this pressure and and the world is expecting so much of you and you didn't ask for this You just wanted to sing the songs that you sang and so on and so forth but also you just wanted to sing the songs that you sang and so on and so forth. But also, there's not the same type of pressure that you're imbibing this and then starting to spin it up yourself as well. And here's the perfect example of somebody, I think, who has the ability to become world-class, but doesn't have the ability to be world famous.

class, but doesn't have the ability to be world famous. Hmm, yeah. And I think that those are two different skill sets. The ability to be world class and the ability to be world famous. Interesting, yeah. I think I like people too much. I really enjoy just being able to be a normal human being in the world and move around and

try out ideas and, you know, I- Pseudonym. Nice pseudonymous sub-stack account. Well, okay, so like, for Christmas, do you know who Tal Wolkenfeld is? She was a bass player with Jeff Beck. She's an amazing talent. Friend of mine came over for Christmas, two Jews. We start hanging out.

She wants to sing the song, the gospel song, the last month of the year. She's just come off tour with the Allman Brothers Band. So there I am, trying to follow her. Some song I've never heard. I can't sing, and playing guitar. And we're just clowning around and somebody's taking video of it. And she's like, we got to release this.

I'm just thinking, if you release this, I'm going to have to listen to how everybody, Eric thinks he's the world's greatest guitarist. And it's embarrassing because she plays with Jeff Beck and now Eric is making an asset of himself So I didn't release it. I mean it was joyous. It was fun. It was silly and It's just like the the constant stream of moronic abuse I don't even know how much of it is from humans. I think a lot of it's from bots I think Elon is very misguided. He has this idea of like anybody who shrinks from criticism or you know, jokes is too thin skin. It's like you have no idea what your product is. Your product allows stalking. You don't know

how this isn't about people yelling you suck. This is about people combing your all your public records saying oh well if you didn't if you didn't want us to know Where you live you wouldn't have thrown that check into the trash or so I was gonna bring this up before we Before we started it's a it's such a shame that we can't play music on YouTube without getting copyright struck It's so annoying because I'd love to get you to react well i'll do it once we finish i want to get you to react to my favorite band of 2023 all five of my songs from my spot if i wrap from the same artist okay the band called sleep token don't know it. Okay so they i don't even know how to begin to describe what this particular genre is okay they're listed under metal technically. genre is. Okay. They're listed under metal, technically. But they have elements of rap, they have elements of hip hop, they have elements of jazz, a lot of elements that are off key that are also brilliant. Completely anonymous. Every single member of the band completely anonymous. Oh, I love that. They have law around the band. They use what look a little bit like

Nordic runes on the album artwork. And if you track all of the different runes and then reverse engineer what they are, sometimes in the corner of tiny little pieces of album artwork, there's notes and things that the first song, they made their albums in eras. And this one was, this last one was a trilogy. The first song of the first album of this particular trilogy, which was released in 2018 There was different members in the band on the backside, right?

Has the exact same melodic progression and sample as the last song of the last album Wow These guys are just another level an absolute other level last week They're not named either there's vessel That's one then there's two, three and four, and then there's backing singers. And they're referred to as like II, II and IV. Love it. Three's birth certificate was discovered and released on the internet through a telegram chat.

They'd reverse engineered based on some, they'd looked at this particular American recording copyright association website where you have to legally list some of the names of the people and you can reverse engineer who that is and oh, that person used to be in this band and that's sad that his voice sounds like that person. And then we go back and see the live recording and from that we can work out where these people live. This is exactly it, right? I tell a joke about this that's not funny at all, which is, well, if you didn't want us to understand your brackaging status, you wouldn't, and publish it on the front page of the New York Times, you wouldn't be throwing out your dental floss.

and publish it on the front page of the New York time, you wouldn't be throwing out your dental floss. Okay. So I get it. You went through my garbage, you picked out my dental floss, you took it to a lab and you came up with a cock and bolt story that because no particular link in this chain may have been technically illegal, everything you do is fine. And I also joke about this under the heading of perfectly legal. If you ask somebody whether something is legal and they say it's perfectly legal,

you know that you should be doing it. I've never thought of that before, but that's so true. An interesting one that I heard recently is any website, this is from Kevin Kelly, any website that has the word truth in the URL, you can immediately discount. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there is this very funny sort of Newton's law that I also talk about with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris

that Ben Shapiro is always talking about the need for reason in areas which seem normative because he doesn't want to make an appeal to religious norms so much because he's known to be an Orthodox Jew. Whereas Sam Harris is always talking about spirituality and morality because he's an atheist who is suspected of not having a moral code because it doesn't come from a God. You've got a counter signal. You have to counter signal. And this is one of the reasons, for example,

why people with unusual beliefs often take down other people with unusual beliefs because you've already pulled out so many blocks out of the Jenga Tower, you can't afford anymore. I was reflecting on the odd horse shoe that we've seen from people like Douglas Murray and Sam Harris, who were very critical of religion at Stila, new large degree. But especially, you know, 20 years ago, kind of breaking down a lot of these walls being involved in being skeptical about the role of it. And yet, there's now almost a return to...

Sure. Nostalgia for a grand narrative that unifies everybody. There's a concern about what has come in in its place. Is it wokeism? Is it Trumpism? Is it... How do you see that? It's too trite to say baby in bathwater. It's easier to say we don't know the second order effects of the things that we do. Perfect example of this is after the introduction of the contraceptive pill, abortions went up and single motherhood went up.

That's like a third or fourth order effect that nobody could have predicted. I don't think nobody, it would have taken an unbelievably sharp mind to have gone, okay, so if before contraceptive birth control is available reliably for the woman to use. An accidental pregnancy is seen as the man's obligation as opposed to the woman's choice, but after that it's reversed, which means that the shotgun wedding goes out of the window because the owners can always be put on the woman. All right, that's interesting. I just think that sometimes you don't know the, like, better the devil you know in some

ways. I have a different take on it, but that's interesting. Give me a take. Oh, well, okay. So, one of my riffs is that if you look at the Declaration of Independence, the language says we hold these truths to be self-evident. You have to say because. You have to say we are not going into an infinite sequence of why statements.

And by saying, we hold these truths to be self-evident, you're saying you may not hold them to be self-evident, bugger off. We hold these truths to be self-evident. If you can't hold these truths to be self-evident- It's exclusionary in some way. Absolutely. And so very often when you imagine that you're going to put everything on reason, anybody who's had an intelligent child knows, why daddy? Why is that? Well, why is that? And eventually it's-

Infinite regret. Well, I joke with my son and I say either the parent eventually says because or you end up as a theoretical physicist because that's what that's exterminate. You have to have an organizing principle that scales. And you know, Sam's mistake is not understanding that, even if Sam Harris can be a moral and ethical, somewhat rational human being at times, on his best day, take Sam Harris as a reasonable, rational, moral human being.

You can't scale that. It doesn't scale. That's a big difference between saying it's impossible for an individual and saying it's impossible for a society. The next part of that part of the document is that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator. You have to make a reference to ground assumption where you are not going to go below. And if you don't do that, you end up in the infinite regress. That's what they cause. Yeah. If I ask you as a computer, divide one by three

to infinite precision, give me the answer, it'll say 0.3333 and it'll blow up. It's called a resource leak. You can't allow these infinite recursions seeking truth. And as a result of that, we didn't understand the load-bearing nature of religion in the atheist movement. Now, I say we, that was never my problem. I'm an atheist who prays, as I've said. And people get very confused, well, who do you pray to and what do you mean? Your brain knows how to pray, your brain knows how to believe in a God, whether there is a God or there is no God. How important is belief?

I don't know. But I've never met an atheist who never believes. And I've never met a religious person who always believes. Humans, fit in and out of belief and non-belief. It is the nature of our of our beast. And as a result of that, you know, I feel like we're just not honest. If, if, if you claim as an atheist that you never entertain the idea of an almighty and a creator, I don't believe you.

And if you're a religious person, it says like, my belief in my Lord is 100%, I was like, nope. There's a line from George Janko where he says, every man knows God when he's at his lowest place. Okay. The foxhole. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. Very interesting to think about what's going to come next as a whether it does descend

into this sort of. For the next one that you want to do the post apocalyptic blown out windows spring mattress in the back corner. World where nothing is unifying given that what we spoke about for the first 90 minutes is the world is confusing. It's hard to make sense. We don't know what's real. We don't know what isn't.

We don't know if we can trust the information that we're getting that's in front of our eyes. We don't know if we can trust the people that are around us. Do they have our best interests at heart? How do we make sense of the world? Religion provided a pretty good tool for that. And I'm not sure whether it's possible to be a cultural Christian or a cultural Muslim or a cultural Jew. I wonder how important the belief bit is to the religion bit.

Do you pray? I meditate. She's as close as you're going to get. What do you mean? I'm going to try prayer. Sure. Well, I mean, what prayers move you? I don't know enough. I mean, I took my mum to Ripon Cathedral on Christmas Eve, and we went through a full service of

90 minutes with 13, 14, 15 hymns and a bunch of prayers in between. A lot of Christmas trees and decoration and stuff, but I think that would have been the first time that I would have heard something like that since primary school, since I was 11 or 10. Yeah. Is there religious music that moves you? See, you have the major scale as the centerpiece of Western music. Do you need a guitar?

We're okay. Why, do you have a guitar? We have a guitar. Can we get the guitar? Come on. We need to be able to hear this. Principal reason for bringing out a guitar would be to stop me from singing, which I think is an excellent idea.

Okay. Well, hey. No, but look, I can't sing and I can't play the guitar. I enjoy doing it. The internet can... There you go. Well, look, this is a full-size one. Last time we gave you one that made you look like you were a giant.

Okay. So, if you just take the major scale, right? That's not really music, but try just the descending major scale What is that to you? Sounds like Mary had a little lamb or something similar. Now what is it? Where do I know that tune from? What is that? Joy to the world the Lord has come. Right now if you take a different scale, right, and you, the blues scale. All right, it's a little bit meaner. So you can ask the same question.

If I do the descending scale, you know, what is that? Like the intro for messing with the kid. Or it's close to sunshine of your love. Right. So is a descending scale music. Not much, but when it's made music by pausing or by emphasis, one of the great tunes of Western civilization has created, Joy to the World.

You know, my feeling about it is that song should move you. And all of these religious songs, they mean something, you know, I was in a car train going from Bulgaria to Kiev and There are all of these Siberian miners. I brought my harmonica and They were I had a transistor radio and at some point the radio Gives out and they want to drink and dance because this is their holiday gives out and they want to drink and dance because this is their holiday. They started getting really rowdy and I realized I had the ability to make music. So I pulled the harmonica out.

I start playing some blues and everybody's dancing and having a great time. And they're like more monogamy, whatever. And I'm paralyzed. I don't have that much of a repertoire on the harmonica. And the one thing I could do was I start playing Jewish songs. And this woman comes up to me and grabs me by my lapels, you know, in Russia, where do you know this from? Where do you, like I'm realizing that I'm in an anti-Semitic environment, I think. And I've got a Siberian minor who recognizes that I'm playing Jewish music and I'm terrified.

I'm paralyzed. I don't say anything. I pretend that I can't understand her in Russian. And she reaches into her bosom and she pulls out a giant star of David, right? And like she's just looking me in the eyes like, I know you, you know me. There's a way in which religious music is incredibly powerful and prayer is incredibly powerful. And I think we're afraid to pray. You know, you say this in terms of meditation. We're afraid to submit to something bigger bigger than ourselves to use the the programming that we have that. That makes us feel does something that feels disingenuous about.

Praying if you don't believe there's a line from Dan Browns angels and demons the movie Tom Hanks is. Tom Hanks is speaking to the Camelango, and he's trying to get access to the Vatican archives. He wants to get down there to work out some secret that was left that he needs to find out who's killing everybody. The Camelango asks him, played by Ewan McGregor, and he says, Do you believe Professor? And he starts giving some politicians answer where he skirts around the question. He says, I didn't ask that. I asked if you believed.

It looks him straight in the eyes and he says, faith is a gift that I'm yet to be given. I don't believe it. We all have the gift of faith, but we don't have is the ability to sustain it. We don't have the ability to import it into all quadrants of our minds. Look, I'm saying that I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the stories about the deity. But that's not constant. You flip in and out. You know, Mike, do you believe in Ray Charles?

I do. Do you? No, no, I'm sort of joking. But if I think about what did I say by Ray Charles, why was that song so powerful? He's basically bringing Saturday night and Sunday morning together. Right? There's a religious sort of gospel choral aspect to it. And he's got the roulette in the background echoing him.

He goes, uh, and they go, uh, he goes, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. That's, that's pretty, that's satanic grunting going on on Saturday night. Right. And then you're going to show up in church and you're going to turn it into, uh, something else. Ray Charles was scandalous because he fused the secular and the sacred, the profane and the sacred. Do you believe in the devil? One of the, you know,

you know the song Crossroads by Robert Johnson? Nope. Well, I can't. Let's see if you do. I don't know that I could do a Robert Johnson Ruby country blue, but like if this were an electric guitar, you probably know... I went down to the crossroads, tried to flag myself around. I went down the crossroads, tried to flag myself around. All good people, they just passed me by.

He's talking about going to the crossroads to bargain for his soul. He wants to learn how to play the guitar. And that's powerful because you have this myth, you know, the devil goes down to Georgia or you go to the crossroads to gain something in a Faustian bargain. How are you going to believe that with no Lord? You're going to screw yourself out of the ability to listen to folklore, to mythology, to great literature. And that makes me sad, you know? It's like, are you making a point of saying that you can't understand the religious person?

We need churches and mandirs and mustards and synagogues, and we need them to behave non-psychopathically. and Mondi and and mustards and synagogues. And we need them to behave non-psychopathically. And you can't hate on the psychopathy and divorce yourself from the power, you know, the power of the word and of song and of communal prayer and harmony. It's something I'm wistful for. I'm wistful for a belief that I never had in a way.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a particular Latin church. Chase, can you grab this big G a lily for me please? One of the quickest growing denominations, I think, of church attendance in America is this thing that's all in Latin. Have you heard about this? No.

I can't remember what it is. And it's growing massively in a young age demographic under 30 or something. The whole thing's in Latin. Which can be awesome, right? Well, I think I'm wondering... Vatican II may have been a kind of a big mistake. Oh, so...

Because when you're forced to actually contend with what the words are in a modern context, they don't have the power that they sometimes have as a spell. Well, it's difficult to switch off a very particular type of critical, vigilant, analytical mind when what you're looking to try and do is allow the experience to wash over you. So perhaps, yeah, not being it unless you have fluent in Latin, being able to just enjoy the experience and just be, maybe that is most of what you're trying to, Maybe that's most of what religious service was doing. Maybe it wasn't really anything to do with the words very often it isn't I mean Depends, you know

So we're actually meeting on Shabbat. This is the I Should have traveled here. We shouldn't be using electronic devices, but I'm not a practicing Jew at that level but I'm not a practicing Jew at that level. But I think about what we say over the wine when we pray, you know? We have this thing where we begin. Like, this is the sound of Jewish prayer, right? And then you're thinking about what it says, and it's very moving to me, because what it is is it's taken directly out of Genesis. Vayi hiyera, Vayi vokir yom ha shishi. And it was evening and it was morning, the

sixth day. Right? Yom is day and shishi is six and Erav is evening and vauker is morning. So you know what the words mean. And you're actually recapitulating God's shifting from work to rest. So as you come to understand what the words mean, it's not destroyed by knowledge. You know that old song by the rivers of Babylon? that old song by the rivers of Babylon. That's related to the grace that we say after meals. Um, these are references that matter. Uh, and I think people are shocked.

Um, they don't know how much of their life comes from scripture. You know, you have a round of firings at a company. Somebody says, I can read the writing on the wall. Well, do you know that that's Daniel 525? Do you know what the wall says? I think many, many take a little farce. You've been measured and found wanting your lands will be distributed to the Persians or something like that You know these these are incredibly powerful references that we live with You know you think about the birds to everything Pizziers on there is a season and a time and a purpose under heaven. It's Ecclesiastes There is a season and a time and a purpose under heaven. It's Ecclesiastes.

You think about Jimi Hendrix going off about two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl. That's Isaiah. Where are you? Where are you with the power of the word? Are you afraid to welcome it in? Are you worried that you'll lose your atheism? What are those two riders approaching? They come with news. That's the fall of Babylon. Who are the Joker and the Thief? And that's all. I believe they're on either side of Christ, being crucified. Religion is interested in you whether or not you give a shit. It knows about you and it finds its way into every aspect of your life.

And if you're going to be an honest atheist, you have to admit that. Talking about younger people, have you seen the data showing the movement of teenage boys politically to the right? Have you been looking at this? Well, where else are they going to go? That's a good question. I mean, I had a teenage boy. I still have one, but he's 18 now. And I watched them be pushed farther and farther right by their schools. You suck.

All of your instincts are bad. These girls are amazing. Look at you. You're pathetic. Be less masculine and more attractive. You're just barking at them constantly. They're not moving right.

They're moving out of your stupid way. You've given them what? Nothing. Nothing. One of my son's friends died recently by his own hand. And I don't know what kind of pressures he was put under, but I watched those kids go through this pressure cook or created by this crazy parasitized left-wing educational movement.

Get away from our sons. Get away from our daughters. Get away from our sons and away from our daughters. It's not left or right. I don't have a Republican bone in my body. Get the crazy people who do not understand human development away from our children. Stop giving our daughters terrible life advice. Well, like... That's one of these Milgram questions. What am I supposed to say? Let me speak abstractly so we don't get distracted with stupid stuff. Gender is about reproduction. And it's paired

and there's nothing you're going to do that's as good as the male-female pairing that produces families. Yes, there's a ton of problems with it. There's a ton of problems with traditional femininity, with traditional masculinity. I actually believe that toxic masculinity used to mean something before it meant nothing. Right now, we are allowing our children to be parented by people who should be nowhere close to a child. Because development for humans is different. We're not like wildebeests where you come out with programming, where you can walk on day one. We're basically not blank slates, but self-assembling computers.

And what you put into a developing mind, you know, what normal child trying to figure out gender identity does not go through a process trying to figure out, oh, I like that dress. Do I want to marry somebody who's wearing it or do I want to wear it myself? That's a normal process that you go through in development. And if a parent hears that, they usually try to guide natural gender identity. Now what happens when an administrator says,

oh, he said he wanted to wear a dress, he's a girl. Everybody respect his choice. You're thinking, wait, wait, wait, he said he wanted to wear a dress. He's a girl. Everybody respect his choice. You're thinking, wait, wait, wait, what? You took a moment that happens in every boy's life. And you turned it into a trans affirmation moment. And then you tried to like freeze it in and let me guess, you really just want to protect something which is great Some people want to protect trans kids trans kids exist. They have life very hard on them. Okay, let's ask how many trans kids got manufactured

by this DEI movement by this DEI movement versus how many would occur naturally. And you have type one and type two error. You have a trans kid who was always going to be a trans kid that wasn't properly treated. That's terrible. I agree with the DEI people about that. You have another collection, huge collection of normal kids who are never going to be trans. And you push them towards this.

I had J. Michael Bailey on the show who his paper on ROGD, rapid onset gender dysphoria, yeah, was pulled. Very, very rare that this happens. And I learned during my research for that about the left-handedness argument for both gay and transsexual people. So in the Middle Ages, it was seen as being a mark of witchcraft of being touched by the devil that you were left-handed, which meant that people who were hid their left-handedness. I think about 12% maybe if the population is left-handed, something like that, but during the Middle Ages,

it was significantly less. The ceiling gets released and people are free to be their true left-handed selves and more people become left-handed. I can now fully manifest that forward. And that is an argument that gets put forward a lot. Well, now that we have released the lid on the pressure cooker that was tamping down people's natural trans or gay proclivities or

whatever, they're now free to be themselves. But that doesn't explain why gender dysphoria appears to occur in clumps. It's not evenly distributed across all schools. You linked two things that I think have to be unlinked. We are fighting the last war because we got male homosexuality wrong. I'm old enough to remember when it was a lifestyle choice. Right? And I had gay friends in college who, it's not a choice. You know, it's like a quiet, I didn't choose this. We're lumping a bunch of stuff together. I don't think male homosexuality

has almost anything to do with female homosexuality. I think calling them both homosexuality is very confusing. There's something that seems much more obligate about male homosexuality is highly conserved. I don't think it's unnatural. I think it's it's part of the design of humans and we haven't quite figured out why it's there I don't disagree, but I think the left-handedness argument makes sense when it comes to homosexuality, but not when it comes to the trans issue No, it makes sense in both, but the size of the effect is the problem. You're claiming, I have no doubt that there were some people

who had transgendered brains, who were closeted, you know, transvestites and that they had a closet somewhere in the basement where they got to be their true selves. No question that that exists. The issue is that you created an enormous amount of like type two error. So you could go after a much smaller amount of type one error. You created all sorts of negative stuff by not balancing type one and type two.

And that's an unforgivable. You're not actually the defender you think you are. You're somebody who's destroying some lives to privilege others. And why have you made that decision? I completely agreed with you. Like I won't say there are only two genders, you know? Why?

Because it's not true. In humans? Yeah. Two genders or two sexes? Well first of all, the gender and sex used to be largely synonymous before we decided that one was in some sense obligate biological and the other was software program. Well, that was a lexical game that was played in the 1950s. That was played to try and bifurcate the term.

Yeah, but you can make an argument that you need a term. I don't think the gender should be purposed for that, but you can make an argument that just like abstracting male and female into top and bottom had some utility. Okay, so what do you mean when you talk about it? That intersex is a really important category to me. I know people who are intersex. They're screwed. They were screwed because our society had no way of dealing with them. The gender binary is so strong that somebody

through zero fault of anybody is born with ambiguity in their genitalia and their chromosome something. So, yes, there are two intended sexes or genders. But nature isn't good enough to hit that mark all the time. And those are human beings, those are souls. And the sloppy right-wing thing, which is to find the shelling point where you just sit there and you say, there are only two sexes and two genders. I understand why you're doing it.

You're trying to stop this crazy conversation that's taken off. So it's not like I don't have sympathies with why you're saying that. But when I bring up, you know, my favorite example is persistent malaria induct syndrome where somebody goes into their doctor having trouble having a kid and it's like, well, you have twigs and berries, but you've also got a

uterus. Your female on the inside. Does that person produce both sperm and eggs? No. Right. I don't think so. But truly that's the definition. That is the line in the ground around male and female, large gametes. Yeah, but sorry. The gentleman who goes into his doctor and to find out that he's got a uterus. Who is he? If he wants to be male, I understand why he wants to be male. If he wants to be able to talk about the fact that he got handed some very

strange cards by by the creator in her infinite wisdom I want him or her however that person conceives of itself to be that's a soul to me And I don't like the energy of saying there are only two sexes and two genders and that's it It's like I get it. I understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to say that there are two intended sexes and genders. It's reproductive, it's nature, I get it. It depends on how we're going to define sex.

Because if it comes down to gamete size, that is binary. Sure. Okay, but what do you do about the edge case? But no one's producing both, so there are none. I don't know that nobody's producing both. Maybe that's a fact. Usually the issue is that you have this list of homologues, right?

So that the clitoris maps to the penile shaft and the labia majora map to the testicles. What you're doing is you're taking a common female template, I believe, and you're treating it through the SRY cascade differently during development so that the default is female, but you also have this ability through this one protein to create a cascade that creates male out of female. Okay? That doesn't always work out. Now you've got an ambiguous situation, and you've got a culture that basically can't

think in ambiguities. That's where a lot of this frustration with the gender binary comes from. Is that you know somebody in a category where they're not really one thing or the other at a hardware level. I believe that beyond that, there's also a software level. There are people with male brains and female bodies and conversely. I don't understand this stuff, but I believe that that's also a software level. There are people with male brains and female bodies and conversely. I don't understand this stuff, but I believe that that's true. If you ever have the opportunity to interview Deidre McCluskey, who used to be, I think, Dennis McCluskey,

very famous economist, I had the pleasure of speaking with her a while back. And, you know, one of the things that she said was that she wasn't doing this to be hotsy-totsy. She was going to, she wanted to die an old lady, not an old man. You know, what, it wasn't, it wasn't a sex thing. It was just the fact that she'd been uncomfortable in a male body her whole life. So I'm using the term her. Do I have to use the term now?

No, I could use the term him or his. But why would you do that? Don't you have enough compassion that somebody ruined their family life and went through hell and in public because it was so painful to be in the wrong body? I get it. Okay. Now you have that compassion and how many lives are you going to ruin over that? How many lives are you going to ruin pretending that this is an enormous cohort?

So to the extent that I have a slogan and I basically never speak about trans, my slogan is make trans accepted and rare. Make it rare means use the developmental environment in order to give good coaching about male strategies and female strategies for life. Don't relitigate the fact that we screwed up male homosexuality. Just take your lumps. We screwed it up. It's a part of the human condition. It's never gonna go away. It's different from female homosexuality, almost certainly. We don't exactly know why it's here. We've been blessed with

untold riches, particularly in the memetic realm from male homosexuals. It is what it is. And now we're going to refight this over trans where, no, I think you have tremendous opportunities through development to assign behaviors, is the skirt a female object? No. The lungi in South Asia is a skirt. Men wear it. I have a lungi. It's like telling a Scottish person that he's cross-dressing. What are you an idiot? You ever dealt with a Scotsman? You do not want to make that mistake. They will let you know very quickly who they are.

We're out of our minds. We're out of our minds. We're creating so much misery for these young men and young girls. And, you know, it And it just makes me upset because we don't love our children enough. We don't love our children enough to tell these teachers hands off my kids. Go work out your weird stuff. I get it. But get away from our children.

I came up with this idea of toxic compassion, which was something I was looking to name. stuff. I get it. Get away from our children. I came up with this idea of toxic compassion, which was something I was looking to name. Metastatic maternity. Yes. Yes. Like an edible complex. Like the need to smother and protect something so badly that you just want to do violence to somebody because you want to get your rocks off. That there is this problem with compassion.

But if you prioritize short-term emotional comfort over everything else, you end up with some very strange externalities. No, it's not just that though. Well, I mean, I wonder if we're talking about the same thing. Maybe not, let me read you mine. Toxic compassion is the prioritization of short-term emotional comfort over everything.

Over truth, reality, actual long-term outcomes, flourishing everything. It optimizes for looking good rather than doing good. This is seen in much of popular culture as the desirable, fair, and empathetic thing to do, and it's everywhere. People would rather claim that body fat has no bearing on health and mortality outcomes to avoid making overweight individuals feel upset, even if this causes

them to literally die sooner or have a worse quality of life over the long run. Parents would rather allow children to play computer games or watch screens and access social media every night instead of dealing with the discomfort of taking it away from them, even if it ruins their brain development, social skills and self-esteem. People would rather say that children growing up in a single parent household suffer no worse outcomes than those from two parent households, even if this misleads parents, children and teachers about why kids behave the ways they do. Elon Musk recently responded to criticism about his political alignment and contribution to climate change. He identified how big of a shift Tesla had caused in the electric vehicle

market and the downstream impact of that. On the environment, saying that he's done more for the climate than any other human in history. What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Telling people what they want to hear, giving them immediate gratification and avoiding saying anything that could cause distress prioritizes appearing good over actually doing good. It's dangerous. I'm with you. You are in an area I think a lot about and I don't want to attack something that you're

saying, but I conceive of this differently. There's a point about sanctimony and appearing to do good while doing evil. That is different from the need to parent and protect. from the need to parent and protect. Part of what's going on is a redistribution of empathy, which is being called an expansion of empathy. Right? So the idea is we are going to be extra specially sympathetic with some groups and empathic with their their trauma their pain and We are going to take away compassion from other groups so for example If you look at suicide statistics in the United States

From all of the rhetoric you would think that young black Asian females would be at the top of the suicide statistics, but it's really middle-aged white men who are killing themselves in incredible numbers. You bring up the statistic. There's an exchange rate in terms of human misery that is measured in suicide. It's a pretty unfudgable thing that when you kill yourself, you're probably in an extremely negative state of personal trauma. So what does the compassion group think about the fact that the group most likely to end their own lives is exactly the group that is faulted?

You know for the patriarchy It's astounding Oh poor little white man in the midwest had their privilege taken away. What the hell are you talking about? You're talking about people killing themselves. You're talking about fathers and grandfathers dying. What we're talking about is a redistribution of compassion. We're talking about taking compassion away from people of European descent. We're talking about taking compassion away from men.

We're talking about taking compassion away from men. We're talking about taking compassion away from a business person like Steve Jobs who might have pancreatic cancer and be dying from it in his 50s because he had the privilege of building billion-dollar companies. Who the hell are you? What is your problem? Come out of the shadows and admit to what you want. You want a redistribution of compassion. You're calling this empathy. It is anything but empathy. Empathy would be an expansion of our understanding of each other's problems and woes.

This is basically saying that these people are worthy of compassion and these people aren't. The child who might have been wronged for not having a clear gender identity, and that would have happened under any error in any circumstance, that's one life. And then you have a bunch of lives over here that are children who are pushed towards sexual reassignment surgery

and are sexually mutilated for no reason at all because of developmental reasons, you know, reasons that they got bad advice from adults while they were trying to assemble themselves. And you're compassionate about this and you're not compassionate about that. I don't want you anywhere near a school. If you're not willing to deal with type one and type two error, you don't belong around our children. If you don't understand the human development is important

and that it is very hard to improve on the gender binary that is. Even if there are edge cases, the gender binary is there for a reason. And you don't have a clue how complicated the gender binary is. You probably haven't even studied sexuality in different species that assign gender, you know, flatworms assign it based on a contest. The winner is male and the loser is female. You don't like that tough luck. You know, bedbugs only practice traumatic insemination. You don't like that? I'm sorry.

How are you going to engineer the entire world around your crazy theories of gender and sexuality? We need these people away from children. They're working at their own stuff. We need to recognize that homosexuality, particularly among men in an obligate fashion, is a normal, conserved part of the human experience. That basically there is a gender binary, that there is a small number of edge cases at a hardware level, There's a small number of cases meant at a software level. We have to be compassionate about all that, but we can't take compassion away from everyone else. That's a message to both the left and the right.

Stop saying they're only two sexes. It's offensive. And stop forcing people to say something so simplistic because you're threatening their children. There was a story about Winston Churchill's father that I wanted to tell you about. In September 1893, Churchill was admitted on his third attempt to the Sandhurst Military College. He wrote to his father, I was so glad to be able to send you the good news on Thursday. His father, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons wrote back a week later.

The full text, the reply doesn't seem to be available, but we do have glimpses. You should be ashamed of your slovenly, happy-go-lucky, harem-scaram style of work. Never have I received a really good report of your conduct from any headmaster or tutor, always behind incessant complaints of a total want of application to your work. You have failed to get into the 60th Rifles, the finest regiment in the army. You have imposed on me an extra charge of some £200 a year. Do not think that I'm going to take the trouble of writing you long letters after every failure you commit and undergo. I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say. If you cannot prevent yourself from

leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have had during your school days, you will become a mere social waste roll, one of the hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence. You will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes. Your mother sent her love. Churchill was 19. What do you make of it? Come on. Tough to read.

It makes me think about what drove Churchill to be the person that he became. It makes me think about the price again that people pay for the successes that others look at and have envy of, revere, admire, remember. We don't know what drives people. They often don't know what drives them as well when they look sufficiently deep, but that's rough to read. Say more about that. The guy goes on to be perhaps the greatest leader

of the 20th century, one of the greatest leaders of all time. He stops Nazi Germany on just this domino fall as they move through Europe, every single country that they come up against and the first one that they hit, that they find some proper resistance from is the Battle of Britain up against Britain. He is prepared to play a game that nobody else in the British government is prepared to play. There's a great book called Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. is prepared to play a game that nobody else in the British government is prepared to play. There's a great book called Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Okay. And basically the Brits saw as they entered World War II, they saw the way that guerrilla warfare tactics were so uncouth that one of the other military leaders was quoted as saying if that's what it takes to win then I am prepared to lose. And Churchill took whatever the opposite approach of that was so he begins to find renegade scientists and inventors people that can do. Gorilla tactics they can break down bridges they can so distrust and they they create the first limp it mine underwater magnetic mine and these guys are doing it by buying up all of the condoms in villages so that they can water protect aniseed balls that they know will reliably dissolve at the particular all of these different things just this crazy insight.

That man the slovenly happy gogo-lucky-haram-scarren style of work, if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless and profitable life you have, I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say. I don't know, it makes me sad to think that Churchill may have done so much great in his life and yet never felt enough because of the source code that he had programmed into him. Yeah. Unwinnable, but unwinnable parental love is an incredible engine.

But I also see love in that letter. See, imagine there was no World War II. Imagine there was no Nazi regime. What was he supposed to do with his life? Open a dry cleaner? Was he supposed to become a vice president for inventory at a large company? What was Winston Churchill supposed to do, absent Adolf Hitler? God, this is just so hard to even talk about and think about.

Greatness. You're supposed to have great people under glass. I call this, you know, break glass in case of emergency people. We don't have any. If you had trouble now, who would you go to? You know, you're from the UK. I don't think you're a biologist, but you know who David Attenborough is. What is the UK's opinion of David Attenborough? David Attenborough- Almost universally loved?

David Attenborough- universally loved. I don't know know you must know an ex-girlfriend because you said all but um Yeah, he's a national treasure of the uk we're supposed to have tons of those people I don't know of any we've beaten up everything we have And if if somebody attacks You know, I've made this point before but everybody focuses on the wrong speeches of Neville Chamberlain. You want to get choked up, look at his resignation speech. That thing is a thing of wonder. His point is, this is the move that Hitler doesn't see coming. Hitler does not see that I'm going to resign for the good of my country,

and that Winston Churchill has asked me to stay on. So, you guys better know what you're doing, because you're gonna have us you can have us to deal with The UK needs to get back in the game. Let's just be honest about it. I don't know what the hell's going on in the UK It makes me very angry and very sick. How's that? I don't know. I was it Do you know ditch Lee Some estate that Winston Churchill was at in the UK, not far from Oxfordshire. It sounds like every other estate that exists.

Yeah, yeah. I was there for a meeting, it was a quiet meeting. There were lots of people in the British Foreign Service there. And they're all impeccably educated and spoke multiple languages and all this stuff. And they were all like moping about, you know, oh, well, you know, of course with the US, there's nothing really for us to do. And this is no longer the UK of the previous, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I was like, what the hell is wrong with you people? You have this incredible role to play. Yeah, there's definitely a degree of defeatism, but yeah, like playing second string. Walk it off Dude does your special forces are still the envy of the planet Everybody knows how tough the UK is when it comes to special forces Your facility with the language is second to none and it's not just that accent

It's the fact that you live it culturally there's so much It's the fact that you live it culturally. There's so much quirkiness, tolerance for eccentricity, for brilliance, not just excellence, that is deep in the English soul. And I have no idea what the UK is doing. Yeah, you're smaller, you lost your empire, tough luck. And walk it off. It feels a little bit like someone who's given a ceremonial... Oh, stop it.

No, when you look at, let's say there's a large debate that's going on, there's some sort of meeting of countries and the UK is there. And it seems like that there is a token gesture to some bygone dynasty. We must remember to invite the Brits because it's important that they have a seat at the table. I don't know, I don't feel like we're forging forward in the world, I don't know the...

Yeah, you aren't doing aren't you aren't doing enough You aren't doing enough But you want to know from your little brother? Get back in the game walk it off cut it out You're incredibly important. I don't know what that looks like. So you're small. So you're relatively small as a market and so What why did Jim Watson have to go over to the Cavangers' laboratory to do DNA? You know? Think about all the things that came out of the UK.

I'd kill for the Dirac equation to have been invented in the US. Have some pride in yourselves. There's a lot of criticism at the moment about multiculturalism in the UK. What does that mean? That as you enter maybe Heathrow, it may be Gatwick, it may be one of the Tube stations coming out of there. It's something like diversity is our strength is one of the taglines and there are a lot of people that have got it. Okay, so let's fight this out because I want to do this.

I really do. Undoubtedly, you know many people of Indian Pakistani origin who speak with an Oxbridge accent. Mm-hmm. Right? And they have all sorts of... Including our prime minister. All sorts of mannerisms. Hadn't noticed.

It's a joke. Including our prime minister all sorts of mannerisms hadn't noticed The UK is also a software product You can teach people to think as if they've always been I mean look let's be honest your royal families partially German. Think about the UK as a software product. Imagine that you can load that software into a mind no matter what the skin color looks like. It's the software that we're attached to much more than your hardware. I don't think we're getting that level of integration. attached to much more than your hardware.

I don't think we're getting that level of integration. Well, it depends with which groups. You have plenty of Ashkenazi Jews who are completely English. I mean, I just brought up Paul Dirac. Dirac isn't a typically British name. It's French. Right. They're all sorts of people who are quintessentially English who aren't. Historically. Now, I have a good friend from way back, Marcus de Soto, who never really thought about the fact that his last name is totally French. You know, what is he? A fellow of the Royal Society and

OBE, whatever it is that he is, you know, it's just, yeah, I think you guys are much better than you think you are. And I don't know what got into your tea, but I don't know what got into your tea, but we can't afford for the UK and the Anglophone universe to keep sobbing like this. You know, I chew out the Australians all the time. It's like, my God, you have this great country far away from Europe. This is your time to lead. The US is stumbling. What?

Do something with it. Do something with it do something with it New Zealanders come on guys No, look, I'm incredibly happy to be part of the Anglophone world and not just in terms of the language in terms of cultural norms in terms of all of the things I say we've Contributed to the world. I'm not British. I've never held a British passport, but I very much feel like the great science that came out of the UK is part of my heritage. By the way, look at a map of the names of, certain names in Scotland and Ireland,

Look at a map of the names of, certain names in Scotland and Ireland, and it's like a who's who of everything that happened. It's just, I'm so proud at some level of this tradition. I sometimes tell somebody that you can tell that a man is only partially educated if the word Hamiltonian means something because, which Hamilton? The Hamilton of mathematical physics, the Hamilton of biology, the Hamilton of US historical fame. I'm very bullish on pride in the Anglophone universe, and we've got to stop moping around. And the UK is supposed to lead. It's been a while, there's a really awesome Netflix series, World War II from the front lines, I think it's called.

So they've used a combination of AI and archive footage to recolor and put into 4K this entire series. And it's outstanding. and there's one about the Battle of Britain. And it's been a while, I moved away from the UK and I had my problems with it and I tried for a long time to try and sort of nudge the culture as best I could from within my business or whatever I was doing. And then just thought I can't, I'm trying to shovel sand away from the seashore here and

it's just not working so I've come over to America or a flourish since I've been here but that was the first time watching that and looking at that degree of spirit. That was the first time in quite a while where I've thought to myself fuck yeah like that's that's something that I can genuinely be proud of it's been Almost as long as I can remember since I genuinely thought I'm proud of being British Come to St. Helena Seriously you got a speck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean below the equator. Uh, I just spent a week there. Do you know about St.

Halina? No, I did. It's the first time I've ever heard those two words put together in my life. Okay. They're the remnants of the British empire called the British overseas territories. All right. And you have like Gibraltar and Diego Garcia, Ascension, Tristan, De Kuna, Pitcair and all these sort of bits and pieces that is what's left.

It's an island of around 4,000 people where Napoleon died during a second exile after Elba, because it was so secure. Apparently, it's the second most fortified island in the world after Malta. It's an unbelievable place. People are incredibly proud of being British. And I believe that William is going to visit at the end of this month, and there's been 20 years since a royal visit of Prince Anne in any event. One of the things that I loved about being in Jamestown, St. Helena is the pride that people have in being British and being under the British order. And we just can't afford for you guys.

I mean, look, when I say lead, it doesn't mean the US isn't going to lead. You have a different leadership role. Use it. We're in a crisis right now. We all remember what it sounds like to be Winston Churchill. We know what that voice sounds like, and it's very painful for us that, actually, you know, I'm thinking back, the problem is which diversity is our strength campaign? It's like some visual diversity. If you fly British airways and you look at that safety reel, it's a joke. I mean, they're just trying to find everybody who they could find, you know,

who displays some kind of visual diversity. No, the power of it. You know the name Michael Atia? He was the master of Trinity College, Cambridge, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, certainly of the 20th century. The name Atia is what? Lebanese. Nobody thought about him as Lebanese. We thought about him as British. I think you guys are much better at this stuff than you think. And you've fallen for the wrong kind of diversity, this kind of visual diversity. Shallow diversity.

Yeah, shallow diversity. Don't be afraid to be British. What are you working on next? What's next for you? What are you working on next? What's next for you? Yeah, it's a problem. I'm supposed to say something like, I've got a special coming up or a book. I'm thinking about writing a book, but look, the most important thing that I have is I have a possible expansion of our two main theories in physics.

And nothing else compares to that. Even if it's wrong, a decent probability, which could be, you know, imagine it were one in 100 or one in a thousand, which is far north of there in my estimation. Did it's wrong or it's right? No, that it's right. I think it's much greater than those odds. And of course, you have to believe that or you wouldn't be working on it. But it's also the case that there aren't that many people who have even ballpark level skills to say what a theory would be. That's hope for me.

Can you imagine if, well, let's just imagine next week, somebody said, you know, actually this looks right. We could start dreaming about looking up at the night sky and seeing it as a bucket list. Where do you want to go? You could ask questions about, is there any way to harvest the zero point energy from all the quantum oscillators? You could say, is there dark chemistry? Well, you have dark matter. We could have dark matter.

At some level, this room is filled with dark matter. Neutrinos are effectively dark matter. The only thing that can grab them is gravity, which is way too weak, and the weak force, which is too weak. So in general, we're just being irradiated by neutrinos morning, noon, and night. Imagine that you had slower moving particles and you could build things with them

and they just weren't coupled to the matter that we see here. So they passed through ordinary matter. If my theories work, there'll be incredible things to play with. And one of the things that I find fascinating is that it becomes this issue of psychology. Like, why is he pretending that he has a theory? I'm not pretending. Why does he think, you know, who does he think he is? And I just, I look at it and I just think, my gosh, you guys have all lost the plot.

The world right now needs hope. And it needs a quest. It needs something for people to dream about that isn't the same set of questions. One of the things that I don't love about podcasting is that people tend to ask clustered questions. And I'm always looking for that interviewer who's gonna ask me things that are just like

People haven't heard Mostly what we do is we just do retreads of the same old Questions and it's not a critique of either one of us as interviewers It's just we don't know how to get out of our traffic circle where we go around and around. I'm trying to build the most exciting thing in the world, which is hope and a future and access to the source code of reality through differential equations and geometric structures.

The... That sounds crazy to people. Yeah, well, look around you. So how much of this was here in 1700s? Now go away. If you're not understanding that we've changed and we've progressed, you've lived through a time of stagnation and I'm sorry about that and I can't help you.

Computers were the only thing that really really took off during this period of time. So think about if science progressed the way computers progressed over the last 50 years. Your world would be completely unrecognizable. Now what do we have? We have a wood table, mugs, exposed brick, glass, metal. There's nothing here that's astonishing except the computers. That thing, that iPad or whatever it is, is the only astonishing thing to somebody who's looking at this from the point of view of 1971.

That's terrible. Okay, so you've all lost the plot. Don't blame me that I haven't. That's what I work on. I'm going to try to make sure that you have options, that your kids don't have to die on this planet. Elon is exactly right about this stuff. The only thing he has wrong is chemical rockets and Mars.

I'm sorry he used it as an advertit for SpaceX, but he was right about everything else. Eric Weinstein, ladies and gentlemen. Eric, I appreciate you. I always enjoy coming and sitting down with you. These ones fly by. I'm looking forward to the next one as well one as well thanks for having me chris.